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About National Card Reading Day

Greeting cards first appeared in China and Egypt at least 2,000 years ago as a way to send greetings during the Chinese New Year. By the 15th Century, Europeans began exchanging cards with each other, often on paper, but wood and other materials were used as well. The oldest known greeting card still in existence was a Valentine Card sent during the 1400s.

Fast forward to 1843, three years after the first postage stamp was introduced. Sir Henry Cole saw an opportunity in Victorian England and created the first commercially available Christmas Cards…the same year Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. Christmas Cards and greeting cards didn’t sell on a mass scale until the early 20th Century. They were still very expensive for the average person until in 1910 when Joyce C Hall started his first card business with a shoe box full of cards. By 1912 his bothers joined him. The business grew. By the 1920s most people could afford cards and in 1928 the company began marketing cards under the Hallmark Name. And the rest is history. National Card Reading Day is an unofficial holiday with no sponsor.

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