The tradition of sending greeting cards is generally traced all the way back to the ancient Chinese who sent messages to celebrate the New Year. The early Egyptians delivered their greetings on papyrus scrolls. And by the early 15th Century, Europeans were sending out hand-made paper cards.
But up until the mid 1800s, greeting cards were only available in America through import from Great Britain. In 1856 German immigrant Louis Prang opened up the very first modest printing shop in Boston and in 1875 he ultimately mastered his approach and started manufacturing greeting cards. By 1881, Prang, ‘The Father of the American Greeting Card,” was producing in excess of 5 million cards every year. His success was a major factor to the success of the current greeting card business.
Most of the key greeting card companies we’ve got nowadays were launched the early 1900s and the business really took off in the early 1930s when better color printing methods were created. Greeting cards at this time covered the basic holidays – Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and birthday – and it wasn’t until the 1950s when more general purpose cards were created.
Even so the most popular greeting card of all is still the birthday card. It’s believed they make up more than 60% of all card sales.
In the beginning, people wished one another well on birthdays to defend against evil spirits. It was considered that it was easier for evil spirits to hurt somebody on their birthday and one solution to prevent it from happening was to get together and hold a event, offering up well wishes to the person’s future. This is how birthday parties began and, as contemporary culture became more mobile, it became important to send your well wishes in a letter or card, given it was not always practical to get together and party.
Today, though, we not only send birthday cards to people who are a long way away, we also personally hand them to good friends and relatives, just to brighten up their day. Most people rarely stress about those terrible evil spirits doing harm to our loved ones. The reality is, we get frustrated a lot more about our loved ones doing harm to us if we forget to send them a card. Maybe that’s why somebody came up with the notion of the Belated Birthday Card.
