Explainer

Christmas culture

7 December 2023

6 min read

Beyond Christmas cards: a guide to the season’s art, past and present

When great art comes tumbling through your letterbox. Explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A stained-glass style illustration of an Inuit mother cradling an infant with a halo-like background.

Northern lullaby, Nori Peter, Canada.

via BAME Anglican.

The first commercial Christmas card was sent in 1843, 180 years ago, but is this relatively recent tradition of sending Christmas greetings by post slowing dying a death? The result of the combined impact of environmental concerns, online options and the increased cost of postage? What images have characterised Christmas cards over that period and how will you choose the perfect Christmas image to send, whether digitally or in the mail?

The UK’s Royal Mail estimates that it still delivers 150 million cards during the Christmas period while other sources claim that one billion Christmas cards are sold in the UK annually. As a result, the traditional Christmas card is still going strong.

The tradition was established when Sir Henry Cole, the founding director of the V&A, sent the first commercial Christmas card as a way of responding to the flood of Christmas and New Year letters that he and others had begun to receive following the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post. Cole, who had been involved in the introduction of the Penny Post, commissioned the artist John Callcott Horsley to design a card and advertised it in the Athenaeum paper as “A Christmas Congratulation Card: or picture emblematical of Old English Festivity to Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends”. Horsley’s design is a triptych with a central family party scene, in which three generations drink wine to celebrate the season, offset by two acts of charity – “feeding the hungry” and “clothing the naked” – which derive from Jesus’ Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

In this period card companies would commission designs from significant artists or hold competitions to produce new designs, while Christmas card designs themselves were reviewed in the national press.

Early Christmas cards featured flowers and religious symbols including angels watching over sleeping children. However, George Buday, in his book ‘The History of the Christmas Card’ (1954), suggests that, “the Christmas card from its beginning was more closely associated in the minds of the senders with the social aspect – the festivities connected with Christmas than with the religious function of the season”.

By the 1880s, a prominent card-maker, Prang and Mayer, was producing over five million cards a year and this expansion saw the now familiar iconography of Christmas established: “winter scenes of robins, holly, evergreens, country churches and snowy landscapes; along with indoor scenes of seasonal rituals and gift giving, from decorating trees and Christmas dinner, to Santa Claus, children’s games, pantomime characters and Christmas crackers”. In this period card companies would commission designs from significant artists or hold competitions to produce new designs, while Christmas card designs themselves were reviewed in the national press.

Card companies, of course, also recognised the value of utilising great art from the Western tradition, particularly the art of the Renaissance. As art critic Jonathan Jones has noted:

“Great art comes tumbling through your letterbox at this time of year. Here are the kings from the east laden with gifts, gathering at a stable where an ox and an ass look lovingly at a baby child. Mary sits demurely. Shepherds hearken to an angel. You pop it on the mantelpiece with all the other cards.”

Although the earliest nativity we know of dates back to the third century - being a stucco preserved in the catacombs of Priscilla, in Rome - when we think “Nativity,” we are probably, as Victoria Emily Jones has noted, thinking of church art from the Renaissance “because the Church held particular sway at that time, in that place”. The National Gallery’s exhibition 'Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed', by highlighting an overlooked Renaissance artist, demonstrates the extent to Renaissance art centred on the life of Christ, with a prominent place for nativity scenes. Their choice of December for the opening of this exhibition shows the extent to which we associate such art with the Christmas season. The exhibition includes beautiful renditions of a ‘Virgin and Child’, ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ and ‘King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land’.

“Historical accuracy is not the point; the point is to see Jesus as the Savior of your own people, as incarnated very close to you, and relevant to life today”.
Victoria Emily Jones

Victoria Emily Jones also notes that, to illustrate the truth that “Jesus Christ was born for all people of all times”, Christians around the world, including during the Renaissance, often depicted him “as coming into their own culture, in the present time”. This realisation also provides one way to search for images of the nativity more relevant to our own cultures and time. Jones has made this a particular feature of her independent research on Christianity and the arts.

