I love these..

These old fashioned Christmas postcards are just so nice, there's a market in town that sells all sorts of old things, people have booths and when they find stuff they have it for sale ,i was with my darling today in the market and they had some postcards from days gone by. The writing on them is always so neat and always done of course in old fashioned ink pen. It just makes me smile when i see them, i wonder who these people were, where they lived what kind of lives they had. Some of the artwork on them is so pretty, so it prompted me to look up when the first one was sent, this is what i found..........

The sending of greeting cards at Christmas began in the Victorian era. Although wood engravers produced prints with religious themes in the European Middle Ages, the first commercial Christmas and New Year's card is believed to have been designed and printed in London, England in 1843.
John Callcott Horsley (born 1817-- died 1903), a British narrative painter and a Royal Academician, designed the very first Christmas and New Year's card at the request of his friend Sir Henry Cole (the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum). Cole suggested the idea of a specially designed form of greeting to send to friends at Christmas. In 1843 an edition of 1,000 of these Christmas cards were printed and placed on sale in London. They were printed in lithography by Jobbins of Warwick Court, Holborn, London, and hand-colored by a professional "colourer" named Mason. The cards were published under Sir Henry Cole's nom de guerre, "Felix Summerly"—by his friend Joseph Cundall, of New Bond Street...

So i thought that was jolly interesting. Did not surprise me one bit it was invented in jolly old London!! So i have learnt something today. I may go back tomorrow and get me a couple of the ones i was looking at.