Christmas cards brighten the holidays

December is the season of glad tidings, and for at least 100 years one of the best ways to send and receive them was through holiday cards. In the St. Croix Valley, the story of mailing holiday cards is intertwined with the burgeoning of Christmas as a holiday.
Historians believe that the first Christmas in New England was celebrated on the St. Croix River by French colonists during the winter of 1604-5. It would be quite some time before Christmas celebrations were widely held again in the area, however, as the Protestants who came to claim New England in the centuries following did not openly embrace Christmas festivities.
That began to change in the late 1800s as the modern commercial aspects of Christmas took shape. The first actual Christmas card was sent in England in 1843, after Henry Cole found himself buried under a mountain of handwritten letters he was expected to reply to. Christmas cards were thus normalized in England and found their way to the young American colony a few decades later.
"There is mention in the diary of Nan Howe Gray, dated December 13, 1884, that she had received a Christmas card in the mail," says John "Al" Churchill of the St. Croix Historical Society. Gray was born in 1861 in Cooper. Other local diaries from the early 1900s state they had exchanged Christmas cards with family members.
The Christmas cards sent locally would have all been "penny post," Churchill says. In Calais, residents may have gone to Roy Ryan's store on Main Street to find the perfect holiday card. In St. Stephen, a dedicated postcard shop was available on Main Street.
In Eastport, Oscar Brown sold cigars and newspapers and "probably would have had cards" as well, says Hugh French of the Tides Institute & Museum of Art. "The drug stores downtown would have also sold cards."
In general, penny postcards were extremely popular and fulfilled a key functionality of the "extremely important" mail system, Churchill explains. "The penny postcard was the email of the day. Took a bit longer than today but it was the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to communicate with family in distant places when 'distant places' were any place over 100 miles away."
Residents had their pick of exceptionally designed Christmas cards, some of which were made locally. Noted area artist Emma Boardman, born in 1885, designed her share of Christmas cards while staying in Calais. More recently, famed artist Pauline Inman summered in Addison between the 1930s and 1960s and found herself inspired to do a series of Christmas cards featuring her Bold Coast themed prints.
Most locally sent Christmas cards had mass-produced designs that weren't regionally significant, but that didn't mean they weren't works of art. Many artists applied tasteful Victorian aesthetics, while others branched into topical humor related to the Great Depression and World War II.
Regardless of what the Christmas card looked like, recipients in the St. Croix Valley would have initially had to pay for their mail upon delivery, "which meant many letters were never delivered," Churchill says. In 1855, federal legislation passed requiring senders to prepay to mail letters, and that would have led to more cards finding their way successfully to their intended recipients.