Each Christmas during his presidency Franklin Roosevelt engaged the United States Government Printing Office to produce a limited edition of his writing for distribution as gifts to friends, associates and family members. In 1944, he selected his D-Day prayer, shown here, which he recited in his radio address in which he informed the American public…

What’s Christmas without Christmas cards? The fanciful greetings here are the work of Oscar Fabres (1894–1960), a Chilean illustrator who studied art in Paris and settled in New York in 1940, where he lived and kept a studio at 715 Madison Avenue. The Oscar Fabres Collection (PR 079), bequeathed to the New-York Historical Society by the artist’s agent,…

Have you mailed your holiday cards yet? The United States Postal Service lists December 20th as the last day to post letters for arrival by Christmas! In the early 20th century, artsy students at the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan printed Christmas festival programs on the school’s own press. Most of the illustrations feature motifs you might…

Snow. Blizzards. We complain, dread the commute and the shoveling and—especially for New York City dwellers—the slush. But, in truth, we love the excitement, especially when the inches pile up and produce record numbers, and photographers—amateur and professional—can roam the streets. This becomes clearer when we look through the collections of the New-York Historical Society….

With Christmas just two days away, it seems a good time to post this little bit of history. In one sense it’s self-explanatory, a poem written out by hand and signed by John Remsen on Christmas Day, 1803. But it’s also a perfect example of a slightly more obscure practice. It is precisely what the Encyclopedia of Ephemera describes…

This post was written by Marybeth Kavanagh, Print Room Reference Librarian. It’s widely accepted that the  first Christmas card was printed in London in 1843, when Sir Henry Cole hired artist John Calcott Horsley to design a holiday card that he could send to his friends. But it was Boston-based printer Louis Prang who introduced…

Holidays evolve — for better or worse. And while there is reason to bemoan the creep of commercialism into every niche of the holiday season, such disappointment is not necessarily as recent as one might think. Charles Dickens’ iconic work, A Christmas Carol: In Prose: Being a ghost story of Christmas arrived in America at a time when contemporaries…

Most people do not associate Santa Claus with war, but in fact the connection goes back to Santa’s very beginnings. Our popular image of Santa was created by cartoonist Thomas Nast during the Civil War. Nast’s first Santa illustrations, published in the January 3, 1863 edition of Harper’s Weekly, featured Santa visiting dejected Union soldiers….