The history of Christmas cards is both short and easily traced. Cards, so familiar today, date only from the mid nineteenth century. German influence has been strong but Christmas cards seem to be an essentially English invention.
The church had suppressed the Roman New Year strenae or gifts, along with other pagan practices. Seasonal gifts re-emerged only in the fifteenth century with German greetings cards called Andachtsbilder - devotional pictures for the home, decorated with a scroll, the Holy Child bearing a cross and the words Ein gut selig Jar ('A good and blessed year').
For two centuries such cards grew rarer, until the late eighteenth century. Then they began to reappear, but now without religious significance and as a seasonal visiting card for friends. If the friends were away from home it was simple to scribble a greeting on the card and to leave it. Austria, Germany and France made lavish use of the cards.
Another ancestor was the eighteenth-century 'Christmas Piece', laboriously written on coloured paper at school by small children to show their parents how well they were progressing and to present their seasonal compliments. The pieces were carried home to become part of the family decorations.
The real instigator of Christmas cards seem to have been Sir Henry Cole (1808-82), writer and Chairman of the Society of Arts, who suggested a Christmas card to the artist John Calcott Horsley (1817-1903). In 1846 only a thousand cards were printed but the pattern for the future was formed. Over the following fifty years Christmas cards were to sweep the world, helped in England by the introduction by Sir Rowland Hill of the penny post and by the halfpenny post in 1870. A few years later Christmas cards reached the United States.
In countries strongly influenced by Britain, such as Australia and New Zealand, British card motifs survive, although robins are never seen and snow seldom. The United States has a parallel tradition with such favourite as the scenes of nineteenth century American life by Currier and Ives. White New England churches, with their lights streaming across the snow and cutters (light, horse-drawn sleighs) waiting at the door are always popular.
The seasonal goodwill inherent in sending Christmas cards has been carried over into buying them: a large proportion of the Christmas cards bought in Britain are sold by or on behalf of charities such as Oxfam and Save the Children Fund as well as many smaller ones.