On Christmas Day 1995, e-mail inboxes became carriers of a new type of message. On the network, which was promoted with a pioneering spirit by ordinary citizens at the time, the new email notifications sounded in the form of an e-card. Each new day, between 19 and 20 thousand e-cards were sent from the servers of the Mit Media Lab, installed at the North American Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the recipients’ homes. A few months earlier, new technology researcher Judith Donath came up with an idea that revolutionized the future of Merry Christmas and Happy New Years. Judith, born in 1962, introduced an online service called The Electric Postcard in 1994. The operating principle of the service was simple. Subject A accessed a database of digital postcards posted on the site, edited them as he saw fit, and sent them to Subject B. The simplicity of the process won over a growing number of users. First, there are no more than 10–20 people a day, and in 1996 this amounted to more than 1.7 million people.
What Judith presented in the 20th century as a revolution in the tradition of addressing the holidays is recreated nearly 150 years later by the invention of the commercial paper-sized Christmas card. Its introduction to the market changed the way Victorian England, and then other European countries and North America, expressed appreciation and respect in the form of images and text in the 19th century. In 1843, Henry Cole, an English civil servant and inventor under the pseudonym Felix Summerlee (among his creations is the new teapot), realized that the British postal service was offering a welcome business opportunity. The man who commissioned the Great World Exhibition in London in 1851, and the first director of London’s Vitória e Alberto Museum in 1852, saw a business opportunity in the massive distribution of holiday letters sent at Christmas.
Cole was not an illustrator, but his compatriot John Callcott Horsley, born in 1817, was a historical painter from the 17th and 18th centuries, inspired by masters such as the Dutchman Johannes Vermeer. Callcott was also a designer, so Henry Cole’s proposal sparked interest. 1843 was the perfect year for the artist. He won a competition to decorate part of the interior of the Palace of Westminster in the English capital with a sketch that recreates the Sermon of St. Augustine. For the first commercial Christmas card in history, John Callcott chose a more mundane theme. On the eve of the holidays, two lots of postcards were put up for sale, one in color, the other in black and white, with a total circulation of 2,500 copies. The one-sided postcard featured a triptych: a large family greeted the table surrounded by two charitable scenes. Like 20th century email, John Callcott’s postcard has reserved spaces for sender and recipient addresses. The rest is nothing more than a simple message “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you.” Henry Cole was overjoyed when he realized that he had sold all of his postcards to a society that made Christmas a visual fusion of novelty and nostalgia.
In the nineteenth century, ink, crayons, collages, and rudimentary and household printing techniques served as support for letters addressed to Christmas. Items that have joined other ephemeral everyday materials such as newspaper clippings, business cards, brochures, dried flowers, collected and organized according to one of the Victorian pleasures: memory albums. Memorabilia that motivated the contests, prompted by publishers to choose the most beautiful. The proliferation of Christmas cards in the coming years will serve as a source of inspiration and raw material for a growing number of scrapbooks.
In the era of steam, the postcard “mechanizes”
Despite being well received, the commercial Christmas card had to wait another five years, until 1848, to receive a new edition, this time by artist William Mo Egley. A second card that introduced holly into Christmas symbolism at a time when religious themes were rare in Christmas vows. Flowers, fairies, butterflies, insects sitting on forest berries, hinting at spring and summer, and not at the darkness of winter, caused the addiction of postcard buyers, as well as cartoon scenes with cats (the love that the twentieth century catapulted to videos on the Internet) , anthropomorphisms with dogs and children in festive outfits.
For artists of the time, such as landscape designer George Dunlop Leslie, the Christmas card signified a new marketplace for their talents. Poets such as laureate Alfred Tennyson and lesser-known Helen Burnside also contributed to the creation of the postcard. Helen, whose work included writing as a child and poetry to musical plays, wrote nearly 6,000 lines for Christmas cards between 1874 and 1900. During the same period, the poetess fought for social goals, namely to improve the living conditions of deaf girls, who were often ostracized.
In the 1860s, a Victorian Christmas card was no different in format than its predecessors, as were letters with intricate edges that mimic embroidery and small embossed images. The flourishing of printing houses and new methods of color printing such as chromolithography contributed to the development of postcards in the 1870s. Irishman Marcus Ward, as well as Londoners Hildesheimer & Faulkner and Benjamin Sulman. Thirty years after the first Christmas card was printed, the work remained a single sheet, without folds, with abundant illustrations and with space to personalize the message to be addressed. In the next decade, the postcard will become more sophisticated, and there will be no shortage of gold and silver notes in print motifs. At a time when steam power was propelling a new empire of machines, in the 1890s simple mechanical devices appeared on the postcard, powered by springs or strings that powered moving parts.
A collector’s obsession
The proliferation of the Christmas card and the proliferation of printed themes and motifs opened up a new branch of collecting, one of which was the figure of Jonathan King. Born in 1836, Jonathan and his mother owned a small postcard workshop. The work was painstaking, the postcards were cleverly cut out of paper lace. The family business flourished, allowing the craftsman to channel part of his income towards the purchase of significant collections of postcards, including Christmas cards. During his life, until 1911, Jonathan collected about seven tons of postcards. It is estimated that between 1862 and 1895, the collector collected two hundred thousand postcards that died in a house fire.
