Greeting cards are a staple of every holiday season. We send and receive them for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, New Years, Mother’s Day and more. There are countless cards in the Ohio History Connection archive collections, for every season and event you can think of. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I wanted to share some of examples of thanksgiving cards in our archive collections.
Thanksgiving cards first started arriving in mailboxes in the 1880s. By the early 1900s cards were a crucial part of the holiday tradition. The most popular format is the picture postcard, a format that remains popular to this day. These typically feature a holiday-themed image, either a photograph or an illustration, on the front and space for a brief written message on the back. While most of the cards in our collection do not feature any messages, their images can still tell us a lot about how the holiday was celebrated in the past. Particularly how the iconography of the holiday evolved over time.
The most common images you’ll see are the expected turkeys and meal scenes. In the examples below you can see a Thanksgiving meal placement as well as a card depicting a traditional menu.
