Customer Reviews

From Our House to Your House: Celebrating the American Christmas

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A poignant look into the personal world of sending Xmas cards. A collection of personal postcards from the 30's to the 90's, showing all kinds of families, dogs, and even single people, who bared their likeness to send holiday greetings to family and friends. My only displeasure is that this book stopped way too soon, as I could have gone on and on in a book ten times this size. Great glimpses into American life over the years.

I have Martin Parr's three 'boring' postcard books and of course the contents were not boring at all, well, most of them aren't but I'll admit that the second to last one in the UK book (A BEND ON PORLOCK HILL) is sort of dull but the word boring definitely belongs in the title of 'From our house to your house'. The book contains ninety-two American personal family Christmas cards and to the folks who received them they no doubt created treasured memories of the families who sent them, to everyone else, I feel, they are just plain uninteresting and dull.

Like many other visual books whose contents are individually low grade printed ephemera (matchbooks, pulp paperback covers, luggage labels, beer mats etc) when collected together they create a quirky fascination and that is certainly true of this book but look through it once and that's it. A second look won't even cross your mind. Bookshops probably found it was a stockroom dust catcher, too.

Unfortunately there is nothing in the book apart from the cards, no essay from Martin Parr about how he found these items or how he might interpret their significance. On the back cover there is blurb, part of which reads 'This is a fascinating eye-opener into American culture, as proud families everywhere (pets included) pose before the camera to send their Christmas greetings across the nation.' Hmmm, perhaps it is best to leave it at that.

One thing that I got from the book was that the US tradition of litho printing made it possible for families to get short print runs of personal cards produced cheaply whereas the English tradition of letterpress printing meant that similar aspirations at Christmastime were expensive enough to deter most families from doing it, so it is very unlikely that there would be an English version of this book.