Yowling cats and murdered frogs: The bizarre Victorian origins of Christmas cards

Much of Christmas as we know it – with its indoor evergreens, family dinners and visits from Santa Claus – came together during the Victorian period.

Some Victorian holiday traditions, though, are more difficult to understand from the vantage point of the 21st century than others, like the era's bizarre and sometimes downright morbid Christmas cards.

While today's seasonal greetings generally feature winter scenes, holiday moments and religious tableaus, their Victorian and Edwardian counterparts could just as easily sport pictures of dancing insects, vengeful puddings and even dead birds.

Why do nineteenth-century card designs seem so strange to us?

The first thing to keep in mind is that Christmas cards themselves were a relatively new concept.

Sending letters to friends and family with personal news and best wishes for the coming year was a long-standing holiday tradition in Great Britain, and it only grew more popular with the 1840 introduction of the Penny Post. Under the new system, standard letters could be mailed anywhere in the United Kingdom for just one penny, about a quarter of the previous price.

At a time when literacy rates were on the rise thanks to public education, the discount dramatically increased the volume of correspondence. In the first year of the Penny Post, the number of letters sent in the U.K. more than doubled.

While the postal service's new affordability had many social benefits, it also posed some personal challenges. Social butterflies and public figures began to receive more mail than they could keep up with, particularly over the Christmas season.

Not wanting to appear rude by ignoring the reams of messages sent to him, civil servant Henry Cole devised a novel solution.

In 1843, he asked an artist friend, John Callcott Horsley, to create a festive illustration with a generic greeting and "To:___" and "From:___" fields where Cole could add some simple personalization. Cole had a thousand copies of the card printed, and, not only did he use them himself, he made them available to the public at a cost of one shilling each.

Cole's time-saving approach to Christmas correspondence soon caught on, and other printers began to sell ready-made Christmas postcards.

There were, of course, no established norms for what Christmas cards should look like, and much of the artwork seems, to our sensibilities, to have little to do with Yuletide.

Nature was a common motif, but images were often unseasonal, showing grassy pastures and elaborate floral arrangements.

Other cards reveal a sense of humour darker, more absurd, and more violent than we associate with Christmas today.