HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

I wish a very happy festive season to all my readers. By the time this post is published, the daylight in the Northern Hemisphere will be creeping back into our lives, little by little. Whether you celebrate the Solstice, Christmas or New Year – or all three – good wishes for the renewal that follows: health, light, love, happiness – and peace.

So this is one of my lighter-hearted posts, intended to cheer rather than to challenge. Welcome to the world of vintage Christmas cards!

The Collection

I have a collection of 45 old Christmas cards, dating from the late 1800s to around the 1920s. You might expect most of them to be decorated with colourful Christmas trees and little girls in bonnets, like the one above, but the majority are nothing of the kind. Some are safe and dull – holly was popular and uncontentious, but some are very curious indeed, pushing the Christmas card boundaries before the genre had really come into its own.

No sooner had I written this post than I was given a pointer to the current Guardian newspaper, which has a wonderful article on macabre and murderous Victorian Christmas cards. These include a dead robin and one frog mugging another for money. Plus a girl who has been transmogrified into an onion. No holds barred on imagination! Mine are not so dramatic, but still entertaining.

The first commercially produced Christmas card, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum was sent in 1843 by Henry Cole, who just happened to be the director of the V&A, which is perhaps why there are other rival claims to early Christmas card innovators. (Eg a one-off card, replete with Rosicrucian imagery, sent by alchemist Michael Maier to James I of England in 1611.) Cole went for a proper print run, however, and commissioned his artist friend John Callcott Horsely to produce a happy scene of Christmas at the Cole family home. A thousand cards were printed – but at a shilling a time, they did not sell well. That’s about £3 in today’s money. Nor did the Cole family look particularly merry. (With the possible exception of the baby, who as the article in the Guardian points out, is drinking wine.)

All the cards which now follow are from my own collection. Some that I have are indeed rather scary. Would you trust this snowman with an innocent child?

And Santa himself appears in some unusual scenes, such as this one, where he is superintended by a rather menacing polar bear.

Perhaps to counteract these bizarre scenes, there were also cards for the type of buyer who preferred to play it safe and put piety at the forefront. Or perhaps these were just leftover prayer cards – possibly even funeral cards – bought up cheap by the printers and rebranded for a Christmas market?

You may have noticed that on certain cards, some of the faces are photographs of real people. Did the card designer use stock photos for these? Or were they custom-made, so that you could have faces of your nearest and dearest transferred into the Christmas scene? I don’t have the answer. But anyway, here are two which feature real children on fake walls, then we have more real children with two fake snowmen.

But at least the next photographic pair of cards have reasonably pretty designs. (Either the horseshoe is very large or the child very small.)

There are only a few in my modest collection which show real artistry, or even just where the design has some flair. The card below isn’t one of them, but seems to be a case of: ‘Let’s see what we’ve got knocking around the place – ah yes an old vase – I’ll just pop out into the garden and fetch a few sprigs for it.’

But here are two at least which I think are very stylish in their design, dating perhaps from the early 1900s..

I wish I could say that the messages on the back are full of interest. Some of the cards haven’t been used at all, some contain very brief ‘best wishes’ type greetings. Here’s one which has laboured further:

With much love from (squiggle)
To Father and Mother with love and Best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Bright and Prosperous New Year from your loving Daughter and Son Maggie and Tom Stephenson (Daughter thinks: Phew – job done for another year! Why do I say daughter rather than son? Well, do you really need to ask that question?)

Another is somewhat lacking in panache – this one is addressed to Weston Supper Mare [sic]:
Dear Annie – received your present, safe. Like it very much be able to brush up now, won’t know me when you see me – Harry
(I’ve added some minimal punctuation) Any guesses as to what the present was? Perhaps it was indeed a hair brush to tidy up a scruffy suitor.

As a general rule, if there’s a printed verse on the cards, it must rhyme, whatever the cost in poetic or grammatical terms:
Pleasant times I wish
Happy day to all
In the humble cottage
And the stately hall

Or: Merry times and laughter flowing
With the Yule-tide log a-glowing
Fondest wishes dear to you
This glad season doth renew

Or even: I send, sweet little friend,
Although not near you,
This card with love thoughts laden,
And hope to cheer you.

Sometimes the card maker at least has the season firmly in mind, as in the first couple of cards below:

But others seem unaware that Christmas should be, well, Christmassy. Or at least festive. And wintry. It strengthens my suspicions that some cards were produced on an ‘all-occasions’ basis, ready to be printed in batches with whatever greeting was required – birthday, Easter, wedding, funeral, or christening, perhaps.

You might also be wondering why there are so many Dutch girls in these cards – to which I have absolutely no answer. This one appears to be selling roses or possibly tulips against the background of a storm at sea. Not very ‘bright and merry’ out there on the water.

And that concludes my current research into the vintage card collection – I can’t promise you a follow-up! But I can indeed wish you a happy Christmas, with a chorus of vintage greetings.

Other Christmas time posts:

The Twelve Days of Christmas

‘The Fool and his Feast‘

And the most popular post of all time on Cherry’s Cache which takes you into the depth of the dark night along with Irish cats and a poetic monk:

Pangur Ban and the Old Irish Cats

Finally, to close with music: this is one of my favourite Wassail songs, with its ancient feel, and the sense of the wheel of the year turning, ever turning…