K.A.C. 2014 - T - 12 ...

     Have you sent out your cards yet? Do you still even send any? A lot of people I know have foregone the whole exchange of Christmas cards tradition, due to the cost and the immediacy of the Internet. Whether you do or not, I thought this would be a good time to present some of the strangest vintage cards I've discovered this year in my research.

     Maybe it's because of the nature of the holiday itself - the getting together of family and friends at someone's house, the baking and cooking ahead of time of all sorts of food to feed the hungry mob, that so many of the early cards had a food theme. A number of them are rather quaint, such as our titular pun-filled card to the left. Think sending your nearest and dearest a sausage card is a bit much? It's got NOTHING on the weirdness of the Christmas pudding cards! 





For example ... seriously, what kind of message are we sending here with this card? Think THAT'S odd? Try the one below on for size!







 



     So after selling everybody on the whole 'traditional Dickensian Christmas pudding' thing, you then send a card out telling them NOT to eat it? If this anthropormorphic flaming pudding gets any closer to this hapless lass, the card may have to be revised, e.g.:

     "The sad Christmas Pudding set your dress to a-burn,
     
        Now you know what it's like to be cooked to a turn!" 




     
     Our ancestors weren't about to let such trifles as living puddings being their only weird card messages being sent out for the holiday season - the more I dig into this, the more strange things I keep finding! You may remember the 'chihuahua and rifle' Christmas card from 1895 (for a refresher, see my December 9th, 2009 entry) - fifteen years earlier (in 1880) came this oddity. Imagine opening up your holiday card and seeing ... a mouse ... riding a lobster ... what the ... ??? The felicitations on the sheet of paper are appropriate to the season, reading "Peace, Joy, Health and Happiness". That's nice, right? Until you stop and think, "Who wrote that note ... the mouse or the lobster?" 



     Stop and think about that - by and large, the animal kingdom are fine to live and let live. Leave us alone, we'll leave you alone. But now you're going to make us deliver your damn Christmas greetings on top of everything else? SCREW YOU! You may be able to pull that crap with these small critters, like a mouse and lobster, big man, but just try that with someone your OWN size ... like an EMU and THIS is what's going to be greeting you come the 25th!  Yes, that's a real card! :) 

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     The moral here - leave the poor critters alone and have the mailman deliver your cards, cheapskate! Come back tomorrow for more!