The buying, sending, and receiving of Christmas cards are things that we now take for granted, but they are unquestionably a fairly up-to-date inclusion in the whole Christmas tradition. So before you start to complain about the whole of them you have to buy, and the costs involved in posting them to all of your friends and family, just take a few minutes out to discover a bit more about this fun way of holding in contact.
The first Christmas card to be sent wasn't done so for the same reasons as we would send them today. In modern society we send them as a way to let people know that we're mental of them over the holiday period, or as a way of saying 'thanks' from a company to its customers, or as a way to perceive people once a year and write a huge shape of what's been happening to the house over the year.
The first Christmas card was sent in England in 1843. Sir Henry Cole wanted to show his friends the kind of things that the poor had to put up with over the Christmas period, possibly as a way of getting them to help out, or, more likely, as a way of pointing out the way that Christmas can give a slight bit of hope to those who have none, for at least one day of the year.
This first Christmas card that spawned a multi-million dollar manufactures was painted by John Calcott Horsley and featured a happy house as well as people helping out the poor and needy, and, quite controversially, especially by modern standards, included two children 'drinking'; it plainly read "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you."
Few early English Christmas cards featured the type of religious or wintery themes that we often associate with them. In fact, a lot of the wintery scenes became fairly unseasonal and it's only now that a lot of countries in the Northern Hemisphere have started to get white Christmases again.
The Christmas card tradition had been going for a full thirty years before a German immigrant sold his first selection of Christmas cards made in America. Within six years Louis Prang had taken this idea and turned it into a company that was producing over five million Christmas cards per year. Unfortunately, in an ironically modern twist, cheap imitations of his Christmas cards eventually forced him out of the market.
The first 'official' Christmas card i.e. Those sent by members of office, was sent in the 1840's by Queen Victoria, who started off a great many of the Christmas traditions that are still going today.
Christmas cards have gone through a whole of changes in the years since then. You can now get them in all sorts of sizes and shapes. They have a vast array of pictures; after all, people in the Southern Hemisphere are far less likely to recognize with a white Christmas when they're out on the beaches on Christmas Day.
The messages in the cards have changed as a growing whole of people determine to wish people 'Happy Holidays' as opposed to the more primary 'Merry Christmas', and you can all the time get them blank and add your own messages.
The cards can be serious, humorous, or have music playing when you open them, and some even have very slight in the way that would tell you what time of the year it was.
The types of paper used, and the costs of them, have changed a lot over the years too. Now you can send cards that have no paper in them at all, the birth of the internet also brought the rise of the eCard. The eCard is great if you haven't sent a primary Christmas card in time, and they can be far more interactive, but they tend to be very difficult to hang on the wall.
So what of the future? The whole of primary Christmas cards being sent seems to have been on the decrease, but for fans of the traditional, it will probably be a very long time before they've been replaced completely.
Now, before it gets too late, make sure you've checked your list and sent off all of your Christmas Cards.
Discounted Lg Le5300 Dyson Stowaway Free Shipping
No comments:
Post a Comment