Easter Greetings: The Sacred, the Secular, and the Natural

Many other postcards have been posted on this website since my sisters and I have been sorting through the house Aunt Ruthie shared with my Grandma Fannie. You can visit them here and here.

This season I share the joy of Easter via vintage postcards from the archives of Fannie Martin Longenecker, my grandmother.


 

My Great-grandmother Mrs. Samuel B. Martin received a combination get-well and Easter card from her niece Myra Laverty, my Grandma Longenecker’s cousin. April 7, 1908

 


 

 

Cousin Myra Laverty sent an Easter greeting announcing pleasure in her new home and perhaps suggesting she’d like her cousin Fannie Martin (Longenecker) to write more often.    Notice the postcard is made in Germany.


 

How Grandma Longenecker looked when these postcards were exchanged.

Fannie Martin went to considerable expense to have Wolfe Studio in Harrisburg, PA adapt the formal photograph as a postcard.

 

Mennonites joined the church after they married They often did not become plain until after their first child was born. Thus, in this photo Fannie was fancy.

Her dress and manner suggest an age when courtesy counted, kindness was a virtue and rudeness was not rewarded. The documentation below proves that the culture of her day expected public civility.

 

Courtesy Never Goes Out of Style

The April 2017 issue of the “O” Magazine published vignettes from vintage etiquette manuals proving that courtesy was de rigueur:

The art of conversation consists as much in listening politely as in talking agreeably; therefore never interrupt anyone who may be speaking to you, and at the same time do not let our eyes wander to other objects, but keep them on the speaker.   – Manners of Modern Society by Eliza Cheadle, 1875

 

Never boast of your birth, your money, your grand friends, or anything that is yours. If you have traveled, do not introduce that information into your conversation at every opportunity.   – Routledge’s Manual of Etiquette, 1875

 

The letter we all love to receive is one that carries so much of the writer’s personality that she seems to be sitting beside us, looking at us directly and talking just as she really would, could she have come on a magic carpet, instead of sending her proxy in ink-made characters on mere paper.   – Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home by Emily Post, 1922

 

The Civility Project

In 2009, tired of vicious attacks he observed among politicians and in the media, Republican Mark DeMoss launched an initiative he named The Civility Project with a pledge to be “respectful of others whether or not I agree with them.” Senator Joseph Lieberman and few others joined him, but unfortunately, the movement didn’t gain much traction.

 

Bonus

My friend, author/researcher Janet Givens has published a series of posts on civility in public discourse. You can begin here. Other enlightening posts on this theme follow.

 

And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another . . . . ~  Ephesians 4:32

 


 

Have you been the giver or receiver of a kind gesture recently?

Do you send Easter (or Passover) cards? Do you celebrate the season in any other special way?

 

After Grandma was fancy, she became plain, the way I knew her all my life.