HAPPY NEW YEAR! See it in Postcards!

Over the years many images have been used to convey the turning of the calendar year. Calendars, clocks, myths and legends, fables and superstitions have produced a wide variety of imagery. One of my favorites is “Father Time.” My children used to put their shoes outside their rooms on New Year’s Eve in hopes that Father Time would fill them with small treats and coins. (He never failed.) Sometimes the connection between image and holiday are oblique, or lost, or just spring from an inventive imagination.

In the years of the “postcard craze many greetings were sent on a postal card. In the early years they mailed for one cent and the colorful cards were eagerly exchanged and collected. Here are a few to indicate some of the range of iconography, with my good wishes for a healthy, happy, peaceful, and prosperous 2011. (Now where did all that time go?)

And yup, I see that one image reversed on me - well, you get the idea anyway.