Noting that “the center of Christianity has shifted”, being “no longer in the West”, she suggests that, if we survey the Christian art being produced today, we will see that “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and the settings they inhabit, have a much different look”. Mary may be “dressed in a sari or a hanbok”, Jesus “wrapped in buffalo skin, or silk” and, instead of oxen and asses, we may “see lizards and kangaroos”. As she writes, “Historical accuracy is not the point; the point is to see Jesus as the Savior of your own people, as incarnated very close to you, and relevant to life today”. Accordingly, she has provided online two series of contextualised images of the Nativity painted within the last century with each work bringing “Jesus into a different place, in order to emphasize the universality of his birth”.

Additionally, she also made use of a meditation I had written, which has as its refrain the plea “Come, Lord Jesus, come”, to create an Advent series of images and reflections exploring “what it meant for Jesus to be born of woman—coming as seed and fetus and birthed son”. Again, in her selection of images, she took “special care to select images by artists from around the world, not just the West, and ones that go beyond the familiar fare”. As a result, in ‘Come, Lord Jesus, Come’, there are images of “the Holy Spirit depositing the divine seed into Mary’s womb; Mary with a baby bump, and then with midwives; an outback birth with kangaroos, emus, and lizards in attendance; Jesus as a Filipino slum dweller; and Quaker history married to Isaiah’s vision of the Peaceable Kingdom”.

Her hope is that “these images fill you with wonder and holy desire—to know Christ more and to live into the kingdom he inaugurated two thousand-plus years ago from a Bethlehem manger”. She quotes S. D. Gordon’s “succinct summary of the Incarnation” - Jesus coming into this world as both God and human being - “Jesus was God spelling Himself out in language humanity could understand” in order to suggest that these images “celebrate the transcendent God made immanent, accessible” and “celebrate his new name: Emmanuel, God-with-us”.

Whether you are looking to continue the tradition of sending Christmas cards through the post or will be sending digital greetings to family and friends, looking for, creating or commissioning nativity images that depict Jesus coming in your culture and your time continues to offer a significant way of showing the wonder of the incarnation to others. And, if you do so, while being entirely contemporary, you will also be firmly rooted in art history and church tradition.

Explore more nativity art

Victoria Emily Jones has curated two collections of nativity art.: 2011 collection, and 2015 collection.

She has also compiled an Advent Slideshow and Devotional for Art & Theology.

Visit BAME Anglicans' Paintings of the Nativity From Around the World.

View a selection of nativity scenes curated by BAME Anglicans.

A nativity seen against a red background

Nativity by Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe, (1913- 1996). Via BAME Anglican.

Contemporary painting tajes in elements of 16th-century Persian art.

Nativity scene in the style of Eithiopian icon.

Contemporary Ethiopian nativity icon.

A Korean style historic illustration of the nativity.

Kim Hueng Jong (Korean, 1928-), Christmas Scene.

Article

Attention

Culture

14 February 2025

5 min read

Dispatches from the battlefield of imagination

The Age of Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A collage image shows a person holding their head, with a wash of warm colours over the scene.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Twenty years ago today, I crossed the threshold of the Christian faith. It was a baptism of fire in a more literal and mystical sense than I care to describe (or indeed would be able to). And unlike many, I really can point to a day and a time and a place.

That night, perhaps unlike CS Lewis, I was not quite “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” But I was certainly the most bewildered. ‘What have I let myself in for?’ I wondered as I walked away from that church on a dark, wet January night. I was certain that in crossing that threshold I had entered a new world. Even if it was true, as I believed – or as I now knew - I sensed that it was dangerous too. There was a wildness to what I had just witnessed that was both thrilling and disconcerting. And yet, after that encounter, I could no more have turned away from what I had discovered than stop the world turning. As the mathematician Blaise Pascal discovered in his own ‘night of fire’ – “certitude, certitude!” is a very precious gift, and one worth holding on to.

Twenty years later, the landscape of faith in this country looks very different to the one in which I stumbled my way over the line. (Or through the back of the wardrobe might be a better metaphor.)

