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.