by The Story of Christmas Cards, and Did President Bush Really Send Thousands Every Year?
Dear Santa,
My name is Oliver and I am ten years old. I live in Springfield, Illinois, which is where Abraham Lincoln lived before he was president, which my whole class has heard about approximately four hundred times because our teacher will not let it go, which I respect because it is genuinely cool but also we get it now.
My grandma sends about sixty Christmas cards every year and complains the whole time about her hand hurting, and she told me that President George Bush used to send twenty thousand Christmas cards every single year, which I did not believe, so I am asking you directly because you would know.
I have three questions.
Where did Christmas cards even come from?
Did a president really send that many cards, and if so, which president and how many exactly?
Why do people still send paper cards when texting is so much faster?
Thank you.
Oliver James Whitfield
Springfield, Illinois
Dear Oliver,
Springfield, Illinois has every right to keep mentioning Lincoln. He is one of the finest men your country ever produced and I had the genuine honour of delivering to that city while he was alive in it, which is not something I say about every American president and every American hometown. Your teacher is correct to keep bringing it up. You are also correct that you get it now. Both things can be true.
Now. Christmas cards. Your grandmother’s aching hand. And a very specific question about a very specific president that I am delighted you asked directly, because the real answer is more interesting than the number you heard.
Where Christmas cards came from.
The first commercial Christmas card was created in London, England in 1843 by a man named Henry Cole, who was, by every account, extremely busy and somewhat behind on his correspondence. Cole had a large number of friends and associates he was expected to write personal holiday letters to, and simply did not have the time to write them all individually. So he commissioned an artist named John Callcott Horsley to design a single card — showing a family raising a toast, with scenes of charity to the poor on either side — had about a thousand copies printed, and sent them to everyone on his list instead of writing individual letters. He had, without quite intending to, invented an entire industry.
The idea spread slowly at first, limited by the cost of printing and postage, but accelerated enormously with the development of cheaper colour printing in the 1860s and 1870s and the introduction of the inexpensive postage stamp. By the late nineteenth century, sending Christmas cards had become a genuine mass tradition across Britain and the United States, and it has not stopped since. Your grandmother, sitting with her sore hand and her stack of sixty cards, is participating in a tradition that is now well over 180 years old and that began, fittingly enough, because one man in London simply ran out of time to write everyone individually and found a clever workaround. I respect Henry Cole enormously. He understood something true about Christmas: the gesture matters more than the method.
Did a president really send that many cards?
Your grandmother had the right family but, I suspect, slightly the wrong number and the wrong scale of the story — and the actual truth is more remarkable than twenty thousand.
George H.W. Bush — the 41st president, father of the 43rd president — built one of the most extraordinary personal Christmas card operations in American political history, but he did it before he was even president, while serving as vice president in the 1980s. His list reached approximately thirty thousand recipients at its peak, and the operation required a team of volunteers working nearly year-round. According to records from the Bush vice presidential office, when the calendar turned from April to May each year, volunteers would begin addressing envelopes, and the work continued through the summer and fall until December arrived and the office transformed into what one volunteer called “a miniature Hallmark factory.” Thirty thousand handwritten or hand-addressed cards is not a task. It is a logistics operation, sustained across seven months, by people who believed that a personal greeting was worth that much effort.
When George H.W. Bush became president, the official White House Christmas card operation grew even larger and more institutional, handled by White House and party staff rather than personal volunteers, and the scale increased dramatically across his successors. By the time his son, George W. Bush, was president from 2001 to 2009, the official White House holiday card mailing reached numbers your grandmother would find genuinely difficult to picture: approximately 875,000 cards in 2001, an all-time presidential record of one million cards in 2002, and by some researchers’ estimates, as many as 1.5 to 2 million cards by 2004 once Republican Party printing and distribution operations were factored in.
So the story your grandmother told you was true in spirit and modest in number. It was not twenty thousand. Depending on which Bush and which year, it was somewhere between thirty thousand, sent personally by George H.W. Bush as vice president with a team of volunteer envelope-addressers, and roughly two million, sent by the full institutional machinery of his son’s White House at its peak. Tell your grandmother the real number is bigger than she thought, and tell her that her sixty cards, written and sealed by her own sore hand, mean more than any of them. A card written by one tired grandmother who chose to write it anyway is worth more than a card printed by a machine, however many millions of the machine version exist. I have read both kinds for centuries. I know the difference.
Why do people still send paper cards when texting is so much faster?
This is your third question and it is, in its own quiet way, the most important one.
Texting is faster. Texting is also, almost by design, disposable. A text arrives, is read in roughly one and a half seconds, and is buried within minutes beneath the next forty messages that arrive after it. This is not a criticism of texting — it is extraordinarily useful for exactly what it is built for, which is fast, frequent, low-effort communication. But a Christmas card is built for something else entirely. It requires someone to choose it, write in it by hand, address an envelope, find a stamp, and walk it to a mailbox. Every one of those steps takes more effort than a text, and every one of those steps is the point. The effort is the message. The effort says: you were worth slowing down for.
Cards also do something texts structurally cannot. They sit on a mantelpiece. They get taped to a refrigerator or pinned to a corkboard, visible for weeks, a small physical reminder that someone thought of you, displayed in your home rather than buried in a phone. People keep Christmas cards in shoeboxes for decades. Nobody keeps a shoebox of old text messages. The physical object outlasts the moment it was sent in, which is precisely what a text message, by its nature, cannot do.
I will tell you something from direct experience, Oliver. The North Pole receives both — millions of letters through the post and a rapidly growing number of digital messages through santaclaus.top and similar channels. I read every single one, regardless of format, and the sincerity is not determined by the medium. A heartfelt email matters as much as a heartfelt letter. But there is something about your grandmother’s sixty cards, written by hand, sealed and stamped and sent into the cold December post, that asks something of her that a text never would. She gives that time because the people receiving the cards are worth the ache in her hand. That is not an old-fashioned habit, Oliver. That is love, taking the slower road on purpose.
Merry Christmas, Oliver. Tell your teacher Lincoln earned the four hundred mentions. Tell your grandmother the real Bush number, both of them, and tell her science has not yet built anything that beats a card chosen and written by hand. And maybe — if you have a spare ten minutes this December — write one yourself, to someone who is not expecting it. You will understand the whole answer better once you have tried it.
Your friend,
Santa Claus
The North Pole
P.S. The North Pole’s own card operation, run by Mrs. Claus and a rotating team of elves, currently sends a number of personal replies I am not permitted to disclose for operational reasons, but I will say this much: it is closer to George H.W. Bush’s thirty thousand than to his son’s two million, and every single one is read before it is sent, which is a standard the elves consider non-negotiable.
