PD Photos: 1 - Vintage papier-mâché Halloween candy container of circa 1920-1950. 2 - A vintage Halloween greeting card that depicts a witch riding a broom flying through the night sky with the moon and stars, and the message on the card is ‘A Happy Halloween’.
PD Image: An early 20th century Halloween greeting card reproduced in Bill Ellis, Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (University of Kentucky, 2004).
The greeting card (1904) depicts a ritual of divination found in folklore from the United States of America and the British Isles. The young girl in the card hopes to catch a glimpse of her future husband by looking into a mirror on a darkened room at Halloween. The legend on the card reads:
On Hallowee'n look in the glass,
Your future husband's face will pass.
The above image shows a Valentine card produced by Esther Howland in 1850 AD that has the message, "Weddings now are all the go, will you marry me or no". This is a public domain image and you are free to use the above classic beauty of a card by downloading or saving the image to your hard disk.
As Leigh Eric Schmidt, a writer in Graham's American Monthly, observed in 1849 that Saint Valentine's Day had become a national holiday in the United States. The first mass-produced Valentines of embossed paper lace were produced and sold in the United States, shortly after 1847 by Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts. Esther Howland took her inspiration for producing the cards from an English Valentine card she had received. The practice of sending Valentine's cards had existed in England before it became popular in North America. Since 2001, the U.S. Greeting Card Association has been giving an annual "Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary."
