Greeting card and its importance
A greeting card is just a small piece of printed or hand painted or handmade paper with a printed or handwritten message to convey your feelings to someone. Today there are so many ways in which we can express our feelings towards someone, such as an SMS, an email message, an electronic card, a fax message or just a phone / cell phone. But greeting cards are still used for this purpose. Some people think to such an extent that why spend money and time buying and sending a greeting card, instead, why not send an SMS, such a cheap and time-saving option?
Nowadays what matters in all fields is presentation. The greeting card is also one of the means to present your feelings. I would say that the greeting card is an aesthetic looking packaging of your feelings / expressions so that the recipient is delighted and honored.
Therefore, greeting cards can be used for almost all occasions, just you need to select the right card, the right color, design or image along with the printed message or your own handwritten massage, which will reveal your affected. As greeting cards are for many reasons, occasions and therefore there are many types of greeting cards available in the market:
- Birthday card
- New year card
- Anniversary card
- Thank you card
- Thinking about your card
- Sorry card
- Best wishes card
- Good luck card
- Get well card
- Flower card
- Congratulations card
- Pledge card
- New baby card
- I love you card
- Valentine’s 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
- Father’s day card
- Greeting card and so on.
Hallmark Cards and American Greetings are the largest producers of greeting cards in the world. In the UK, an estimated £ 1 billion is spent each year on greeting cards, with the average person sending 55 cards a year.
In the United States, many adults traditionally send Christmas cards to friends and family in December. Many service companies also send cards to their customers this season, usually with a universally acceptable non-religious message, such as “happy holidays” or “seasonal greetings.”
Historians say that the custom of sending greeting cards started with ancient Chinese exchanging messages of goodwill to celebrate the New Year. In ancient times, the Egyptians transmitted their greetings on papyrus scrolls. In the early 1400s, handmade paper greeting cards were traded in Europe. The Germans are known to have printed New Years greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and in various parts of Europe handmade paper Valentines were exchanged in various parts of Europe in the early to mid-15th century.
By the 1850s, the greeting card had been transformed from a relatively expensive, handcrafted and hand-delivered gift to a popular and affordable personal means of communication. Thanks to new advances in printing and mechanization. This was followed by new trends such as 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 Christmas card that he could send to friends and acquaintances. In the 1860s, companies like Marcus Ward & Co, Goodall, and Charles Bennett began 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 main categories of greeting cards, one is mass produced (printed on offset printing machines, etc.) and the other is handmade greeting cards. Hand-painted greeting cards are also a separate category of greeting cards. These cards are also available, but these types of cards cannot be mass produced as each card must be painted individually. So each hand-painted card is unique.