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.

Essay

Christmas culture

Creed

13 December 2023

6 min read

The deep changes Christmas drives

From Longfellow’s deep peals of the bells, to Dickens’ Scrooge, to the miracle of No Man’s Land becoming common ground, conversions begins with Christmas.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A abstract image of red people-like shapes against a red background

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

It was 1914, Christmas on the Western Front. Here, from trenches scarring the Belgian countryside, echoed not the sound of war, but carols—the song of soldiers, bold, vibrant, and clear.

Not every sector heard the sound. But Ernie Williams, of the 6th Battalion Cheshire Regiment, did. Across his sector, he heard a chorus of German carols converge with English. Even more miraculous: both sides emerged into No Man’s Land, shaking hands, taking pictures, exchanging gifts—enemies who, just hours earlier, were trading hot lead, now kicking a football back and forth.

The miraculous ceasefire was, at the time, both a media spectacle and a propaganda nightmare. The Daily Mirror published private letters from the front with details for a captivated public. The military high commands from both Christian nations worked to censor the story. The images of enemies together contradicted propaganda carefully crafted to demonise one other.

The men prosecuting the war from desks believed this epidemic of goodwill could extinguish fighting spirit. But they could never deny that at the front, one sector of No Man’s Land had been converted into common ground. Enemies met as converted men, if only for a moment—converted to a wider way of seeing and being, alive with possibilities for peace.

For a moment, enemies became what they really were, brothers—in defiance of their own Christian nations. This is, for us, a clear line of sight into the marked difference between the Spirit of Christ and the semblance that is Christendom. A Christmas conversion if there ever was one.

Scrooge has always pointed modern people towards Christmas conversion and its deeper economy, away from the business of bottom line towards brotherhood.

But this conversion on No Man’s Land makes the “Believe!” sign hung atop Macy’s Department Store in New York City seem shallow. The M&S Christmas advert, trite. Yet these are the conversions we know, the ones we experience year and year, season after season, without much consent or choice. It’s a manufactured conversion, not towards the brotherhood of humanity, but to the bottom line. Our coffee cups, converted from drab white to ruby red. Commercial jingles add sleigh bells. In all kinds of ways, daily life converts us towards a season of consumption called Christmas.

But who denies this? I’m stating the obvious: capitalism, materialism, consumerism. Every -ism a shoddy container of Christmas Spirit. We know this truth. We make it the moral of our stories. We’re moderns after all.

Grateful as ever to the Dickens, our benefactor of Christmas. Scrooge has always pointed modern people towards Christmas conversion and its deeper economy, away from the business of bottom line towards brotherhood. This deeper economy of concrete choice and the reality of conversion came straight from the mouth of Marley’s ghost, framed by an epiphany of regret:

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

The gap between knowledge and wisdom, theory and experience, is widest at this point. We thrill ourselves to watch Scrooge find that “everything could yield him pleasure”—like the Christmas morning churches with bells “ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!” But is this our conversion?

If we’re honest, perhaps the bells of churches don’t always resound in our ears with hope, glad tidings, and peace. Our eyes and ears are on Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Myanmar, on a world teetering, careening, towards another Christmas of contradiction—songs of peace on earth in a world at war with itself. In this chaos, church bells—if they’re heard at all— can be heard as a mockery of suffering, a maligning of the oppressed, a fanciful hope in a violent world.

It’s what Longfellow heard, an American contemporary of Dickens, during the American Civil War. Longfellow wrote the poem that would become a classic carol, 'I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day' in 1863, at the fever pitch of the war. At the time, a war that was only magnifying personal tragedy and crisis. He was both grieving the death of his wife while trapped in an excruciating period of waiting, to learn whether his wounded son, an officer in the Union, would live or die.

As he wrote, Longfellow found in himself the reality that disillusionment had given way to despair,

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

We talk of Scrooge being damned at Christmas, less so of disillusionment and despair. But even so, despair rises like a tide in us. A cynicism confused with honesty, drawn out by the gravity of seemingly unrestrained cycles of violence, chaos, and evil.

Whether we be damned or despairing, we need conversion. And it’s here where we meet that truly decisive question: converted to what exactly? What draws us up out of damnation or despair? What sort of conversion turns No Man’s Land into common ground, enemies into a carolling chorus of converted men?

We see a glimmer as Longfellow goes on,

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

From the deep peals of the bells, to the new man Scrooge, to the miracle of No Man’s Land becoming common ground, these are a fragmentary glimpse into the conversion that begins with Christmas but also outlasts it. It is the mystery and meaning and majesty at the heart of everything, incarnation: God With Us.

God’s solidarity with the weak is revealed in his becoming weak. His identifying with us as the demonstration of his love for us. His rejection by us never canceling out his love and its endless desire for reconciliation with us. These endless dimensions of incarnation, of an intrusion that startles the status quo, elicits nothing short of conversion.

Conversion is the only way to see and savour Christmas. A change marked by an expansive opening of wider vistas, a new way of seeing and living, the ushering in of new possibilities, of shattering the fatalities and necessities that claim to define and determine our lives, that keep us from changing since “that’s just the way things are.”

All this from a Jewish baby—not a precept, proposition, or program, but a person—born under the rule of Herod and Augustus, a person in whom our hopes and fears in our waitings and longings collides. He forever tells the truth that it is not the high command of Christian nations or the glitz of luxury that builds common ground, but the weakness of God, a God in a cradle in the world that is no man’s land. This person is the mystery and meaning and majesty that creates the common ground where enemies are made brothers, the person in whom God and man commune with peace on earth, good will to men.