Every year, Americans purchase approximately six and a half billion greeting cards with a large percentage of these cards being purchased for children. (Greeting Card Association, 2014) Towards the end of the 1970s, Strawberry Shortcake commenced a new era of greeting cards for children; one in which the sentiment offered by the sender must compete with the sentiment offered by a popular culture icon. In the last decade, children’s greeting cards, an often-overlooked body of texts in the landscape of children’s popular culture, have been transformed by the integration of technology (e.g. musical cards), the accompaniment of gifts (temporary tattoos), and the visibility of popular culture icons. Through artifactual (Brown, 1998; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Reid-Walsh, 2013) and textual analyses (Hade, 2001; West, 1994), this paper explores the evolution of children’s greetings cards over the last forty years. The research questions addressed include: (a) What assumptions about children and childhood are conveyed through the evolution of children’s greeting cards over the last four decades? (b) In what ways are children’s greeting cards artifacts of personal sentiment and in what ways are they artifacts of consumer culture? (c) What role does children’s agency play in the reception of these cultural texts?
About the presenterSarah Fischer
I am a doctoral candidate at Penn State University in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction where I teach undergraduate courses in Children’s literature, reading methods, language arts methods and fantasy literature.