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!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Erin Go Bragh

You'll find 70 St. Pat's images on our
Victorian Holidays Volume Two CD.

For commercial use: http://www.lunagirl-images.com/gallery.php?gid=58

Bonne Année - 365 jours de bonheur!

Judging by the number of New Year cards we come across, sending greetings for the new year was very popular in the Victorian and Edwardian eras -- maybe as popular as sending Christmas cards! We're developing a lovely collection of vintage photo postal cards originally sent to wish friends and family Happy New Year (or Bonne Année, a good year, in French).

And looking at the dates on the back, they sent them not only at January 1st, but throughout the season from after Christmas into the first weeks of January. We think that's a lovely custom that we should revive!

Cards usually carried wishes for happiness, prosperity, and sometimes health and friendship, and often featured pictures of good luck symbols such as four-leaf clovers, horseshoes, coins, even pigs (an old lucky symbol that has gone by the wayside). Many have charming photos of children, ladies, or romantic couples.

You'll find a nice selection of restored cards on our Christmas New Years Photos Postcards CD, and also on the New Years French Postcards collage sheet below. Heureuse Année!

Victorian Floral Christmas Cards

The custom of sending Christmas cards began in Victorian London in about 1840, and in 1875 Boston lithographer Louis Prang began publishing Christmas cards in America. The earliest cards usually featured colorful flower blossoms or pictures of birds, children or angels.

We couldn't find out much more about floral cards, except that they were part of the Victorians' (and Victorian-era Americans') love for flowers, and that the early, more expensive cards were probably sent by affluent folks.


Prang's cards were expensive, and it was inexpensive holiday penny postcards, somtimes imported from Germany, that were sent by most Americans until WWI.

We think these floral cards are lovely and quaint -- they certainly reflect the "shabby" romantic spirit that so many of our customers like!


While the more traditional cards featuring caroling children, nativity scenes, holly wreaths, and of course dear old Santa Claus do feel more "Christmas" and festive to us this time of year, these old flower cards are sweet for something different.

You'll find them (and hundreds more holiday images) in our Holidays & Occasions 2CD set -- and with holiday greetings removed in our Flowers & Birds collection, to use as flower pictures in your scrapbooking, card making and art.