*First Orthodox Christmas Cards of the beginning of 20th century were mostly depicting scenes of celebration of the feast, fragments of Christmas décor and landscapes with churches or children playing in the snow.
With advances of photo reproduction and printing technologies some of the hand-designed cards partially got replaced with the ones with images mostly from religious paintings and rarely Orthodox icons.
The main reason for not using traditional Orthodox Christian icon images on greeting cards was Westernization of church art and architecture. Although not completely forgotten, traditional Orthodox icons were by far less popular even among the clergy. Another reason was that Orthodox Church was not too happy about using traditional icon images on disposable media but for some reason realistic religious paintings and icons seemed more suitable for paper products from the church officials’ point of view. At the same time tens of thousands of small icons were produced every year using the latest photo mechanical methods such as oleography or collotype.