Those Treasured Trade Cards of Christmas

By Robert Reed

As seen in The Antique Shoppe Newspaper, December 2008    

                                               May love, hope and health unite
                                               to make your Christmas glad and bright.
                                                                     --trade card message,1880. 

            The cheery Christmas trade card came along at just the right time.

            As the Victorian era came to revise the celebration of the holidays, consumers also became more receptive to colorful images on paper and to product advertising.

            The Christmas trade card, with the immediate advancements in chromolithographic printing, was the perfect solution. Merchants simply handed the customer a colorful card bearing a beaming image of the season. In some cases, but not all, the merchant’s name was discreetly stamped on the reverse of the latter 19th century card.

            Typically such cards were given away as premiums during the holiday season to ensure customer traffic and to encourage yuletide spending. Those that were not outright free were sold in groups or sets for just a few cents to regular customers. A few major stores stocked large selections of such cards with a wide variety of subjects and scenes for direct sales to the public. They were very, very similar to what merchants willingly distributed except that they bore no advertising.

            Christmas trade cards, for all their beauty, could be terribly ironic.

            An 1880s card depicted a mother holding a child up to light candles on the family’s very combustible Christmas tree. The clear residential fire hazard in the full color illustration was an advertisement from the Home Insurance Company of New York.

            While the Christmas trade card was largely an American device, the earlier Christmas card itself had clear British origins. Most historians credit H. C. Horsley with the pioneer format for such a card in 1840s. Horsley’s version depicted three generations of a family at Christmas dinner. Side panels of the card featured Christmas charity with the poor being fed and given clothing. It was simply inscribed, “A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to You.”

            “Only the most basic literary skills were needed to send a card and one could maintain the warmest of greetings with the minimum of effort,” note J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue authors of The Making of Modern Christmas.

            During the 1860s residents of both countries often used the then popular custom of delivering engraved calling cards to further decorate them with Christmas greetings. By the 1870s the more affluent British were using Christmas cards in envelopes as well as postal cards to extend greetings of the holiday season. A decade later printing processes were economical enough to make such cards readily available to large numbers of people.

            In America one extension of the whole thing became the trade card in general and the Christmas trade card in particular.

            Such cards were a natural means of drawing crowds to stores and drawing attention to the product and even to the merchants themselves. The name of the store and its proud owner could be readily printed on the backs of the cards or simply stamped on using an inked pad.

            Meanwhile some large companies, desiring to capitalize on both the Christmas holiday and the collectiblity of such cards, issued them in sets thus encouraging customers of the 1880s and 1890s to return to the same store for a similar product and to complete more of the card’s series.

            Interestingly most any full-color image could past for a Christmas trade card if some sort of holiday’s greetings was included as a caption. Happy and smiling children were great, but sledding scenes, or even various animals were fully accepted as legitimate fare for the season. Initially  only a small number of vintage Christmas trade cards featured what would now be considered as traditional fare such as mistletoe, holly, the Nativity and either Father Christmas or Santa.

            Woolson Spice Company, for example, often featured birds perched on snow-covered branches. They then added messages like, “Accept the greeting we send you. May all Christmas bliss attend you.”

            Trade cards calling attention to the holiday varied in size. Most were two or three inches wide and four or five inches deep, just right for the pocket or purse. However other types could be as large as seven or eight inches tall or small as a few inches square.

            Gradually as the traditions became more indelible in Christmas celebrations, the trade cards came to reflect similar images. Still they tended to stress the commercial aspect of the holiday rather the religious significance of it.

            “Christmas trade cards with images of Jesus in a lowly manger do not exist,” notes Dave Cheadle author of the book, Victorian Trade Cards. “Meanwhile cards with images of a jovial St. Nick loaded with store-bought goodies are legion.”

            The image of Santa Claus appeared on some cards of the Woolson Spice Company, Kerr & Company Cotton Thread, Leader Flour, McLaughlin’s Coffee, as well as a vast number of stocks which were then stamped by local merchants. Like holiday postcards, which would immediately follow the popularity of trade cards in the United States, Santa appeared in costumes of various colors. The jolly gent could be found in outfits of brown, blue, green, white, and of course red. His image on the trade card might be wearing just a cap, a fur-trimmed hood, or a tall hat decorated with pine cones. However in most every case commercial trade cards had Santa bearing a very generously-filled bag of toys and other treats.

            Some Christmas cards merely alluded to the image of either Santa or (earlier) Father Christmas. One 1880s trade card borrowed generously from Clement Clark Moore’s Visit From St. Nicholas to offer a poem concerning a similar figure:

            “Welcome Father Christmas,
            So jolly, plump and round,
            That step pest, brisk and rosy,
            Across the frozen ground!” 

            The N. K. Fairbank Company did one better with possibly the most holiday-related soap ever put on the market, Santa Claus Soap. Fairbank, which would eventually be more famous for the Gold Dust Twins cleaning products, sold the uniquely named Santa soap just before the dawn of the 20th century. It accompanied the product with beautifully printed trade cards too. Of course each card depicted a red-suited Santa carrying a Christmas tree heavily laden with toys.

            At their height Christmas trade cards continued to use eye-pleasing images sure to attract Victorian era attention. One featured a little girl with her doll reminding, ‘the gem of all the year is happy, merry, Christmas time with carol sweet and joyful chimes...”

            Observed the New York Historical Society during an exhibition of such classical cards some years ago, “cute animals, winsome children, and pretty women were widely used in such trade cards to move merchandise just as they are used today.”

            America’s romance with trade cards had largely ended after the first decade of the 20th century. Part of the change was the emergence of the holiday postcard which allowed citizens to directly mail lovely illustrated greetings for only a few cents each. Moreover merchants and manufacturers were drawn to the vistas of printed advertisements in newspapers, magazines and other publications.

            Today surviving Christmas trade cards offer a remarkable view of how the holiday was envisioned by some more than a century ago.

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