The first Christmas and New Year’s card was designed by John Callcott Horsley in London in 1840 at the request of his friend Sir Henry Cole. It was later reproduced in lithography (finely-textured stone drawings reproduced on cardboard or paper) and became the first commercial Christmas card in 1843. The card showed a family raising their toasts to Christmas and said “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You”. The Christmas card quickly became very popular, and others soon followed Horsley’s concept.
The idea of sending holiday greetings on a card actually began in the late 1700’s with the perfection of lithography, when merchants would send New Year’s greetings to their customers. Today, greeting cards are a multi-billion dollar industry.
In the same year that the first Christmas card was produced, 1840, the first prepaid postage stamp went on sale in Britain. The first Christmas postage stamp was issued by Canada in 1898. Christmas seals were conceived in 1903 by Danish postal worker Einar Holboell as a method to raise money for tuberculosis.
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