Some Christmas Cheer, Business History-Style

For those of you celebrating Christmas today, very best wishes from The Exchange. As a small gift, we provide the following history-related sites of interest:

• From The Smithsonian online, a brief history of the Christmas card and a sampling of holiday cards from Smithsonian collections; the New-York Historical Society blog details the influence of Louis Prang on the American Christmas card market.
• And the Postal Museum has an interesting essay about "Holiday Parcels in World War I"; and for collectors, a history of the art of Christmas stamps; 
• Anne L. Murphy writes about Christmas and New Year's bonuses for 18th-century bankers
• This archive provides over 25,000 pages of vintage Christmas catalogs from Sears, Lord & Taylor, Spiegel, Montgomery Ward, and several others.
• The Hagley Vault features a series of Christmas-related materials from its holdings.
• Ellen Caldwell explains "How Charles Dickens Set the American Christmas Dinner Table" for JSTOR Daily. 
• From the St. Louis Federal Reserve blog, "A Quick History of the Christmas Tree Industry" (The original article, published by the Philadelphia Fed, is available here, but may take a very long time to load.)
• The Hartman Center at Duke University blogs about its recent acquisition of the 1939 Montgomery Ward booklet that introduced "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" to the world.
• From the National Electrical Contractors Association, a brief history of electric Christmas lights; and more here: "Old Christmas Tree Lights"
• "Yule and Misrule" highlights interactions between fishermen and merchants in maritime Canada in the late 18th century, from the Borealia blog