Greeting cards - The best form of gift

A Greeting Card is the world most popular gift for any occasion like birthday, festival, wedding, friendship, love, father day etc. Greeting cards are used for express your feeling. A greeting card is an illustrated, folded card featuring an expression of friendship or other sentiment. Although greeting cards are usually given on special occasions, such as birthdays, Christmas or other holidays, they are also sent to convey thanks or express other feeling. Greeting cards, usually packaged with an envelope, come in a variety of styles. There are both mass-produced as well as handmade versions that are distributed by hundreds of companies large and small.

Hallmark Cards and American Greetings are the largest producers of greeting cards in the world. Recycled Paper Greetings was the first to print their product on recycled paper, a practice much more common today. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that one billion pounds are spent on greeting cards every year, with the average person sending 55 cards per year.


Greeting cards Categories
In Gift shops you can find almost all types of cards for each and every occasion like

1. Standard Greeting Cards
A standard greeting card is printed on high-quality paper (such as card stock), and is rectangular and folded, with a picture or decorative motif on the front. Inside is a preprinted message appropriate to the occasion, along with a blank space for the sender to add a signature or handwritten message. A matching envelope is sold with the card. Some cards and envelopes feature fancy materials, such as gold leaf, ribbons or glitter.

2. Photo Greeting Cards
In recent years, photo greeting cards have gained widespread popularity and come in two main types. The first type are photo insert cards in which a hole has been cut in the center. Your photo slides in just like a frame. The second type are printed photo cards in which the photo is combined with artwork and printed, usually on a high-end digital press, directly onto the face of the card. Both types are most popular for sending holiday greetings such as Christmas, Hanukkah & for baby showers.

3. Musical Greeting Cards
Modernly greeting cards have been conceived which play music or sound when they are opened. They commonly have 3D handmade birthday cards which play traditional celebration songs such as Happy Birthday To You.

4. E-Cards
Greeting cards can also be sent electronically. Flash-based cards can be sent by email, and many sites such as Facebook enable you to send greetings. More recently, services have launched which enable you to send greetings to a mobile phone by text message. Many of these electronic services, such as ValenTXT, offer open or anonymous chat, to enable further discussion.


History of Greeting Cards
The custom of sending greeting cards can be traced back to the ancient Chinese, who exchanged messages of good will to celebrate the New Year, and to the early Egyptians, who conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls. By the early 1400s, handmade paper greeting cards were being exchanged in Europe. The Germans are known to have printed New Year's greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and handmade paper Valentines were being exchanged in various parts of Europe in the early to mid-1400s, with the oldest Valentine in existence being in the British Museum.
World Oldest Greeting Card

By the 1850s, the greeting card had been transformed from a relatively expensive, handmade and hand-delivered gift to a popular and affordable means of personal communication, due largely to advances in printing and mechanization.

Technical developments like color lithography in 1930 propelled the manufactured greeting card industry forward. Humorous greeting cards, known as studio cards, became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s.

By the 1980s there was a thriving market for what were now called "alternative" greeting cards, and the name stuck even though these "alternative" cards changed the look of the entire industry.
First Ever Greeting Cards