Greeting card

A greeting card is a piece of card stock, usually with an illustration or photo on its front cover, made of high-quality paper featuring an expression of friendship, love, celebration, or other sentiment. Greeting cards are traditionally given on special occasions such as birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, baby showers, baptisms, and graduations, or during the holidays, including New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Greeting cards can also be sent to express other feelings, such as giving thanks, sympathy, encouragement, or best wishes to get well from an illness or injury.

Greeting cards are usually packaged using an envelope and come in a variety of styles. There are both mass-produced and handmade versions available and they may be distributed by hundreds of companies large and small. While typically inexpensive, more elaborate cards with die-cuts, pop-ups, sound elements or glued-on decorations may be more expensive.

Hallmark Cards and American Greetings, both U.S.-based companies, are the two most commercially successful producers of greeting cards in the world today.

In Western countries and increasingly in other societies, many people traditionally mail seasonally themed cards to their friends and relatives during holiday seasons, especially in December. Many service businesses also send cards to their customers in this season, typically with a universally acceptable non-religious message such as "happy holidays" or "season's greetings." Many people also usually include money or gift cards that are placed into greeting cards.

The concept of a khaki fabric card appeared in 1899 during the first Christmas of the Boer War and was issued by a business in Glasgow. In New Zealand, it was not uncommon to receive a khaki greeting card, even the premier, RJ Seddon is said to have received one. An example of a fabric card is held by the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and is a small square of fabric with a heavy fringe created by threads with a hand written greeting.  

The custom of sending greeting cards can be traced back to the ancient Chinese who exchanged messages of good will to celebrate the New Year, and to the early Egyptians, who conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls. By the early 15th century, handmade paper greeting cards were being exchanged in Europe. The Germans are known to have printed New Year's greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and handmade paper Valentines were being exchanged in various parts of Europe in the early to mid-15th century, with the oldest Valentine in existence being in the British Museum. The card was written to Bonne of Armagnac by her husband, Charles Duke of Orleans, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London at the time. Not surprisingly, its message is rather downbeat. Its opening reads: ‘I am already sick of love / my very gentle Valentine.’

By the 1850s, the greeting card had been transformed from a relatively expensive, handmade and hand-delivered gift to a popular and affordable means of personal communication, due largely to advances in printing, mechanization, and a reduction in postal rates with the introduction of the postage stamp. This was followed by new trends like Christmas cards, the first of which appeared in published form in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole hired artist John Calcott Horsley to design a holiday card that he could send to his friends and acquaintances. In the 1860s, inventor Hugh Pierce Jr., inspired by the Christmas card, invented the Birthday card. Companies like Marcus Ward & Co, Charles Goodall & Son, and Charles Bennett began the mass production of greeting cards. They employed well-known artists such as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane as illustrators and card designers. The extensive Laura Seddon Greeting Card Collection from the Manchester Metropolitan University gathers 32,000 Victorian and Edwardian greeting cards and 450 Valentine's Day cards dating from the early nineteenth century, printed by the major publishers of the day.

Technical developments like color lithography in 1930 propelled the manufactured greeting card industry forward. Humorous greeting cards, known as studio cards, became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s. A 1958 article about the U.S. greeting card business cites the trade’s reference to its contemporary, postwar offerings as “Modern Cards,” as opposed to “Traditional Cards,” noting that the preceding decade’s U.S. sales had grown from three to four-and-a-half billion cards yearly: “The Modern Card has not won over old customers, so much as it has brought into card shops millions of Americans who had never bought a greeting card before.”