Christmas pre-revolutionary postcards. Vintage Christmas cards
Our life is unthinkable without a holiday, and especially without Christmas. This ringing of bells, kind smiles around, faith in the best and love in the air - all this is always expected with all our hearts.
Christmas is the brightest event in our life. This is the hope for salvation, for the best and brightest. Merry Christmas greetings in postcards, poems, cute pictures can really please those who are not near you on this great day.
Christmas has its own traditions. First of all, this is the gathering of the whole family together at a common table. It is important to congratulate all those whom you cherish and love so much. But if suddenly someone dear to your heart is far away, you can give him a little joy by simply sending a beautiful Christmas card with good wishes.
It is important to make peace with those with whom you were in a quarrel. Do not leave negativity in your life, get rid of it, open your heart and soul to goodness and love. A greeting card to help you. This is the easiest and most touching way to remind yourself and your feelings. And you can download a card with congratulations on Christmas on our website.
With the right word, you can pour out your soul, confess your love, beg for forgiveness. But happiness, as you know, is in the little things. It is not worth giving pompous gifts on a great holiday, your attention is the best present on this day. Those right words can be found on Christmas cards.
Sincere congratulations pour from the heart. This moment is important for any person who wants to reflect in his wish all devotion, love, respect and attention. To these pleasant words, you can attach postcards in verse with congratulations on Christmas. We bring to your attention an amazing selection of bright pictures for free.
I would like to wish all users of the LJ platform blog a Merry Christmas. This is a very bright holiday, which is usually celebrated with the family. People give each other gifts, lay a festive table. Many customs and traditions are associated with this holiday. One of them, unfortunately, almost forgotten in our time, is to send Christmas cards to friends and family. In a holiday card, people put a piece of their soul and good mood, which they convey to the recipient. It is always a pleasure to receive such postcards. They evoke warm feelings in the person you want to congratulate. A small piece of cardboard with a colored picture and words of congratulations inside can cheer you up on a holiday. You feel that relatives, friends or even just acquaintances have not forgotten about you. I can’t say that I feel the same when I receive an email with congratulations, even if it’s animated.
I offer a small selection of vintage Christmas cards.
Postcards or open letters appeared quite a long time ago, I consider engraved business cards, which were popular in France in the 18th century, to be their prototype. Also, the prototype of postcards was traditional popular prints - colored engraved images that adorned the houses of peasants. Religious plots, heroic or vice versa sarcastic images of historical characters, illustrations for fairy tales and folk customs were popular in them. As a rule, such popular prints had a caption or text telling about its content. With the help of such pictures, for example, peasants could see what exotic animals and distant lands look like. They served as a visual aid and textbook for children.
The first postcards in the modern sense appeared in England. The first Christmas card was created in 1794 by the artist Dobson and was a drawing depicting a winter landscape and a family located near the Christmas tree. The artist sent this homemade card to his friend, and he liked it very much. In 1795, Dobson printed several dozen of these Christmas cards and sent them to his acquaintances. And in 1800, an entrepreneur was found who organized the sale of such cards. John Horsley came up with the idea to decorate a postcard (12x7 cm) with a real Christmas triptych: in the center, the artist placed the family of Sir Henry Cole, sitting at the Christmas table, on the sides he placed pictures designed to remind others of the mercy and compassion of this respectable English family. Judging by the drawings, the Coles generously shared clothes and food with the poor. About a thousand copies were printed from the original, and for each postcard the Coles received a shilling - that was a lot of money! But at the same time, the family was sure that the public's interest in Christmas cards was nothing more than a momentary fashion, and not a business. In this they were wrong. Since the 1860s, the production of postcards has been put on stream. The first postcards appeared in Austria-Hungary in 1869. Their appearance was due to the lack of envelopes and paper for ordinary letters. A "correspondent card" was issued with an imprinted stamp that featured an address line on one side and a small text box on the other.
