#19: the art of vintage Halloween cards

They just don't make 'em like they used to.

Oct 22, 2023

Do y’all know how ancient Halloween is? I’d always known about the ~concept~ of Samhain as the springboard for modern Halloween, but til very recently, the extent of my knowledge on it sounded a little like this: something something pagan something Celtic something druids.

I mean, technically I wasn’t wrong. But this week I let myself do a cursory read on it and discovered that the similarities between the 2000-year-old holiday, its medieval facelift, and the present day are actually pretty striking. Back when Halloween was Samhain, folks believed that on this day, the threshold between ours and the spirit world was thin enough to pass through. A dangerous prospect. So, to confuse the fairies and protect themselves from getting kidnapped, folks would dress up as animals and monsters.

Over the years, the holiday evolved, and by the Middle Ages, people started going door to door in the OG form of trick-or-treating: regular folks like me and (probably) you would go a-knocking on the doors of the wealthy and offer to pray for dead relatives’ souls in exchange for pastries. Ghosties and pastries? It was destined to be my favorite holiday even then.

But although some form of Halloween has been around for 2000 years, somehow the first legit recorded reference to a Halloween card recognizing the holiday didn’t appear until 1891. In volume 4 of Ingall's Home and Art Magazine, there’s a whole spread on how to do the holiday right - including a set of basic instructions on making a festive card. As I read them, my heart did a little tap dance celebrating the whirlpool of time we inhabit. Times may change, the internet may consume us, and rockets shoot off into space, but at our core, humans stay more or less the same.

The magazine’s sweet instructions reminded me so much of the templates I email y’all here, 130 years later:

Here’s the transcription:

[We think readers will appreciate this…unique design,] highly appropriate for the occasion, so suggestive is it of the quaint observances of Halloween. It is a late innovation for a Halloween invitation and programme combined. In the absence of dancing, it may be used as a menu card, and, in either case, it forms a quaint and pretty souvenir.

Lida Clarkson’s varied instructions in art will suggest the thought at once, to clever people, that these may be easily fashioned at home. Water color paper makes very pretty cards. Fold in sheets of the desired size, and upon the outside of the first leaf paint, as true to nature as you please, the design given, after which trim off all the card outside the design, and cut the second leaf to correspond. The dance programme is placed within, the invitation upon a last page. These, if printed, will ad a perfect finish, but may be written in a neat, regular hand. If used for the menu, it is placed inside.

But as familiar as the instructions feel, things have changed since 1891. Because the oh, so classic Halloween image this magazine suggests you draw for your Halloween cards and invitations?

A cabbage.

A fucking cabbage (see below).

Ah, yes, because “a cabbage-head…highly appropriate for the occasion, so suggestive is it of…Halloween.”

Cabbage fixation aside, the magazine’s spread on Halloween is a riot. At turns familiar and wildly foreign, the party-planning suggestions read a bit like an alien describing the holiday without ever having seen it in action. Some gems include cake-making rituals done in complete silence; clairvoyant games to guess the temperament of your future spouse using only vinegar, milk, and a blindfold; and homemade fairy boats of candles and walnut shells to catch a glimpse of your future1.

…I think I’ve been doing Halloween parties wrong.

The Halloween Card game grew

In the years that followed after that first reference, Halloween cards became nearly as popular as Christmas cards and it became a straight up “craze” in the first decade of the 20th century.

The Halloween postcard was a staple of US culture through the 1930s - until the phone came along and ruined the fun of sending postcards to each other willy nilly.

Thankfully, old copies of these gems still exist, and I’ve rounded up a few of my faves for y’all: