Today Is Christmas Card Day

Today is known as Christmas Card Day, honoring Sir Henry Cole of England who created the first commercial Christmas Card in 1843. It showed three generations of a family toasting the holiday in the middle, with scenes of charity on either side, with food and clothing being given to the poor.

Christmas Card Day is always on December 9th.

For decades, sending and receiving Christmas cards has always been an annual tradition. Many include a summary of what the family has been up to during the previous year. Many people still send them because they like getting them in return. But the cost of stamps and the time you need to write and send them has caused many people to stop sending them.

Instead a lot of people are going with the free Ecards. Some people get a big kick out of the animated Ecards and like sending and receiving them instead of getting paper cards.

Hallmark estimates there were one and a half billion paper Christmas cards sent last year. That’s 13 times the number of households in America. It’s also nearly a billion more than the number of active Twitter users. But it’s down from the two billion cards that were sent just a decade ago.

If you still like sending cards and you haven’t gotten started yet, today is a good day to get going on the project.