The sending of seasonal messages of goodwill is a truly ancient ritual with practical implications – isolated villages would send seasonal gifts to their neighbours as it paid to be polite to people who might feed you if supplies ran short.

In Pagan Britain, good luck charms were exchanged at the winter solstice but it took a long time for the custom to evolve. The start of greetings cards as we now know them really came in the fourteenth century with the advent of wood-block printed New Year’s cards from Germany.

Quintessentially English

Even though the greetings card had German origins, our modern- day Christmas card can be deemed a quintessentially English invention as the first real Christmas greeting cards were almost certainly the ‘Christmas Pieces’ made by children in the early 18th century. School children would write affectionate and often rhyming messages to their families on special paper with an engraved border and then decorate them further before taking or sending them home.
These engraved Christmas papers are rare, extremely sought after examples of children’s artwork and can be viewed as a kind of ‘sampler’ as they were designed to show parents how well their handwriting improved over the past year. By 1820 colour was added to the engraved borders, making the pieces much more decorative.

What is believed to be one of the first mass-produced Christmas cards (above) dates back 170 years. The lithographed card caused a controversy in some quarters of Victorian English society when it was published in 1843 because it prominently features a child taking a sip from a glass of wine.

Approximately 1,000 copies of the card were printed but only 10 have survived to modern times. The card was designed for Henry Cole by his friend, the English painter John Calcott Horsley (1808-1882). Cole wanted a ready-to-mail greeting card because he was too busy to engage in the traditional English custom of writing notes with Christmas/New Year’s greetings.

The card pre-dated colour printing so it was hand-coloured. It was divided into three panels – the centre panel depicting a family drinking wine at a celebration, the other panels showing charitable acts of feeding and clothing the poor. The greeting reads: “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.”