Happy Holidays !

The entire Érudit team wishes you a wonderful holiday season.

Every year, the ongoing support of our partners and readers allows Érudit to disseminate knowledge that makes readers smile and think, and helps us better understand where we come from and where we are going. Thank you so much!

A brief history of greeting cards

As usual, Érudit is taking advantage of the holiday season to create a personalized Christmas card. True to our organization’s image, these creations are colorful and candid. We would like to extend our warmest thanks to Myriam Bourbeau for her work this year.

But this year, we asked ourselves: where does this tradition of sending holiday greetings to our loved ones come from? To answer this question, we delved into our catalog.

Did you know? The first Christmas card was invented in 1843 by an English museum director, who took advantage of the recent invention of the postage stamp to send 1,000 copies of his lithograph to his acquaintances.

But the tradition is even older:

As Lise Deschênes (2023) writes: “A long time ago, the Romans would wish their friends good luck at the winter solstice. More recently, in France, it was customary to visit loved ones and acquaintances or to visit the sick and needy on New Year’s Day. As it was too difficult to travel to make all these visits, people had their greeting cards delivered.” (Our translation)

England—and, very quickly, the American continent—was soon bitten by the greeting card bug: in the 1860s, several greeting card merchants were established on English soil. Twenty years later, the concept was adopted in the United States, largely due to innovations in lithography. However, it was German manufacturers dominated the greeting card market in the early 20th century.

What about more recent times? According to Yves Beauregard in 1996: “For 25 years, this custom has been declining. In the 1960s, a family mailed an average of 80 cards, whereas today the number is barely more than twelve.” (Our translation)

Greeting Cards in Figures

In 1969, 300 million cards passed through the hands of Canada Post. Twenty years later, the number of cards sent in Canada had fallen to 148 million. More attached to this handwritten tradition, our American neighbors exchanged 2.2 billion cards in 1991, an average of 26 per family. This can be explained in part by the imposing presence of Hallmark, which dominates between 30% and 35% of the global market.

Bibliography

Beauregard, Yves. “Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année: le courrier du temps des Fêtes.” Cap-aux-Diamants, issue 47, fall 1996, pp. 20–22. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/8233ac

Deschênes, Lise. “Origine et avenir de la carte de Noël.” Histoire Québec, vol. 29, no. 2, 2023, pp. 30–31. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/103499ac