I’M NOT sending any Christmas cards this year. Not only do they cost a fortune,  considering they’re just bits of folded card, but with the added cost of the postage, I decided to save my money.

Instead, my New Year resolution is to add to my collection of Victorian Christmas cards, some of which are pictured here.

Click here for a Christmas card slideshow

Some friends of ours have a lovely Christmas tradition of their own. Instead of sending their family members a new Christmas card each year, the same small collection of "antique" cards gets circulated among them, each person receiving a different one than the previous year.

Rather than being chucked into the waste recycling bin, or chopped up to make gift tabs (which is another useful money-saving tip) our friends’ vintage cards are carefully stored away for a year and then brought out to be posted again for a new round of festive cheer.

I’m afraid I wouldn’t risk the hazards of the postal service. Not that vintage Christmas cards

are expensive, generally speaking. For a few pounds it’s more than possible to pick up any number of cards dating from the late Victorian and early Edwardian era.

Admittedly, some of the earliest and grandest are more expensive, but few break into three figures. None of the cards in my own little collection cost more than £15.

We have Sir Henry Cole, the first director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, to thank for producing the first commercially printed Christmas card.

It was designed by John C. Horsley and its popularity following its launch in the Christmas of 1843 was boosted by the advent of the postage stamp and Sir Rowland Hill’s "Penny Post" three years earlier.

Horsley’s card was engraved with the scene of a family enjoying Christmas lunch, surrounded by vignettes of charitable acts such as feeding and clothing the poor. The greeting read "And Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You".

The introduction of lithographic printing and other improved printing techniques meant that by the 1850s, beautifully illustrated multi-coloured cards were winging their way around the country by the sackful.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, styles of Christmas cards mirror fashions and artistic tastes of their respective periods.

In addition to the usual Christmas-related images such as jovial Santas, angelic religious scenes, equally angelic and well-dressed children and their pets, and of course snowy chocolate box landscapes, the choice of other subject material seems today to be a little more bizarre.

From my own collection are cards illustrated with ladies riding bicycles, summer flowers in full bloom, swallows perched on a branch of cherry blossom, and arguably the most bizarre — a pig on a child’s swing with an audience of ducks and small birds.

However, whatever their subject, their design echoes the era of their manufacture. It is simple to tell the high Victorian cards from their more modern and florid counterparts produced in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods.

They were, in their own small way, advertisements for the expertise of their printers. Many rose to prominence including Mansell, Goodall, Marcus Ward and Raphael Tuck in England and Bernard Ollendorf, Ernest Nister, Lothar Meggendorfer and the Obpacher Brothers Germany.

The first American Christmas card was produced in the early 1850s as an advertisement for "Pease’s Great Varety (sic) Store in the Temple of Fancy". It showed Santa Claus and a happy crowd of people all showing their delight at the presents he had brought them, whilst in the background is a Negro servant setting the Christmas dinner table.

The artists employed to draw illustrations for Christmas cards is a subject for study all to itself. They ranged from the children’s illustrator Kate Greenaway to the powerful monochrome images of Aubrey Beardsley.

And then there were the flippant cards: cards that when turned sideways or upside down show a concealed meaning in the drawing; cards that when opened looked like a banknote or cheque or caused them to squeak.

Perhaps one set of cards hardest to understand today were produced in the 1880s in a series by Raphael Tuck named "Silent Songster". They showed dead robins.

At the time, the series was very popular and was imitated by several other firms in subsequent years. Even the accompanying inscriptions are strange. They read "Sweet messenger of calm decay and Peace Divine" or "But peaceful was the night wherein the Prince of Light His reign of peace upon the earth began".

One can only surmise at their purpose. Perhaps it was a mixture of shame for the slaying of a robin or wren over Christmas and a compassion for birds during the cold winter months.

In contrast, one of my favourite inscriptions is on an Edwradian card decorated with a picture of a rotund and hirsute angel-winged stockbroker. It reads: "I hope you will not think it strange/If I fly from the Stock Exchange/To bring you the news surprising/That all the New Year Bonds are rising!".

Anyway, like I said, I’m not sending any Christmas cards this year, so let me take this opportunity to wish all my reader a happy and restful festive season and a prosperous New Year.

