Saturday, December 6, 2014

Four vintage Christmas cards
(So many cozy buildings!)

Please accept my apologies for dropping the ball on posting this week. To make up for it, here are four old Christmas cards — a very merry sailing ship and three cards featuring cozy, snow-covered dwellings. It's quite the common theme on Christmas cards, old and new. Enjoy!

1. "Old days, old times, old friends"
This card, printed on thick stock, features a ship with Christmas wreaths on its sails. The last part of the name scrawled in the lower-right corner looks like "dubbs." The back is blank.1


2. "Best Wishes for Christmas and the New Year"
I'm a sucker for robust reds and greens and snow-covered villages. And check out the man's scarf! On the back, the only writing is, in tiny cursive, what appears to "Mac and Phoeby."


3. Simple fold-out card
Here is the front and the inside of a "MADE IN U.S.A." card featuring snow-covered homes, evergreens and a simple message. The graphic design is really nice.



4. A card in French
Finally, this French-language card seems to be of a more recent vintage. The message on the back is typed and states: "Chère Vicki, Je te souhait un joyeux Noël et une bonne année. Ton amie, Marie-Claude."


Footnote
1. I'm going to use as many of my old Christmas cards and blank postcards as possible for the bundle of Postcrossing holiday postcards that I'll be sending out in the coming week. That way I can send folks all across the planet cards that are both merry and truly vintage. I guess it counts as recycling, too!

Monday, December 1, 2014

Happy December! And welcome to the world of Christmas ephemera


I always try to wait until it's actually December to start unleashing the Christmas- and holiday-themed ephemera. So here we go!

This vintage postcard was mailed in either December 1916 or December 1918 (the postmark difficult to read). Kenneth and Dorothy wish a Merry Christmas to Millie of Collingdale, Pennsylvania.

If you're a fan of Christmas ephemera of all kinds — vintage postcards, vintage greeting cards, magazine advertisements, illustrations, recipes and all sorts of nostalgic stuff — this is the place to be.

You'll want to dive into the Papergreat archives, which contain more than 75 Christmas-themed posts. And they're all organized in this handy directory.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Vintage postcard: "Rally Day for all the little folks..."


It's been a while since I featured a vintage Rally Day postcard, so here's one from the early 1920s that was mailed to "Master Loyd Hardy" in "city." Loyd is possibly a misspelling of "Lloyd." And it's amazing to think there was a time when "city" sufficed for an address.

Hammond Publishing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was responsible for this card. It provided supplies and publications for churches and Sunday School classes in the early part of the century, but has long since faded from memory. The website Historic Highlandlake features a cradle roll (a church listing of very young children) that was published in 1906 by Hammond Publishing.

The signature on the bottom of this postcard looks like "G.G. Sautyman," but I don't think that guess is correct.

* * *

Finally, just because, here's part of the postcard reimagined as an early 20th century illustration of zombie children descending upon on a church.