This Christmas, thousands of Christmas cards will once again land on Dutch doormats. But where does this tradition come from?
Sending Christmas cards has a long history and developed over the centuries from personal letters to commercial cards.
The first predecessor of the Christmas card was the New Year’s letter. In the fifteenth century, people wrote personal letters with good wishes to family or acquaintances, which were usually read on New Year’s Day. These were not sent by post.
According to Marianne Bakker, curator of Museum Collection Brands in Nieuw-Dordrecht, these letters were especially common within wealthy families. In Drenthe, she previously said that printed New Year’s letters with hand-colored images surrounding a handwritten message were created in the eighteenth century, an early step towards the modern Christmas card.