THERE’LL be no Wiis in my house this Christmas thank you very much. We watched them being demonstrated at the launch by Nintendo PR girls thrusting, parrying and gesticulating in front of a widescreen TV.

See a pop-up slideshow

It immediately made us wonder how long it would be before one of them let the thing slip, sending it crashing through the screen. Wiis don’t have a wrist strap for nothing, but if I was the parent of a youngster expecting one from Santa this Christmas, I be taking out extra insurance.

Oh for the days when children were content with a stocking containing an orange, the latest Dandy or Beano annual, a handful of assorted nuts (still in their shells, of course) and a few simple and inexpensive toys. Ah yes, I remember it well.

Time was when the must-have Christmas present for children and adults alike was a magical

book like the ones illustrated here. In their own way, they were the Victorian equivalent of the Game Boy — and they didn’t need batteries. They are mechanical or metamorphic books, designed to be interactive, their pages changing as the story develops, all at the whim of the reader.

Today’s collectors call them "pop-up books", a catch-all term that covers a multitude of elaborate and innovative three-dimensional and other designs that remain as captivating today as they were a hundred years ago.

Actually, mechanical books have a long history. One of the earliest examples was published in the 13th century by an unlikely sounding character named Ramon Llull (c.1235-1316), who wrote poetry and practiced mysticism on the island of Majorca.

His hand-written complex philosophical texts were illustrated with revolving desks called volvelles which could be rotated around a central pivot to point to words or symbols on the page or predict the future.

In the 14th century, other mechanisms were being used for example in books on anatomy, where flaps could be turned or lifted to show different sections of the body and its organs.

Books specifically intended for juveniles did not appear in any form until the latter half of the 18th century when publisher John Newbery responded to the need to improve children’s education.

Thereafter, it was only a short time before publishers began to experiment with creative and innovative ways to capitalise on the market.

London printer and bookseller Robert Sayer took the lead in about 1765 with the production of "Harlequinades", books named after the pantomime figure, which consisted of pages with two engraved scenes.

  Each scene was split in the centre by a number of flaps, layered one on top of another and attached at the top and bottom of the page, so that each flap could be lifted from the centre.

Each half of a scene was interchangeable with the others so that turning the various flaps created sufficient variations in scenes to keep children amused for hours.

Using a similar technique, the first Paper Doll Books were produced by London publisher S. & J. Fuller from 1810 and in the1820s, miniature portrait painter William Grimaldi developed another type of "lift-the-flap" book referred to as a toilet book.

He devised the idea as a party game, sketching articles from his daughter’s dressing table as  representations of specific virtues. For example, rouge equalled modesty, powder, innocence and the looking glass, humility.

The articles were illustrated on flaps, which, when lifted, revealed scenes illustrating each virtue.

His son Stacy published the first book in 1821 entitled The Toilet, which enjoyed great popularity and inspired a rash of imitations.

Two years later, Stacy published a boy’s book, A Suit of Armour for Youth, also written and illustrated by his father, in which illustrations of moral themes were hidden beneath pieces of armour.

Thomas Dean was the first publisher to produce truly movable books on a large scale. The firm was already in existence at the start of the 19th century but they were among the first to adopt the new lithographic printing process that had been invented in Germany in 1798.

Dean’s "toy books" dominated the market from the 1840s being noted for their beautiful chromolithographic images.

His son George joined the company in 1847 and they opened studios in London where teams of artists devised ever more complex movable books.

In 1856, for example, they released a series of fairy tales adventure stories in "peepshow" style titled New Scenic Books.

Each scene was depicted on three or more cut-out sections placed one behind the other and attached by a ribbon running through them.

The scenes lay flat, face down when the book was closed but when it was opened, the ribbon caused the scenes to pop up giving a three-dimensional view.

In the 1860s, Dean also invented a mechanism to animate a scene by pulling a tab. Advertised as "living pictures", among the best known was the "Royal Punch and Judy as Played before the Queen"

In it, the reader controls the action in a three-dimensional miniature theatre, moving the characters by pulling tabs located at the bottom of each page.

"Home Pantomime Toy Books" was another Dean’s innovation in which the entire subject matter of an image changes as the pages are turned.

