Misc.

Valentine’s Week: The history of Valentine’s cards

The History of Greeting Cards
(from the Postcard and Greeting Card Museum – www.emotionscards.com)

Sending greeting cards to friends and family is a tradition that goes back about 200 years. They were mostly sent by the elite and wealthy in the early to mid 1800′s. Most of the early greeting cards were hand delivered and many were quite expensive, but they soon gained mass popularity with the introduction of the world’s first postage stamp issued in 1840 and a few ambitious printer’s and manufacturer’s perfecting printing methods, hiring artists and designed both elaborate expensive cards as well as simple affordable ones by the 1850′s.

As you visit our galleries you will see that cards of the past were fine pieces of art. Manufacturer’s used quality artists and many of the large manufacturer’s held "art" competitions to generate interest and to get new ideas for cards. Some of these competitions awarded as much as $1,000.00 to the winner!

The oldest known greeting card in existence is a Valentine made in the 1400′s and is in the British Museum. New Year’s cards can be dated back to this period as well, but the New Year greeting didn’t gain popularity until the late 1700′s. The Valentine and Christmas Card were the most popular cards, with Valentine’s offering us the most "mechanical", "pop-up" and filigree cards, followed by Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving. Cards gained their highest popularity in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s offering us cards with some of the most unusual art. The Victorian age give us the most prolific cards.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, when lovers said or sang their Valentines. Written Valentines began to appear after 1400. Paper Valentines were exchanged in Europe where they were given in place of Valentine gifts. Handmade paper Valentines were especially popular in England. In the mid to early 1800′s, Valentines began to be assembled in factories. Early manufactured Valentines were black and white pictures painted by workers in a factory. Esther Howland (see below) known as the Mother of the Valentine made fancy Valentines with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap". She introduced the Paper Lace Valentine in the mid 1800′s. By the end of the 1800′s, Valentines were being made entirely by machine.

Christmas cards were introduced and popularized by John Calcott Horsley, the artist of what is known as the world’s first Christmas Card and Louis Prang, known as the Father of the American Christmas Card.

The rest is History. With the exchange of New Year’s, Valentine’s, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Birthday Cards, just to name a few, there is probably no occasion that doesn’t have its own greeting card!

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Sharing some Fall Traditions

If you’ve never seen an Ottawa Fall, you’re missing out! It’s definetely such a great time to live in Canada! Though I hate that the cold is coming, the Fall colours are absolutely magical! As a rule, we try to go for a special outing to look at the Fall colours with the kids and this year- we checked out Gatineau Hills for the Fall Rhapsody Festival. There are tons of walking trails, beautiful Look-Outs and our favourite Mackenzie King Estates. We took tons of photo’s of the kids playing in the leaves and posing by the ruins. I thought I’d share a few of our Thankgiving photo’s with you!

Here’s a photo overlooking the water at Mackenzie King Estates near the boat house. Aren’t the colours pretty?!

Here’s me and my darlings posing for Dad:

The next day was TURKEY DAY!!! Yummy! We decided to start a new Tradition of giving this year…my oldest daughter and I made homemade Candy Apples and packaged them, made a cute stamped tag and then delivered the apples to 8 of our neighbours. It was really fun to stop by and catch up with people we hadn’t necessarily seen in a while. My kids would ring the door bell and say: "Happy Thankgiving" and then give them the Candy Apple. Some of the people thought we were selling them. My kids and I called it "reverse-Halloween". Here’s a cute photo of my daughter after we got them all made:

Thanks for reading! Just thought I’d share some of our fun this week!

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Have a great day! Josee

What a great mail day!

Wooohooo….check out what I got in the mail today….a swap from Shelli Gardner, the Cofounder and CEO of Stampin’ Up! This adorable tag made my day. Gift Tag Shelli made them for all the Founder’s Circle Trip Achievers. (The top demonstrators in Canada and the US received a Free trip to Lake Powell, Arizona for 5 days.) If you want to see what we did and saw on this trip…you can find my pictures from my trip HERE. We were supposed to receive this adorable tag while on the trip, but, unfortunetely the tags made it onto only the first bus on the last morning…so, they mailed them to us instead- how nice to receive something special in the mail! Here’s a cute photo of Shelli making her swaps. It’s so nice to know we’re not the only ones not having our swaps done till the last minute. Happy Stamping! Josee www.stampingjo.com