Back then, in 2005, the War on Terror was raging. If religion was discussed at all, it was generally reckoned a pretty rotten sort of institution. A regrettable historical hangover, an inheritance bequeathed to us by our more credulous ancestors of which we were doing well to divest ourselves, albeit too slowly for some. In this brave, new secular world, it was an increasingly commonplace view that religion ruined everything; beside which, it wasn’t true anyway.

These were the days when a certain form of atheism was ebullient and on the march. The Four Horsemen of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris held the cultural conch for a time, and they weren’t letting go. The God Delusion came out in October 2006, quickly followed by God Is Not Great in early 2007. Religion (not sin) was the root of all evil. Reason^TMwas the exclusive intellectual property of the unreligious mind, untainted as it was by visions of that laughably silly Sky-Fairy in the heavens. The battlefield of apologetics was a much-contested landscape at the time. Truth was the prize - which both sides could at least agree upon - and many a debating hall was filled to bursting to watch each side’s sharpest minds slug it out.

God only knows how in such an intellectual atmosphere, I survived the shelling and carried through to the other side. But it’s telling that I had as my guide through the intellectual carnage, not voices of that age, but rather voices from further back in time. My old friend, CS Lewis, but also GK Chesterton, St Augustine, Dostoyevksy, and the potent words of the gospels to which they led me. Like wily old corporals, they saw me safe across No Man’s Land.

Even if I made it through, there’s no doubt it was the secularists who gained the cultural ground back then. That their intellectual case was unsound, it didn’t matter. Their propaganda was better – it was what people wanted to hear – and so Christianity was shoved out of the public square.

And now, two decades on, the war has moved into a very different theatre of operations. The Age of the Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination as, unwittingly, the dry vacuum of secularism has sucked in contending spirits of another kind.

These days proponents and adversaries of the Christian faith jostle not in the dusty debating halls of our great universities, but on the battlefield of cultural consumption. Its topography formed of the movies we watch, the streaming channels we look at, the podcasts, music and media we endlessly gulp down.

Truth itself is no longer the prize, since the logical outworking of atheism’s ascendancy was to get what perhaps its proponents never bargained for: a post-truth age. What matters now is not so much what you believe, as what you attend to. The words and images which you consume. (Or which consume you.)

Walk the streets of any city and witness every passer-by glued to the screen nestled in their hand. Earphones clamped over their head. Distraction, saturation, enchantment: a cacophony of sound, a barrage of images overrunning the imagination to the point of madness. Until we have forgotten what it is like to sit patiently in silence with a still and empty mind. What it’s like to observe the world around us, to be available for the people around us.

But with what do we fill our imaginations now – that is the question? There lies the battle.

And so we find ourselves now moving through a world in which our capacity to create and consume is loaded with inestimably high stakes. It harkens back to Dostoyevsky’s famous line in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

He’s right. Although the heart, the mind, the imagination cannot in any true sense be de-coupled from one another. (Is ‘soul’ a more encompassing word?)

And yet, of the two, the truly subversive combatant is God and not the devil. (Consider the Cross: the most subversive act in all reality.) It is God who is the invader here after all. He is the one taking back ground. His weapons are Truth, Beauty and Goodness. On the face of it, these are mild, even benign, abstractions. And yet in each is wrapped a potency as explosive as dynamite. Because with them, the spells that hold our imaginations captive can be broken. In an unguarded moment, He can slip through the enemy lines.

Witness the ear of culture’s recent harkening to the ancient truths and wisdom of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Nick Cave sings of a “Wild God” and to everyone’s surprise, people are starting to listen again. But he’s not the only one.

The inescapable wildness of God is that He cannot be contained; if His will is to break through, then He cannot be held back. As Mr. Beaver said of the lion Aslan, in answer to the fear: “Is he safe?”

“Who said anything about safe? ’Course, he isn’t safe. But he is good.”

As little image-bearers of this Creator, indeed as little creators in our turn, our creativity teeters on a knife-edge – it always has. An edge sharp enough to cleave heaven from hell. We’d do well to remember that. And that, being image-bearers of this wild God, no wonder we have a wildness of our own.

Yep. Twenty years has already been one heck of an adventure. But I suspect it has only just begun.

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