Hello :) First off, thanks for clicking over!
I had such a good time this afternoon looking at (and photographing) my collection of vintage Christmas Cards and Seals and Tags. Honestly, I didn’t realize I had so many, and what I will show you here is just part of the collection. But before anyone begins thinking that I’ve gone nuts and have buried myself in these things, I have to explain how this vast collection came to be. Thanks to Nick being ultra alert to internet technology, we got an EBay account really early in it’s existence. This was back when people had just begun to clear out their closets and sell their stuff on-line. And I was there ready to buy it, at such remarkable prices that it was crazy not to. I think back then, people just wanted to get rid of their unused things, and as the saying goes, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.
And so it was, that people were selling full sets of vintage Christmas cards at prices that were much less than a box of newly produced ones would cost. At first I was actually buying them because I was being frugal, and I fully intended to send them out to people. Then they began arriving in the mail and I was shocked by the beauty. True story .. one time while opening my packages I shed a tear because I could not believe what I was handling. That heart stopping feeling came over me for a moment this afternoon as I looked at these things again. The history associated with something meant to allow friends to keep in touch in a day before the internet, is steeped within these printed bearers of good cheer.
The last box of cards I bought on EBay were the full box of the ‘girl holding the pink Christmas tree’ ones, which are endearingly called ‘Miss Twinkle’. That was at least 5 years ago. Nowadays, such finds are next to impossible on EBay, where vendors are no longer primarily everyday people who are cleaning out their excess things. I think the term ‘dealer’ would more aptly describe them now, as opposed to someone who thought that it would be embarrassing to send out Christmas Cards that were so old fashioned. (That being said however, I am still a big fan of EBay!)
I have to regrettably admit that in the early days I did actually send out some vintage cards to people at Christmas, though I didn’t write in them. Rather I enclosed another plain card within for my own personal greeting and enclosed that, along with the original envelope, in a new envelope. To this day, I wonder if the recipients ‘got it’ and realized that what I was sending was special, as I never did hear from anyone regarding them. Maybe they wondered why I was sending them such an old card, and why I couldn’t be bothered to write in it!
As this preamble would suggest, I ended up with too many photographs to show all of my Vintage Christmas paper goods in one post, so I will divide it. Here I will show you the Christmas cards, and on a second post I will show you the Christmas seals and Gift Tags.
By the way, the little snow lady pictured at the top of the post is my favourite of all. I love her.
Hope your week has begun with a happy Monday.
xo loulou
If you’d like to see Part II of this post, Vintage Paper : Christmas Seals and Gift Tags, please click here
