The Collection
New Year Greetings Card
This is a New year's card postmarked 1912. It was printed in
Bavaria.
The Christmas card developed in Britain after 1843, when Henry
Cole (later Sir Henry Cole and Director of the Victoria and Albert
Museum) commissioned a design for card from J. C. Horsley.
This card was a lithograph print onto stiff folded card, depicting
a family party scene and bearing the message : "A Merry Christmas
and A Happy New Year to You". In America, sentiment cards,
which were sent all year round, were specifically designed for
Christmas, and these were popular and collected well before Cole
sent his cards to his friends.
The introduction of cheap postage meant that the greetings card
business grew; and compared to Valentine's cards, the Christmas
card trade had the advantage of people sending much more than one
card per year.
This card shows the conventional Christmas images seen on plenty
of cards today : ivy and holly in the foreground, with a winter
scene behind.