I found this Christmas card among my grandmother Velma’s papers. I’d known that cross-word puzzles were very popular in the 1920s, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a cross-word Christmas card. “Ronald” was my grandfather, but there is no indication whether the card was to him or from him.

Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about the cross-word puzzle craze in his social history of the 1920s, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s:

     Within a month this odd-looking volume [THE CROSS-WORD PUZZLE BOOK] with a pencil attached to it had become a best seller. By the following winter [1925] its sales had mounted into the hundreds of thousands, other publishers were falling over themselves to get out books which would reap an advantage from the craze, it was a dull newspaper that did not have its daily puzzle, sales of dictionaries were bounding, there was a new demand for that ancient and honorable handmaid of the professional writer, Roget’s Thesaurus, a man had been sent to jail in New York for refusing to leave a restaurant after four hours of trying to solve a puzzle, and Mrs. Mary Zoaba of Chicago was reported to be a “cross-word widow,” her husband apparently being so busy with puzzles that he had no time to support her.¹

If you have an interest in what daily life for the average American was like in the 1920s, I highly recommend Only Yesterday. In addition to the informative content, it’s a fun read! Here is a link to a digitized version on the University of Virginia’s website: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/allen/cover.html.

¹Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s (New York: Harper & Row, 1931) 159.