My Thoughts On Christmas Cards
Now that I have sent my Christmas cards out, I can sit back and judge all the ones that come in. I love to see pictures of people (why send out a family card without one?) and enjoy seeing how people’s personalities come through (Grannie always chooses a Snoopy card, my mom does something uber religious, etc)
My only gripe with Christmas cards is the braggy Christmas card that details all of the ways each member of the family is wonderful and perfect. Witty notes are great— braggy ones aren’t.
One year, kid you not, my family got a braggy card which not only featured the blue print sketch/design of the front of their newly constructed, multi-million dollar home in Lake Forest, but went ahead and described how “Little Susy” was the star of the Chicago Ballet’s Nutcracker (meaning she was an extra dancer in one of the scenes) and “Little Timmy” was the star football quarterback… barf.
That being said, an interesting article in today’s WSJ about cards. I think Felten gets it wrong however. The handwritten note (if missing) has not been replaced with pre-fab sentiments. If card buying customers have such control over what goes on their cards, then they are actively thinking of their recipients more than ever. The act of selecting the card, choosing a photo, addressing the envelope, stamping it, licking it… all these actions aren’t done in a vacuum. Maybe it’s just me, but as you take each individual card, you think of the person it is going to, even if for a second. And that is worth sending them to me…
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From “Christmas Spirit: It’s all in the cards” by Eric Felten of the WSJ:
You’d think that Christmas cards, those small holiday tokens of love and friendship, would be greeted with joy or at least with some mischievous amusement (wow, the Joneses managed to stay married another year). Instead, the arrival of envelopes prompts an annual avalanche of complaints. Let us count the gripes: Cards are too secular, proclaiming “Happy Holidays” out of a politically correct fear that “Merry Christmas” might offend; cards are no longer about Christmas at all but just annual vehicles for sending out pictures of the kids or snaps of the family vacation; cards have become impersonal, with pre-fab sentiments replacing the handwritten note.
Could it be that this sour way of looking at things is wrongheaded? Perhaps we should be celebrating that the recent advent of online custom digital printing has fostered a great resurgence in holiday greetings. Computers may have killed off most pen-and-paper correspondence, but not Christmas cards. (This may be the only time of the year when we address an envelope, affix a stamp or grapple with a mailbox.) There’s a case to be made that we are enjoying a Christmas card revival that gets us closer to the original tradition than we might have imagined—even if that happy development does come with burdens peculiar to our age.
The tradition got started in England in 1843 (the same year that saw publication of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”) when Henry Cole hired well-regarded illustrator John Calcott Horsley to design a Christmas greeting card that could be mass-produced. Cole was an author, an industrial designer and a savvy political insider with a long list of friends and acquaintances and not nearly enough time to write Yuletide letters to them all. The card Horsley designed left no space for any correspondence beyond the scribbling of the recipient’s name at the top and Cole’s signature at the bottom. And so when we’re tempted to tut-tut that Christmas cards these days deliver prepackaged sentiment without much in the way of the personal touch, well, that’s what they were designed to do in the first place. (Emphasis Mine)
To those tired of seeing family pictures and secular sentiments on modern cards, it’s worth remembering that Cole’s original Christmas card featured not a pious image but a family gathered for their holiday feast. All are raising a glass—if you look closely, you’ll see that the nanny is helping a little girl of about 4 to gulp her share of the grape.
One obvious difference between cards of the past and present, though, is in their artistic quality. When the craze for Christmas cards first hit, no small part of the sensation was the visuals—elaborate paintings reproduced with miraculous color-saturated fidelity by the hot technology of the day, chromolithography. The king of the American Christmas card, lithographer Louis Prang, held an annual competition starting in 1880, challenging popular illustrators to see who could design the most beautiful, remarkable card. The contests were followed in the press with a sort of 19th-century version of “American Idol” breathlessness.
Few of the cards we receive today can match those elaborate designs, because the hot technology of our day, custom digital imaging, demands that we all become our own card designers. The powerful new digital tools we enjoy give us great freedom to create. But having those tools in turn puts the burden on us to be creative. Once you could go and select an appealing card from among the thousands of professionally designed cards. The only challenge was deciding on one that seemed to capture your own style. Now you’re pressured to create your own style from the bewildering assortment of design elements heaped in front of you.
Sure, the online card services provide the templates, but the bulk of the aesthetic choices fall on our shoulders. What photo(s) to use? Color or black-and-white? How to crop the picture in the template frame—should I show little Johnny head-to-toe or zoom in on his face? Should the sentiment be printed in block letters, script, sans-serif type, italics, all caps? Once there were people whose job was to make those judgments. It’s one small tyranny of the computer age that we’re all expected to be our own art directors.
The cards that show up at the Felten house suffer from a predictable sameness that comes from the fact that most of us use the same online templates. Even so, they aren’t too bad given that most are designed by amateurs. But then there are the friends who ruin it for us all. Like the pocket-protected kid in college who skews the grading curve in calculus, they set the bar ridiculously high. Every year we get a card that puts all the rest to shame, clearly cleverly designed well before the professional photography and impeccable graphic work realize the vision. (The kids are posed in a series of tableaus with an amusing dramatic arc, the artsy black-and-white pictures punctuated with color embellishments.) I can huff that, well, they have a professional photographer in the family (and they do). But, nonetheless, they’ve set the standard in our circle, and one doesn’t want to be embarrassed. Next year I’m hiring an illustrator.
Does anybody have John Calcott Horsley’s email address?
