New York Public Library - 100 Christmas Wishes: Vintage Holiday Cards from the New York Public Library

VINTAGE HOLIDAY CARDS
FROM THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. T hese Christmas greetings from the vast collection of holiday cards in the New York Public Library postcard collection capture the abiding, universal impulse to connect with friends and loved ones at Christmas, but the whimsical, artistic, lush, humorous, and sober imagery from these century-old images is a unique window into the past. The cards are from 1887 to 1944, and come from a dozen countries.

They represent not just the common instinct for Christmas conviviality, but the golden age of postcards themselves. In some ways they were the social media and email of the early twentieth century: brief messages, dashed off quickly, to acknowledge and maintain connection and affection. The images on the cards represent the Christmas ideal of our collective imagination, an ideal that transcends time, country, and culture: happy children who long for magic, lighted trees and festive families, snow at dusk, and evergreens, sleigh rides, gifts, and bountiful feasts. These visions still dominate our conception of what Christmas means. We insist on joy, but if there is too much loss accumulated in our lives at the end of the year, we will settle for longing and a poignant remembrance of Christmas past. We pray, we dance, we sing, we feast, we shine light into the darkest time of the year, we exchange gifts, we preserve the belief in magic for our children, we remember, and we hope for peace.

We reveal our humanity and our dreams to each other at Christmas. We are fortunate that the New York Public Library was prescient enough to begin collecting postcards, which most people thought disposable and unworthy of preservation, in 1915. The first picture postcard had appeared in the United States only twenty-two years previously, at the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893. They were an instant success and demand for picture postcards was insatiable in the early part of the century. The holidays were the perfect opportunity to utilize the new form of greeting, and a quick and inexpensive way to send goodwill to friends and family both far and near. This collection of early Christmas postcards, housed for over a century in the New York Public Library archives, distills those abiding wishes for the holidays from revelers from long ago and faraway, in a wish for peace, joy, magic, bounty, family, and for light to be shone round the world at Christmas, past and future.

As one card in the collection avows: Once again tis Christmas time
Happy bells are pealing,
Bringing tidings old yet new,
Bonds of friendship sealing. May your own bonds of friendship be renewed this season, and may the happy bells of Christmas ring out from the past and echo into the future, and may these images remind us of our shared humanity at Christmastime and always. Rosanne Cash