The creation of the Christmas card is attributed to Sir Henry Cole, a British civil servant involved in London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition and the beginnings of the Victoria and Albert Museum. “The invention of the greeting card, specifically of Christmas or end-of-year cards, came from people looking to reduce the amount of individualized, personalized letter-writing that they were doing.” “Some things never really change,” says Wroblewski. Image: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-085080 We’re not so different from people of the past as we might think.Įarlier Christmas cards tend to feature ornate "Dickensian Christmas" scenes. “Something about the framing of it makes me think of the kind of thing that would be a cute animal picture on Instagram or social media these days,” she says. It’s Wroblewski’s favorite out of the 68 boxes and fifteen to twenty linear feet of greeting cards from the nineteenth century through roughly the 1960s that are in the museum’s collections. Decades old, the card depicts two dogs in sweaters, one proffering a bone as a gift to the other. Take one of the Christmas cards in the archives of the History Museum, where Wroblewski is the Director of Collections. Image: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-089189 “Anthropomorphizing your animals-not a new tradition,” says Julie Wroblewski of the Chicago History Museum. “Thinking about animals and pets as an extension of your family is also something that’s been around for a while, in different ways.” “Anthropomorphizing your animals-not a new tradition,” says Julie Wroblewski of the Chicago History Museum with a laugh. Fridges, mantels, and baskets are filling up with photos of friends and family near and far, well-known and barely familiar, along with what we’re sure are some adorable pictures of pets-maybe even some wearing sweaters. It’s that time of year, for mailboxes bursting with unwanted catalogs and more welcome holiday cards.
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