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
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The First American Christmas Cards