World's First Commercial Christmas Card

Tamara Colloff-Bennett writes on the QuillCards.com website. "The custom of exchanging greetings is an ancient one. The Chinese sent messages of good will to one another for the New Year, and the early Egyptians used papyrus scrolls to send greetings to one another."

According to Tamara, "In Europe, handmade greeting cards made from paper started being exchanged by the early 1400s."

She goes on to pen, "Then with the introduction of the world’s first postage stamp in 1840, the stage was set for greeting cards to gain mass popularity. In fact, this is precisely what happened when three years later in 1843, Sir Henry Cole invented the first commercial greeting card for Christmas in Victorian England.

Tamara points out, "Coincidentally, it was in the same year of 1843 that Cole’s fellow Victorian, the author Charles Dickens, published his classic novella entitled A Christmas Carol."

Shown above, the first commerically made Christmas Card which was the idea of Sir Henry Cole who commissioned John Calcott Horsley to design and draw it.

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