A Greeting card is just a small piece of paper printed or hand painted or handcrafted with printed or handwritten message to convey your feelings to someone. Nowadays there are so many ways we can express ourselves, our feelings to someone such as a SMS, an email massage, an ecard, a fax message or just a telephone/cell phone. But still Greeting Cards are being used for this purpose. Some people think to such an extent that why to spend money and time in purchasing and sending a greeting card, instead why not send a SMS, so cheap and time saving option!!!
Nowadays what matters in every field is the presentation. Greetings card is also one of the means of presenting your feelings. I would say that the Greetings card is an esthetic looking packing of your feelings/expressions so that the recipient feels delighted and honoured.
Hence Greeting cards can be used for almost all occasions, only thing that you should select the right card, appropriate color, design or picture along with the printed message or your own handwritten massage, which will reveal your affection. As Greeting cards are for many reasons, occasions and hence there are many types of Greeting Cards available in the market:
- Birthday card
- New year card
- Anniversary card
- Thank you card
- Thinking of you card
- Sorry card
- Best wishes card
- Good Luck card
- Get well card
- Flower card
- Congratulations card
- Engagement card
- New baby card
- I Love you card
- Valentines day card
- Christmas card
- Dipavali card
- Diwali card
- Navratri card
- Ugadi card (Hindu New Year card)
- Gudhipadawa card (Hindu New Year card)
- Sankranti card
- Mothers day card
- Fathers day card
- Congratulation card and so on.
Hallmark Cards and American Greetings are the largest producers of greeting cards in the world. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that one billion pounds are spent on greeting cards every year, with the average person sending 55 cards per year.
In the United States, many adults traditionally mail Christmas cards to their friends and relatives in December. Many service businesses also send cards to their customers in this season, usually with a universally acceptable non-religious message such as “happy holidays” or “seasons’s greetings.
The Historians say the custom of sending greeting cards is started by to the ancient Chinese who exchanged messages of good will to celebrate the New Year. Egyptians in ancient times conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls. By the early 1400s, 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-1400s.
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. Thanks to new advances in printing and mechanization. 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, companies like Marcus Ward & Co, Goodall 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.
There are two major categories of greeting cards, one is mass produced ( printed on offset printing machines etc.) and other is handmade greeting cards. Hand painted greeting cards is also a separate category of greeting cards. These cards are also available but this type of cards can not be mass- produced as each card has to be individually painted. So every hand painted card is unique.