Greeting Cards
The sending and receiving of greeting cards is an established tradition in the UK, with card sending or card display in the home being an important part of British culture. Sending Valentine's Day cards became hugely popular in Britain in the late 18th century, a practice that has since spread to other nations. Today in the UK just under half the population spend money on their Valentines. Following Sir Rowland Hill's postal reforms in the 1830s, the reduction in postal rates with the invention of the postage stamp (Penny Black) made sending greeting cards an affordable means of personal communication. Invented by Sir Henry Cole in 1843, the Christmas card accounts for almost half of the volume of greeting card sales in the UK, with over 600 million cards sold annually. Other popular occasions for sending greeting cards in the UK are Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Easter and Father’s Day.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the words greeting and/or cards:
“Half-opening her lips to the frost’s morning sigh, how strangely the rose has smiled on a swift-fleeting day of September!
How audacious it is to advance in stately manner before the blue-tit fluttering in the shrubs that have long lost their leaves, like a queen with the spring’s greeting on her lips;
to bloom with steadfast hope that, parted from the cold flower-bed, she may be the last to cling, intoxicated, to a young hostess’s breast.”
—Afanasi Fet (1820–1892)
“The world is a puzzling place today. All these banks sending us credit cards, with our names on them. Well, we didn’t order any credit cards! We don’t spend what we don’t have. So we just cut them in half and throw them out, just as soon as we open them in the mail. Imagine a bank sending credit cards to two ladies over a hundred years old! What are those folks thinking?”
—Sarah Louise Delany (b. 1889)