This week’s Sepia Saturday prompt is inspired by the holiday
season. I recently acquired my great-grandmother’s two scrapbooks of greeting
cards that she saved and glued – and I mean GLUED to death! – onto pages that
have turned brown and brittle since her death in 1939. From the looks of Mary
Theresa Sheehan Killeen Walsh’s pages, my need for order and logic did not come
from her. Apparently she glued as she grabbed a card from wherever she had kept
them, perhaps a bag, box or drawer. Smack dab in the middle of a parade of
Christmas cards is a valentine or Mother’s Day greeting only to pick up again
with Christmas cards soon to be interrupted by St. Patrick’s Day and Get Well.
Two scrapbooks full of HER memories! Here is just a small
sample of beautiful Christmas greetings 1920s-1930s style.
Here is a card sent in 1935 from Mary Theresa's sister Delia Sheehan Christian (the one whose descendants on Facebook know nothing about her ~sigh~).
Merry Christmas y’all! Here’s to Happy Blogging in 2016!
For more holiday greetings, please visit my friends at Sepia Saturday.
© 2015, Wendy Mathias.
All rights reserved.
My favorite is the blue and brown design with multi color candles.
ReplyDeleteWhat treasure you have there, jumbled or no. I have one or two of my parents’ cards from the 40s and 50s but nothing as good as these.
ReplyDeleteI have several vintage cards like yours that my grandmother kept. I love looking at them. My favorite in your collection is the last one, a week of Christmas wishes, because I haven't ever seen one like that. Beautiful collection!
ReplyDeleteHow cute though that she kept them like that, maybe her method wasn't the best, but neat to look back at them :)
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas!
betty
Oh, Wendy, I'm drooling. Vintage Christmas cards are my favorite but the only cards in my collection were bought, they aren't family. I just found a newspaper ad for my great-grandfather's music store that says they also sold fine stationery, including fringed Christmas cards. This was in the 1890s - I need a time machine!!
ReplyDeleteThe cards of today are just so different.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful collection - mixed up or not. My kids & my husband drive me crazy with the way they put pictures in their photo albums in no particular order - whether by season, holiday, or even year! They just slap 'em in there any old way. When I need to remember when something happened, I need only go to one of my photo albums to find out because I keep everything in precise order. I don't know - maybe I'm just too fussy. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful heirloom to have passed down to you. I love vintage cards and they seem so much prettier than many cards published today. Over the years I have compiled six Christmas scrapbooks of cards, poetry, quotations etc and enjoy each year looking back on them.
ReplyDeleteLovely cards, so nice that they have been kept, even in a strange order.
ReplyDeleteDo you find that orderliness seems to skip generations? Maybe because an orderly mother might impose more discipline, in general, to her children who then grow up and embrace disorderliness with a passion. I have a tremendously disorderly niece whose own daughter has become a compulsive neatnik. She's the only one who can find anything in their household. The pendulum swingeth a wide swath. That said, I love the cards!!
ReplyDeleteI just love the old cards. You are so good to pull every little clue about individuals from things and it makes me wonder what future generations will learn about me from the way I do things.
ReplyDeleteVery nice. Are they whole cards with messages inside or just the covers? My mother scrapbooked a few cards, such as those from Christmas we spent in England when I was one. I must confess I usually throw mine out after a year or so. You can't keep everything!
ReplyDeleteWendy, those are delightful! Many happy Christmas wishes to you & yours!
ReplyDeleteI have a similar collection of holiday cards and postcards from my maternal grandmother, fortunately not mounted so that the sender and date can be identified. The best are those from earlier years, say pre-1940, when charm and sentiment were nicely balanced.
ReplyDeleteBest wishes for a joyful holiday!
I've got a box of old cards (my great-grandmother's, mostly), and I just love them all! Yours are really great...the graphics, the sentiments -- all just smack of an earlier time!
ReplyDeleteHow aggravating that Mary Theresa's sister's descendants seem to know nothing of the relationship. Hopefully, those Facebook connections aren't that keen on genealogy--else I'd suspect their research prowess.
ReplyDeleteHope you had a pleasant Christmas. And yes! Here's to Happy Blogging, take 2016!
How lovely for you to have such a precious collection of Christmas greeting cards.
ReplyDeleteThe last card is my favorite :)
ReplyDeleteI have several old cards that were stuffed in drawers when I cleaned out my mom's house....she had less organization than anyone I know...thankfully I did not get that gene!
Happy New Year 2016!!
I do love the old Christmas cards. They seemed so much more Christmasy than the ones most people send these days. A Week of Christmas Wishes is really special.
ReplyDeleteYour cardss remind me of ones my mother glued onto construction paper pages and tied together with yarn. I wish she hadn't glued them but I'm glad to have them.