So who was the first? John, Louis and Henry all played an important role in the invention of Christmas cards, but it's complicated.

In 1840, John Horsley was commissioned by Henry Cole to paint a card. The picture was of a happy family enjoying wine (someone was very insightful) with the message 'merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you' Henry had the idea of printing and selling the cards in 1843, but John painted it. Without knowing the original brief it's tricky to say whether John was more visionary than Henry - you can make your own decision. However, you should also know that Henry was a mover and shaker when it came to introducing a uniform postal system throughout Britain in 1840, known as the penny post.

So what about Louis? Louis was an entrepreneur. He is known as the father of American Christmas cards, as he opened a lithographic shop and produced the first line of U. S. Christmas cards in 1875. However, Louis did invent a way to reproduce colour paintings known as the 'chromolithograph technique', and his first card using this technique had the message 'Merry Christmas'.

With the easy penny post system, sending  Christmas cards really took off in the 1850's and has been a lucrative business for many card manufacturers ever since. A lot of us have a love-hate relationship with Christmas cards; we love to get them, but hate sending them. Grappling with the Christmas card ritual has been around ever since 1873, when the Time's personal column ran the first advert apologising for 'not sending a Christmas card this year'.

With email and ecards, letter writing is becoming a lost art. It won't be long before the era of sending Christmas cards will be over too, as it is already in decline. It has been estimated that the number of cards the average American family received at Christmas fell from 29 in 1987 to 20 in 2004. Obviously email and ecards are making it easier and cheaper for people to send their seasons greetings.

Hallmark has a free ecard site http://ecards.hallmarkcards.com.au/ecardsCaption.aspx?cat=679

This information was sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cards
and http://www.emotionscards.com/museum/history.html.

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