Painted winter scenes were selling long before printed Christmas cards were common. Currier and Ives, the New York print firm that took that name in 1857, published sentimental scenes such as sleigh rides in the country, with winter scenes supplied by George H. Durrie. Every print was coloured by hand, by a dozen or more women each adding one colour.

The snowy village became its own tradition. Christmas villages grew out of the late 18th century putz of the Moravian Church; after World War II Japanese companies mass-produced little cardboard houses with cellophane windows and mica-dusted roofs that looked like snow, and in the 1970s ceramic villages arrived.

Watercolor Christmas cards paint that same village by hand: a row of houses with glowing windows, pines and soft hills in loose wet-on-wet colour, left to fade into white paper around the greeting.

Currier and Ives colourists were paid $6 for every 100 hand-coloured prints, and the favoured colours were clear and simple. Source ↗

Christmas village buildings are not made to a consistent scale: a church only needs to be noticeably taller than the houses. Source ↗

Christmas villages are rooted in the Moravian putz, a nativity landscape that could grow to fill an entire room. Source ↗

The late Georgian and Victorian periods are seen as the zenith of British watercolor, with painters such as J. M. W. Turner and Myles Birket Foster. Source ↗