Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * “When you start looking at the cards, you think, ‘This is a really cute place, this Canada, with all that snow around. You can go skating, have a great time.’ ” Ms. Catchpole recently combed through a number of the archives’ special collections to prepare a history of the Christmas card in Canada.
Her research reveals that commercial Christmas cards became established as an institution in Canada in the 1860s — two decades after the first commercial card was printed in London, England. That first card was the brainchild of Sir Henry Cole, a senior British public servant sometimes known as “Old King Cole,” who conceived of it as a means to streamline the process of writing Christmas greetings to his many friends and acquaintances. At the time, it was common to write letters at Christmas.
Mr. Cole enlisted an artist, John Callcott Horsley, to design his greeting card, which depicted a family celebration and included a greeting: “A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to You.” But the card ruffled feathers in Victorian society with its depiction of a family celebration that included a child drinking wine. “The British temperance movement said it corrupted children,” said Ms. Catchpole. Nonetheless, weary letter writers across the country quickly came to see the benefit of Mr.
Cole’s greeting card, she said, and by the 1860s, the cards were big business. Many of the early Christmas cards, printed in England, depicted nature scenes that pointed to the coming of spring. Children, animals, flowers and butterflies were standard images. But when Canadian printers began to produce their own cards to compete with the British imports, the imagery was decidedly different. Canada had its own printers making Christmas cards by the mid-1870s. And the cards by J.S.