Colonial imagery on Christmas card

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2000 by Kenneth L. Ames

Christmas cards constitute a rich and largely untapped resource for cultural study. [1] They provide valuable insights into seasonal imagery, ritual and tradition, gift giving and exchange, graphic design, printing technology, and many other subjects. Christmas cards also offer something to those interested in pictorial evocations of the colonial American past. Although never dominant, colonial images have appeared on American Christmas cards from the late nineteenth century to the present day. They were especially common during the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of the colonial revival. This article examines some of the most popular types of colonial imagery on Christmas cards of that era.

During the 1880s and 1890s, L. Prang and Company and other American firms occasionally incorporated colonial themes in the designs of their Christmas cards, [2] but between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I, German publishers largely took over the American market for greeting cards. Their most prominent products were chromolithographed postcards that were well designed, beautifully printed in vibrant colors, and embossed for greater effect. The imagery was intentionally broadly appealing because the cards were sold internationally, with holiday greetings printed in the language appropriate to each market. Justly popular, they provided exceptional aesthetic value for trifling cost.

World War I brought an embargo on trade with Germany and an end to German domination of the American greeting card market. American publishers' new marketing opportunities coincided with the emerging interest in America's colonial past. Americans once again began sending cards made in the United States for the domestic market.

Although Christmas has ancient roots, most scholars agree that the modern Christmas is largely a creation of the nineteenth century. [3] Victorian Britain can claim responsibility for two staples of today's holiday: A Christmas Carol (London, 1843), the compelling tale of spiritual rebirth by Charles Dickens (1816-1870), and the commercial Christmas card, which first appeared in London in the same year. [4] Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic were immensely fond of Christmas cards to judge by the tens of thousands that still survive. By today's standards, however, Victorian Christmas cards were not very Christmassy. Seasonal and religious images were in the minority, and the most common subjects were summer flowers, followed by a profusion of other subjects. [5] In the early twentieth century, card publishers began to standardize or conventionalize Christmas card imagery. Most of the cards sold today are variations on themes introduced seventy to eighty years ago.

A major function of Christmas cards is to link people together across time and space. Most twentieth-century Christmas cards, unlike those of the Victorian era, use verbal or pictorial cues to create a sense of linkage to those who have celebrated the season or the holiday in earlier times. When people mail cards to friends and relatives around the country or around the world, they figuratively reach out across space to renew and reaffirm their relationships.

Many twentieth-century Christmas cards make pictorial allusions to the Victorian era, which is reasonable enough, considering the period's role in shaping the modern Christmas and the profusion of surviving Victorian Christmas texts and images to draw upon. Depicting colonial America on Christmas cards is a more difficult proposition, however, because throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Christmas as we know it today was little celebrated and Christmas cards were unknown. Designers of Christmas cards adopted two strategies for overcoming this historical inconvenience: they illustrated colonial motifs, often without people, and they employed imagination freely, creating scenes of Christmas in colonial America, perhaps, as it should have been.

Many of the devices used by designers taking the first approach figure prominently in The Romance of a Christmas Card, a sentimental tale of 1916 by Kate Douglas Wiggin (see P1. III). The heroine of this story designs Christmas cards inspired by the scenery of her old New Hampshire town. Her images record the present, but her present is dominated by the surviving material culture of the colonial past. The cover of the book captures this perfectly, depicting an unpretentious, center-chimney gambrel-roof house nestled in a snowy landscape on a winter night. The image could date from almost anytime in the last three centuries.

The generic old house in a winter landscape had been a stock image of the Christmas postcards produced in Germany, but American designers nationalized the image, introducing American house types or even specific historic houses. Among the latter were Mount Vernon in Virginia, the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. More common however, were images of vernacular houses, the so-called Cape Cod house in particular (see Pl. I). [6] The homely simplicity of the Cape Cod house may have evoked a past free of class conflict and implied that grandeur and ostentation were antithetical to true Christmas spirit. Another, probably more accurate, interpretation is that the Cape Cod house is a particularly effective embodiment of shelter and refuge. Its low profile and massive roof connect it to the natural world around it, while its antiquity blurs and compresses time.