The Penny Post gets a lot of credit in popularizing the Christmas greeting card. (Or perhaps the Christmas greeting card helped popularize the penny post, depending on how you look at it. The person who commissioned the first commercially available Christmas card (that we know of), Sir Henry Cole, had helped introduce the Uniform Penny Post just three years prior, so he likely had political motives behind his jollity.) Folks could mail a letter or postcard for one penny, is the point.
An aside: Money nerds have debated how the value of that penny would translate to today’s currency. While the inflation rate from then to now is pretty straightforward, it’s important to consider the economy of the time. For working people, a penny had very different spending power versus the much wealthier upper classes. The consensus seems to be that for most of the working class, the cost would’ve been more like spending a pound per letter. For those of us in the US grumbling about the cost of postage right now, sip on that steaming cupful of perspective.
Those first Christmas cards were… kind of weird by today’s standards. Just this weekend, I was flipping through a whole box of Christmas postcards from ~1900-1920 and I noted that few of them were religious in any way (though many of them said “Xmas”). Most featured Santa, though his appearance varied wildly. There were a whole lotta cats. But mostly, the themes were food, silliness and fun.
According to the Victoria & Albert Museum (whose first director was good ol’ Sir Henry Cole, by the way) printing at the time meant the quality of cards ranged pretty wildly at a wide range of prices. Really simple cards – maybe with a basic illustration and a nice little poem – were very inexpensive whereas metallic inks, complicated illustrations, fancy cuts and trims would’ve been more costly. The sudden surge in popularity of this practice meant printers went out of their way to set their cards apart. So while basic wintery scenes and flowers were common, designers really started stretching out to make their cards special. Humor and surreal images were really common themes, including lots and lots of anthropomorphized food.
Wait, food? Food was a big theme of Christmas for Victorians – and it remains pretty closely tied to our concept of what Christmas is even today. Some of that imagery was pretty obvious. That first Christmas featured a whole Christmas feast (though the jolly consumption of alcohol raised more than a few eyebrows.) Jolly puddings and roast meats were natural features of a Christmas card, sure. But hilariously, root vegetables and winter brassicas often accompanied Christmas greetings. Again, it’s the novelty and humor of the thing. They also liked to feature those foods trying to eat us, or other funny food scenarios, like mice cooking up a cat for their Christmas feast.
According to Greg Jenner, only around 12% of the cards he studied from the time period (of a sample of around 750) “had a religious greeting.” So why weren’t the famously uptight Victorians sending the wee baby Jesus to one another during Christmastime? Well, because they were famously uptight! Christmas was seen as a time for fun and mirth. Sending someone the nativity scene through the post was kind of a buzzkill.