{"id":729,"date":"2010-12-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.paperstone.co.uk\/Wordpress\/?p=729"},"modified":"2014-06-17T13:26:49","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T13:26:49","slug":"christmas_facts_2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paperstone.co.uk\/News\/articles\/christmas_facts_2","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Facts #2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"christmas cards in rubbish\" src=\"\/images\/NewsImages\/2010\/christmas_cards_in_rubbish.jpg\" height=\"120\" align=\"right\" \/>Victorian Civil servant Sir Henry Cole is credited with \u201cinventing\u201d the Christmas card. A wealthy businessman also, he wanted to send friends, family and business contacts a greeting at Christmas. In 1843 he commissioned his artist friend John Callcott Horsley to design almost 1,000 hand-coloured lithographs to send out that year. The Christmas card was born.<\/p>\n<p>The emergence of the Christmas card had come shortly after the standardisation of postage rates in 1840 (the \u201cPenny Post\u201d) which helped encourage the cards\u2019 uptake by the Victorian middle classes.<\/p>\n<table class=\"image\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"John Horsley\u2019s first Christmas card\" src=\"\/images\/NewsImages\/2010\/first_xmas_card.jpg\" height=\"250\" \/><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td class=\"caption\" style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">John Horsley\u2019s first Christmas card<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>Horsley\u2019s design (pictured above) features a Victorian family scene on either side of which are acts of charity to the less fortunate. Charity was a central theme of early Victorian Christmas celebrations (see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.paperstone.co.uk\/News\/2010\/Happy_Boxing_Day_2010_\">Boxing Day origins<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Early Christmas card designs featured fairly secular images including robins, cherubs and scenes from nature. A bird\u2019s nest full of eggs might symbolise the imminent arrival of spring. Religious images of, say, the Nativity and depictions of Father Christmas came later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Victorian Civil servant Sir Henry Cole is credited with \u201cinventing\u201d the Christmas card. A wealthy businessman also, he wanted to send friends, family and business contacts a greeting at Christmas. In 1843 he commissioned his artist friend John Callcott Horsley to design almost 1,000 hand-coloured lithographs to send out that year. The Christmas card was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Paper"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Christmas Facts #2<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.paperstone.co.uk\/News\/articles\/christmas_facts_2\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christmas Facts #2\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Victorian Civil servant Sir Henry Cole is credited with \u201cinventing\u201d the Christmas card. A wealthy businessman also, he wanted to send friends, family and business contacts a greeting at Christmas. In 1843 he commissioned his artist friend John Callcott Horsley to design almost 1,000 hand-coloured lithographs to send out that year. 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