Ace Collins

But he knew that the church would frown upon him giving candy to children to keep them quiet.

So what he did was he had the sticks shaped into a staff by the candy maker and took them back and explained to the people that this candy in its shaft form represented the good shepherd.

and told them the story of the Good Shepherd, and that once their choir had finished performing, they could lick these candy sticks, and that kept them quiet throughout the entire service.

Well, it caught on in the United States in the 1880s and 90s when it became cheap to mail letters, but it was actually introduced about the time that

Christmas turned into a family celebration in England.

And there's a man who was just way too busy to answer his mail during the Christmas season.

And old Henry knew that if he didn't answer that mail, Henry Cole did, that he was in trouble because it was a bad slight not to answer mail in Victorian England.

I guess it's kind of like not responding to a text today.

People start wondering, well, are they mad at me?

You know, what did I do?

Well, he couldn't respond to all the letters he'd gotten, so he went to an artist and had them paint a Christmas scene of a group of people around a table with a goose on the table and all the things that you think of as Dickens.

And then he took that, put it on cardstock, folded it, and had printed in on the inside another picture and also greetings for the holidays.

And he sent that to all of his friends who he didn't have time to answer their mail personally that Christmas season.

Within the next year, eight or 10 of those friends went to the same printer and had those same cards made again for them.

And suddenly Christmas cards became a way that the wealthy for the next 40, 50 years corresponded with each other during the Christmas season.

With the advent of cheap color printing in the 1880s and 1890s, you ultimately had people of all sorts sending Christmas cards during the holidays.

And it really took off about 1900.

Yeah, I think in the last, if you look at the songs that were introduced in the last 30 years, Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You will probably stick around.

Mark Lowry, when he wrote Mary, Did You Know?

It was such a unique viewpoint song, you know, brilliant concept will stick around.