Have you ever wondered where the tradition of sending Christmas cards every year came from? While the first Christmas cards appeared in Britain back in the 1840s, it was a German immigrant named Louis Prang who made them popular in the United States and around the world. Using a revolutionary new color printing technique that he called chromolithography, Prang’s Roxbury factory made the most popular greeting cards in the country from the 1870s until the turn of the century.

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America’s First Christmas Cards

• Louis Prang’s war map of Charleston Harbor


• Prang chromolithographs from the BPL


• “Louis Prang and the First American Cards,” Chase, E. Dudley. (1956). The romance of greeting cards: an historical account of the origin, evolution and development of Christmas cards, valentines and other forms of greeting cards from the earliest days to the present time.


• “Yule Spirit Highlights: Nutty Cards,” The Vanderbilt Hustler. Dec. 1964.


• Barnhill, Georgia B. “Business Practices of Commercial Nineteenth-Century American Lithographers.” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 48, no. 2/3, 2014


• Ristow, Walter W. “Worlds of Christmas Greetings.” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, vol. 35, no. 4, 1978


• GOODBAR, OCTAVIA. “Cards.” Current History (1916-1940), vol. 47, no. 3, 1937


• Morrill, Edward. “Old Prints: Louis Prang – Lithographer.” Hobbies – The Magazine for Collectors, August 1940


• Mills, Benjamin Fay. “Louis Prang, Popularizer of Art.” Vocations, Volume X: The Fine Arts, 1911


• Los Angeles Herald, June 16, 1909


• Paywalled news
  
  
  
  • Boston Globe, Dec 31, 1882
  
  
  • New-York Tribune, May 09, 1880
  
  
  • The (Chicago) Inter Ocean, Dec 10, 1881
  
  
  • The (Launceston, Tasmania) Examiner, Dec 14, 1882