The tradition of giving Christmas cards to acquaintances, friends, and family along is a that is deeply entrenched in several people around the world. Actually, there are a lot of people that give also Christmas cards to their co-workers, supervisors and even clients like a gesture of goodwill through the holiday season. But where did the thought of giving cards at Christmastime originate from?
new year cardWithin the U.S., handmade Christmas cards were exchanged face-to-face early on within the country's history, then later by way of the U.S. Postal Service. By 1822, many handmade greetings appeared to be sent through the mail; actually, there have been numerous how the Superintendent of Mails tried, unsuccessfully, to petition Congress to limit the amount of cards that might be sent from the mail.
John Calcott Horsley, a British illustrator, printed the first commercial Christmas card for Sir Henry Cole in 1843. Sir Henry Cole wanted something he could send to friends and family, and professional colleagues along with other acquaintances, to require them the blessings of year, a method of saying Merry Christmas after some more than spoken words.
A thousand of those three-panel cards, which in fact had images of your family experiencing the Christmas holiday around an evening meal table full of food within the center, as well as other people performing charitable works, such as giving clothing to homeless people, on the back and front, were printed and sold, rendering it the first publicly sold Christmas card in history.
Prepaid credit cards quickly became popular both in England and Germany; however, it had not been before 1870s that commercially printed cards made their approach to the U.S. A printer named Louis Prang started mass-producing Christmas cards around that time so that the person with average skills meet the expense of to purchase them and send them out.
In 1915, a person named Joyce C. Hall, along with his brothers, created Hallmark for the purpose of marketing and selling greeting cards, that has been this type of success a mere 36 months later these folks were also marketing their particular line of gift wrap. In 1932 they patented whatever they called Eye-Vision, that has been putting handmade cards on display racks so people often see them before buying them. These were the pioneers in displaying greeting cards this way.
Christmas card designs tended to alter depending on the times, including spoofs on the impoverished condition of several people throughout the Great Depression, and Santa Claus carrying as a famous Flag during WWII. In 1954, Americans sent 2 billion Christmas cards being a personal and heartfelt method of saying Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays.
Today, the time stands in excess of 4 billion, with all the person with average skills sending out about twenty cards, however, lots of people send out over twenty, including 62,824 sent in 12 months by Werner Erhard of San Francisco. Critics blame people like him for which they see like a waste of income and paper, however, the tradition isn't slowing, and thus unlikely to end in the near future.