The world's first Christmas card

The current (Dec 08) issue of The American Philatelist (the journal of the American Philatelic Society) has an interesting article on the first commercially-produced Christmas card. The card was designed by Henry Cole, an associate of Great Britain's Prince Albert (Queen Victoria's husband), who asked for the cards to be printed because he didn't have time to write Christmas letters to his many friends and associates.

Cole printed a thousand cards and sold the ones not used by Prince Albert. They were advertised as follows:

Just published. A Christmas Congratulation Card: or picture emblematical of the Old English Festivity to Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends.

They sold for 6d each (which today would be equivalent to about $4). The "penny post" had been invented in England in 1840, so this creation followed close on the heels of the popularization of mail for the general public.

The design of the card is embedded above (that's the best resolution I could find). The arrangement is a triptych, with room above for the recipient's name and a space below for a signature. The left and right panels show the charitable acts of feeding and clothing the poor. In the center panel a prosperous Victorian family is gathered around a table on which a large goose or turkey is being carved (apparently by a child).

What I find most interesting about the center panel is that everyone is drinking wine. The older couple on the left and the two ladies on the right are raising their glasses in an apparent toast to the viewer. The person in black is pouring another glass. The child in the center back has his/her glass "bottoms up," and the lady center right is tipping a glass of wine into the mouth of the small child on her lap.

I am reminded that during the Victorian era, wine was considered a healthful drink, and the consumption of alcohol by children was not at all uncommon. (The lower classes would be substituting gin for wine, and giving it to infants to keep them quiet while the adults worked).

As noted in the American Philatelist article, the mailing of cards became much more popular in the 1870s when the postal rate was lowered to a halfpenny, and the popular themes included "decorated Christmas trees, winter scenes, throwing snowballs, tobogganing, and robin redbreasts, as well as the traditional Father Christmas and religious images."

The first Christmas cards came to the United States in 1875, and in the 1880s typical Christmas cards depicted "snow scenes, glowing fireplaces, children playing with toys, and fir trees." What's interesting about this is the dominance of nonreligious images in the first Christmas cards. It's fashionable nowadays to decry the "secularization of Christmas," as though such a trend is new, whereas at least re the cards, secular images have been dominant since the inception of the tradition.