The less reliable, but extant, collection of Laura Seddon’s postcards, now at Manchester Metropolitan University, includes over 32,000 pieces from the Victorian era, in particular from the period between 1880 and 1890, and the Edwardian era. 1901 and 1910. Postcards hinting at Christmas as well as Easter and Valentine’s Day are the result of a collection that Laura Seddon has been collecting for nearly 30 years. At 76, the British took on the titanic task of cataloging tens of thousands of postcards, starting with a 1964 book, The History of a Christmas Card, by the Hungarian English nationalized printer and teacher, George Budai. In 1992, Laura donated her collection to the aforementioned university institution, where she was honored as an honorary member. Among the cards available today for consultation is the one with which a business relationship was established between Henri Cole and John Callcott in 1843. One of 12 postcards that did not go through a three-century journey. In 2001, one of these hand-painted postcards was auctioned for € 26,000.
Incomprehensible values for those who, back in the 1800s in England, organized the “industry” of philanthropy around a new life for this role. At a time when the term “reuse” was an invention of the future, women who devoted themselves to philanthropy painstakingly cut out images from expired cards. They compiled them into albums that told stories that were handed out to children in hospitals, orphanages, and missions.
whitefish here our liveblog from the war in Ukraine
The founder of the Wagner group and associate of the President of Russia Yevgeny Prigozhin confirmed that the Zambian student who died in Ukraine fought on the side of the mercenaries.
Lemehani Natan Nyirenda, 23, was supposed to serve a sentence of nine years and six months in a prison near Moscow, but was killed on September 22 at the front line. Zambia demanded an explanation from Russia about the case, and Prigozhin, who recruits prisoners in Russia, finally broke his silence. admitting that the young man was recruited by the Wagner group.
“Yes, I remember him well. I spoke with him in the Tver region, ”he said, quoting Moscow Times🇧🇷 The oligarch said that he tried to dissuade him from participating in the military actions of Russia, but the young man voluntarily decided to fight in Ukraine, praising Russia for “helping Africans gain independence.”
I asked him: “Why do you need this war?” In a couple of years you will be ahead of your time, soon you will be able to be at home and see your family.”
The young man did not return home, but, according to Prigogine, he was one of the first who broke into the enemy trenches and “the hero died”.
According to Telegraph, Lemehani Nathan Nyirenda was admitted to the Engineering Physics Institute in Moscow in 2018. Two years later, he was arrested for drug possession after he was stopped by the police while he was working in time to have fun in the delivery service. He is one of the prisoners recruited by the Russian oligarch to reinforce troops on the war front in Ukraine.
Ukraine accuses Prigozhin of sending thousands of militants recruited directly from Russian prisons to the front in exchange for the promise of salaries and amnesty.
“In just one week, the enemy bombed 258 times 30 settlements in our Kherson region,” in the south of the country, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his usual evening message, which was broadcast on television.
“They are not capable of anything, only destruction. This is what they leave behind. What they are doing now against Ukraine is an attempt at revenge. Revenge for the fact that the Ukrainians defended themselves several times against them,” he said.
According to the official news agency Ukrinform, Russia has attacked Kherson 21 times over the past 24 hours, hitting residential buildings and civilian infrastructure with its missiles.
As in previous days, air raid sirens sounded again over Ukraine, but without a massive attack.
Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ignat said flights by Russian strategic bombers had been recorded, but “threats of attack by ground-launched missiles” had also been recorded.
According to the US Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Russian troops are preparing to launch another wave of missile strikes on Ukraine next week.
“But most likely, these preparations are aimed at maintaining the pace of recent attacks, and not increasing them due to the limited Russian missile arsenal,” ISW said.
On Monday, Zelenskiy warned of a possible new massive attack later this week.
The military offensive launched on February 24 by Russia in Ukraine has already caused the flight of more than 13 million people – more than six million internally displaced people and more than 7.8 million – to European countries – according to the latest UN figures. which classifies this refugee crisis as the worst in Europe since World War II (1939-1945).
The Russian invasion, justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the need to “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine for Russia’s security, was condemned by the international community at large, which responded by sending weapons to Ukraine and imposing them on Russia. political and economic sanctions.
The UN has presented as confirmed 6,655 civilian deaths and 10,368 wounded since the start of the war, stressing that these figures are much lower than the real ones.
Erin Gilmour, a 22-year-old student, and Susan Theis, a mother of 45, were stabbed to death at their Toronto homes four months apart after being sexually assaulted.
Nearly four decades later, “scientific advances” have allowed the Toronto police to detain Joseph George Sutherland, Inspector Steve Smith told a news conference.
By linking two murders in 2000 with a suspect’s DNA collected at the scene, authorities used genetic genealogy “to identify the family” and thus “reduce the number of suspects,” Smith said.
This investigative method consists of comparing the suspect’s DNA with the family tree of a distant relative.
“If we hadn’t used this technology, we would never have known his name,” Smith explained, adding that Sutherland was never suspected.
“This is the day our family has been looking forward to for most of our lives,” said Sean McCowan, brother of Erin Gilmore.
“In a way, it’s a relief that someone has been arrested. But it also brings back so many memories of Erin and her brutal and senseless murder,” he added.
Aspiring fashion designer Gilmour was the daughter of David Gilmour, co-founder of Barrick Gold, one of the largest gold mining companies in the world.
She had no ties to the second victim, Susan Tice, a family therapist and mother of four, according to police.
Joseph George Sutherland, now 61, will appear in court in early December on charges of first-degree murder.
It may also be linked to other open cases, authorities said, who are continuing to investigate.
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