Dean dominated the industry for much of the 19th century but in the 1880s, a number of German publishers capitalised on their country’s expertise as specialist lithographic printers and crashed into the European children’s book market.

Leading the attack was Raphael Tuck who moved to England as a young man, working first as a furniture maker. He subsequently began framing and selling pictures and chromolithographs printed in Germany from a wheelbarrow in the streets of London.

In 1866, he opened a small shop and four years later, his sons joined him to open a publishing business in the capital.

The business was a huge success and Tuck later became official Publisher to Queen Victoria.

Father Tuck’s Mechanical Series was a popular series featuring multi-layered three-dimensional scenes, while Fun at the Circus featured pages with three-dimensional overlays designed to be raised out of the book and laid on to the tabletop like a diorama.

They were also printed in both colour and black and white, the latter enabling children (and their parents) to colour them by hand.

Another German publisher who specialised in colourful movable books was Ernest Nister. His company was founded in Nuremberg in 1877 in a city which had been a centre for toy making throughout the 19th century and had the most advanced colour printing in the world.

His speciality was illustrations that stood up automatically. His figures and scenes were die-cut and mounted in a three-dimensional framework connected by paper guides. As the pages are turned, the figures stand to attention in a setting which has its own perspective.

His other forte was movable books with pages made up of dissolving and a revolving slats which cause the images to transform using complex geometric cuts which revolve as tabs are pulled by the reader.

However, the most complex and original movable picture books of the 19th century were produced by a Munich artist called Lothar Meggendorfer.

His illustrations often had five parts which move simultaneously and in different directions using intricate levers hidden between pages. When activated they give the characters and scenes an almost endless range of movement.

Dozens of interlocking parts and intricate rivets make the carpenters chop the wood, the musicians play their horns, and the nurse rock the baby but because of their complexity, the books were the preserve of the wealthy.

Nevertheless, from the 1880s to the 1900s, Meggendorfer’s works enjoyed brisk sales and many reprintings.

Needless to say, the outbreak of the First World War crippled output from both German and British publishers alike. The Second World War dealt the industry another blow and in this day and age of electronic gadgetry, pop-up books are enjoyed and appreciated by a relatively small select few.

I know which camp I’m in.

But stop and take another look. Those baubles, knickknacks and trinkets that you remember when you were a child might actually be highly desirable collectors’ items.

And that means hard cash to pay the credit card bill which arrives when Christmas is but a distant memory.

The thought occurred watching Coronation Street the other night. Ken Barlow probably didn’t realise what the Bakelite crib ornament was worth as he hung it on his tree, but it was not lost on me.

Fact is, almost any Christmas tree decorations dating from the 1930s, 40s and even Sixties has a value as a collectable, while some rarities could fund the entire festive season.

Particularly sought after are the hand-blown glass ornaments that I remember used to come in brown cardboard boxes divided into compartments and each wrapped in tissue paper.

That was probably how so many survived the journey from Czechoslovakia, where they were made.

Favourites are the clip-on birds with their fragile spun glass tails and the gaudy baubles, hand-painted with glitter to make them look like they are covered in frost.

To a collector, each has a value of £10 to £15. Rarer examples, particularly those with an unusual shapes or modelled with the heads of cherubs, clowns or animals can easily be double that.

The same can be said for early plastic and even decorations made from cardboard, providing of course they’re in perfect condition.

I remember the Christmas tree from my childhood was hung with little Japanese paper lanterns, each one with a tiny metal candleholder (I was never allowed to put candles in them for fear of burning the house down) that today would be worth £15 to £20 apiece.

I was told they came home in the rucksack of a relative who saw action in that part of the world during the war. Whether that was true, I’ll never know, but I wish I still had them.

Old electric fairylights can also be worth serious money, particularly when they remain in their original cardboard boxes. Own a set today and you’d be best advised to speak to an electrician before putting them to use.

Of course, collectors of such things would ever dream of actually switching the things on!

Picture shows an unusual seasonal survivor – a 1930s artificial Christmas tree complete with its original decorations which was in a sale at Brightwells auctioneers in Leominster. It had been purchased from Binns department store in Sunderland to celebrate the first Christmas of a baby boy and had been kept carefully by the family ever since. It sold for £350.