Holiday cards, including Christmas cards, were brought to Russia from Europe, and then text in Russian was added to them. Entrepreneurial merchants specially bought postcards without text. For the first time, postcards in the Russian Empire began to be sent by mail since 1894, when the Minister of the Interior signed a decree authorizing the sending of open letters on privately made letterheads. The first Russian Christmas cards were issued for charitable purposes by the St. Petersburg Board of Trustees of the Sisters of the Red Cross (Community of St. Eugenia) to receive additional funds for the maintenance of the hospital, outpatient clinic and courses for sisters of mercy. Christmas cards before revolutionary Russia were distinguished by their craftsmanship and sometimes surpassed their foreign counterparts. In addition, there was a huge variety of materials and types of designs. Postcards have become a special kind of art. In order not to limit the imagination of manufacturers, they even abandoned the international standard for the size of a postcard (9x14 cm)
Among the Christmas cards for children, many had educational stories that teach kindness, mercy and compassion.
The tradition of giving each other cards for the holidays is firmly rooted in Russia. Circulations of holiday cards reached hundreds of thousands of copies.
Outstanding artists such as A. Benois, K. Makovsky, N. Roerich, L. Bakst took part in the creation of Christmas cards. . According to some historians, the great artist Nikolai Karazin was the creator of the first Russian Christmas card. Images of angels were popular among the plots of Christmas cards.
all kinds of rituals and fortune-telling, snow-covered landscapes and animals, but the compositions with playing and having fun children and Santa Claus were especially good.
1912 postcard
Children loved to receive such cards in addition to gifts.
Among other things, everyday scenes were found in Christmas cards. They help us better understand the way of life and worldview of the people of that era.
Traditional biblical stories were not ignored either.
Holiday postcards are also a good indicator of the socio-political life of the country. Since 1914, the plots of Christmas cards have changed, military themes have appeared - warriors before the battle, families waiting for them, soldiers saying goodbye to their loved ones.
In addition to hand-drawn postcards, photographic postcards were also popular. Photographers created interesting compositions, applied various photomontage techniques to get an interesting plot.
1913 postcard
early 20th century
1913 postcard
The original composition distinguishes these photographic postcards. For photographers, this was a good chance to move away from the standard family portraits, which most often made up the bulk of orders, and get creative creating staged shots.
1914 postcard
Start twentieth century
1912 postcard
Since 1917, holiday, and especially Christmas cards in Russia have been canceled as they began to be considered a means of religious propaganda. The Soviet government several times made attempts to publish greeting cards with the "First year of the October anniversary", "Second ...", etc., but they were not in wide demand. Before the Great Patriotic War, a wide range of greeting cards "Happy New Year" and "November 7", and then "From May 9" appeared. Over the past ten years, the tradition of giving and mailing holiday cards at Christmas has seen a gradual resurgence. Now there are postcards for every taste and a wide variety of subjects. You can send a holiday card and e-mail, and animated and with music. But still, I don't think it's right. You can’t put so many good emotions and positive mood into an email, which is necessarily transmitted to the recipient. Yes, and agree to receive a postcard written by hand is always more pleasant. Finally, at the end of the post, I would like to bring some modern Christmas cards.
P.S In the course of searching for postcards for this post, I had to browse the entire Internet. In fact, as I understand it, quite a lot of postcards have remained since the beginning of the 20th century. As you can see above, the postcard scans are of good quality and have no damage. In my opinion, this suggests that people have carefully preserved these postcards for generations. Over time, they may have become part of the family archives. These people left memoirs in the form of postcards and letters. What will be left for our descendants after us? In the digital age, objects lose their value as such. Such an intimate thing as congratulating the closest ones remains on the servers of the Internet space and you forget about it a minute after you turn off the computer. Maybe you should still start exchanging congratulations in the form of beautiful postcards again (especially since there is a huge selection of them now, I especially like handmade ones). Then the value of such a congratulation will increase and you will want to keep the card as a keepsake. And this memory may remain for our descendants as part of history.
