Currier & Ives Merry Christmas Cards

This is where the picture of Christmas in everyone's head came from, and now it's a card you can send.

Currier & Ives printed this in 1876, a lithograph out of a shop that called itself a publisher of cheap and popular pictures and meant it. Before color photography, before illustrated magazines, their prints were how most Americans saw a picture of anything. When they printed Christmas, the snow, the evergreen, the warm window seen from outside in the cold, they weren't capturing a tradition. They were handing one to a country, and it held.

Most nostalgia for Christmas is a copy of a copy of something. This design is the something.

We cleaned up the original lithograph and brought the color back. The result lands differently than anything made last year, it feels settled. Like it was always going to look exactly this way.

You get 24 folded cards, each 4 x 5.5 inches, all carrying the same image, the one that started it all.

Whoever opens it will recognize it before they can say why.