18 
House & 
Garden 
Doubtless you recall this card. It is of American make and was 
issued for Christmas, 1879 
THE STORY of the CHRISTMAS CARD 
From Out of England—Not From Germany—Came a Custom 
Which Furnishes Collectors a New Subject 
GARDNER TEALL 
English Christmas card designed by Frederick 
Mason for private use 
An 1880 card by An 1893 English card Raphael Tuck and 
Kate Greenaway by S. Thompson Sons’ 1881 card 
O NE might imagine that the 
Christmas card is an insti¬ 
tution whose origin is at least as 
old as pictorial printing. Book¬ 
plates, playing cards, cartes de 
visite, in fact, almost all sorts of 
cards were in vogue some hun¬ 
dreds of years before anyone ap¬ 
peared to think of producing 
Christmas cards, at least the 
printed pictorial ones that have 
come to be so familiar to us and 
so inseparable in our minds from 
the thought of the holiday season. 
Learned bibliophiles and en¬ 
thusiastic print-lovers have un¬ 
earthed several very early woodcuts to 
which they have Ascribed a greeting pur¬ 
pose. But it is unlikely that greeting cards 
were in use as Christmas cards before the 
19th Century, although an artist-engraver 
A Kate Greenaway card of Christ¬ 
mas, 1881 
By Kate Greenaway, for Marcus 
Ward & Co. 
would, now and then, issue a 
birthday card or, perhaps, a new 
year pictorial greeting. 
I suppose Charles Dickens did 
more than anyone else to create 
the atmosphere into which the 
true and cheerful Christmas card 
was introduced, an atmosphere 
that fostered and encouraged the 
lovely idea. Prince Albert is 
credited with introducing the 
Christmas tree into English 
homes and the Apostles of Kul- 
tur have yearned to make us be¬ 
lieve that “Made in Germany” 
appeared on the first Christmas 
cards, merely because that unfortunate 
legend has appeared on some of the later 
ones. As Germany borrowed her art and 
her science from other countries—she is 
welcome to her philosophy!—so too did 
she borrow the idea of the Christmas card 
from England, and in other of its forms 
TO WISH YOU 
ty CHRISTMAS 