Postcards (open letter) first appeared in 1777 in France. Below we are talking about pre-revolutionary, Christmas and New Year cards, but they rather trace their roots from popular prints, which in the 17th-18th centuries were first imported from Germany, and then began to be produced in Russia.
In 1897, the "Society of St. Eugenia" issued the first postcards. Their sale turned out to be a commercially profitable business and quickly paid off. Postcards were issued from the original works of famous artists, these were paintings by Boris Kustodiev, Nikolai Pimonenko, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vladimir Lebedev, Mikhail Germashev.
Of course, they were not as bright as today - the level of printing was not the same, and many postcards were generally made by hand. However, these old postcards are wonderful illustrations of the traditions and customs that existed then in Russia...
On most pre-revolutionary Christmas cards, you can see biblical stories or angels. Popular ideas about the birth of Jesus Christ were formed under the influence of Gospel stories, legends and traditions. Traditional images associated with the birth of Christ are a nativity scene (cave), a manger with a baby, animals - an ox (a symbol of humility and diligence) and a donkey (a symbol of perseverance), Joseph and the Mother of God.
On the oldest Merry Christmas postcards, all the characters are drawn, but with the advent of photography, they began to print postcards with staged scenes and kids dressed as angels. Basically, such postcards were sold in photo studios, and they were very popular, because the image was really alive.
No less popular were postcards with everyday scenes on a Christmas theme - like the very first Christmas card, they depicted a table set for the holiday, children opening gifts, funny, sometimes not very sober companies and couples. By sending such postcards, people wished each other what was depicted on the postcard - that the house was a full bowl and there was always enough money for a good holiday table.
Other "everyday" cards for Christmas depict decorated Christmas trees. The tradition of decorating a coniferous tree came to Russia along with the first New Year's holiday from Germany, but until the 30s of the 19th century, Russians, as a rule, limited themselves to spruce branches. The first Christmas trees and Christmas decorations appeared in the homes of St. Petersburg Germans, but by the end of the 19th century, the tradition of starting holidays with Christmas tree decorations spread throughout Russia.
Among the "everyday" postcards were "postcards for adults", depicting kissing couples. Indeed, the custom demanded that guests who came to the house at Christmas exchange kisses with the hosts, and for young people the holiday was almost the only opportunity to kiss before the wedding, so they waited for it with trepidation. And of course, from many pre-revolutionary Christmas cards, kittens, chickens and piglets look at us, as if they are also enjoying the bright holiday of Christmas.
A special place among pre-revolutionary Easter cards is occupied by postcards created by the artist Elizaveta Merkuryevna Boehm(1843-1914), a student of the outstanding Russian artist Ivan Kramskoy, many postcards with her drawings have survived to this day. The main characters of her postcards are children; postcards often contain a saying, an instructive or congratulatory inscription.
From the end of the 1880s. the artist moved from silhouettes to watercolor technique. She first began working on postcards in 1898 at the request of the Board of Trustees of the Community of Saint Eugenia.
The release of Bem's first postcards was timed to coincide with the Christmas and New Year holidays. “Her two watercolors “Heart to Heart” and “The Boy” served as a happy start for the publishing house and, having found a warm welcome among the public, demanded several editions.”
The art critic Stasov, who was very fond of Bem's "wonderful 'children's poems'", predicted that "later on, all these numerous lovely scenes will, of course, stand with honor in the artistic history of our present time." From today's point of view, such an assessment of Bem's creative heritage is perceived as somewhat overstated. However, it should be recognized that Bem took her place in the history of Russian art in the last quarter of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The name of the artist has not lost its fame for more than a century, and this is not so much the merit of museum exhibits - her watercolors, as postcards printed according to Bem's originals, mass production, which is still loved by the public.
The Russian Empire met the last pre-revolutionary Christmas and New Year holidays as a participant in the First World War. This could not but be reflected on holiday postcards.
