Send New Year Greetings: Revive This Edwardian Tradition!

Sending Happy New Year postcards to family and friends was a very popular tradition with the Victorians and Edwardians (and French ladies of the time) ~ as popular as sending Christmas cards, judging by the great number and variety of New Year cards we find!

 

These charming cards often showed illustrations of children, cherubs, Old Father Time, happy couples, benevolent angels, lucky horseshoes and shamrocks and pigs (yes, a symbol of luck and prosperity), even New Year gnomes who bring wealth and happiness to your home.  

Other New Year cards, especially the French ones, featured photographs and the wish for Bonne Annee (a good year) or Heureuse Annee (a happy year), like these from our collection.

You will find a lovely selection of illustrated cards on our Victorian Holidays Volume One CD and beautiful photo cards of children, ladies, and couples on our Christmas New Years Photos CD.

We altered some of the photographs into Christmas cards on the CD, but we left many with new year greetings in French. 

 I think New Year postcards should make a comeback! They would be a wonderful tradition to revive, especially in these anxious times. 

 

  

Just print onto cardstock, embellish if you like, and send to wish your loved ones a happy 2011.  The best wishes of a friend mean just as much now as they did a hundred years ago in 1911!