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Christmas cards in early 1900s Britain

An exploration of the growth and decline in the popularity of Christmas cards, also showing a 1914 Christmas card to the soldiers on the WW1 front.

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By the webmaster: from discussions with older people who lived at the time. Top image produced by AI and tweaked in Photoshop.

When was sending Christmas cards popular?

Sending Christmas cards are are said to have begun their popularity in Britain with Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, although I understand from the internet that they had existed in a very small way since the 1500s.

However, there is nothing in my mother's memoirs about sending Christmas cards among ordinary people in the early 1900s, I understand that they were akin to status symbols and sent among the wealthier classes. I would certainly imagine my mother's Victorian/Edwardian working class family refusing to pay for postage on as many cards as we send today. I say 'today', although the use of Christmas cards seems to be swiftly dying out now as greetings over the internet are becoming the norm.

Back to my mother's time in the early 1900s: As there was no television to occupy children in the dark, winter evenings, it seems highly probably that they did make something akin to Christmas cards alongside Christmas decorations. Where they existed, they would probably have been hand-delivered to families and friends living in the same area.

Christmas letters

In contrast to what I understand to be the lack of interest in Christmas cards in the early 1900s and before, school children were certainly required to send a Christmas letter to their parents. An example of such a Christmas letter is on another page and seems likely to have been copied from the blackboard and primarily intended to justify the work of the school teacher. There were no hand-made Christmas cards at school that I know of - even for young children as late as the 1940s when I was at my primary school. If you can add more information, please contact me.

A WW1 Christmas card

From the above, it may seem that this page contains so little actual information to be almost pointless. However, I have bothered with it is because of the following extremely poignant home-made Christmas card that has come my way and is worth sharing. In practice it is not actually a card at all, as it is simply paper.

A poignant home-made 1914 Christmas card for the soldiers at the front in World War One, looking forward to the sunrise of better times to come in 1915. If only that had been true. Note that the card is from a member of the aristocracy, a Lady Rawlinson.

The original is held in the family of Anne Davey and is very faded. Hence the poor quality here.

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