Our 2019 Christmas card celebrates the true spirit of the season – an ancient human ritual that predates the major religions of Europe today. For as long as people have lived in the Northern Hemisphere, we have turned a bitter and barren season into a festival of light, food, friendship, and gift-giving. The pagans called it Yule, but you may know it by one of many names. Its traditions persist today – from the firs we bring indoors to remind ourselves of nature, to the lights we hang about our homes, to the roasted vegetables, wines, and ales we enjoy with family and friends. This original ‘Christmas’ story – one of ordinary people coming together to celebrate their love for one another – is thousands of years older than the nativity fable, and is an important part of our shared human heritage. This card has a white border with a Humanists UK logo at the top.

MIX-PACK A mix-pack of our most popular cards. This pack contains 2 each of our Fibonacci Cones, Saturnalia, Festive Darwin, Tree of Life, and Hubble cards.

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, and went on to become one of the most influential scientists in history. He split light into its rainbow. He showed that apples fall from trees for the same reason that moons orbit planets. He invented a new type of telescope. He developed calculus. And most of it before turning 30. We’ve hidden various references to Newton on this card: some big, some small. How many can you spot? All together they make up our tribute to the giant on whose shoulders modern physics stands.

Bertrand Russell was a humanist, philosopher, logician, and Nobel laureate. He was a member of our Advisory Council, as well as President of Cardiff Humanists. He famously posited a china teapot orbiting the sun, pointing out that nobody can disprove such a teapot. We hope he’d like our affectionate tribute.

All around us, stars are forming. In this stellar nursery spotted by Hubble, 170,000 light years away, diamond blue stars are destined to live fast and die young: far more massive than our sun, they will explode as supernovae within a few million years. Surrounding them is the hydrogen gas from whence they came, blown asunder by ultraviolet rays and violent streams of charged particles. And producing, from our angle, to our eyes, for the tiniest moment in the history of the universe, a rather festive tree. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee.

For centuries, light and colour have been a treasured part of midwinter celebrations. If you want to add a twist, literally, it’s easy to put two strings together to form a DNA-esque double helix. We think it’s a fitting reminder that no matter when, where or what you celebrate, we’re all the same underneath.

If you were to note the position of the sun at the same time every day over the course of a year, you’d end up with the distinctive figure-eight pattern shown on this card – known today as an analemma. For thousands of years the analemma frustrated attempts to tell the time: sundials would cheerfully go out of sync with hourglasses or burning candles. The difference was a challenge to anyone putting together a theory of astronomy, and inspired much scientific inquiry. Today we know the peculiar shape of the analemma is caused by the tilt of the Earth on its axis, and our orbit being elliptical rather than circular. And it rotates: if you’re at the poles, it’s vertical; if you’re at the equator, it’s horizontal. At the winter solstice (in the northern hemisphere), the sun is at the lower tip. We think the analemma is a lovely symbol to mark the passing of the year and the progress of humanity.

Our 2014 card is a festive representation of Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life – his first sketch of the idea that all species are related, and evolved from a common ancestor. The tips of the branches represent species that are alive today, and as you travel from the star to his hat you pass every species that has ever existed (plus the Galápagos Finch, which played an important role in the inception of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.)

This card comes with a twist: if you turn it upside-down, it celebrates a different midwinter festival. Click here to see the upside-down image. There’s some text on the back that hints at this, though doesn’t give it away explicitly.



Darwin getting into the festive spirit. (Folded to A6)



Pine cones naturally grow in Fibonacci spirals – a form of the ‘golden ratio’ that pervades nature, mathematics and art. We think they’re an appropriately festive and fascinating symbol to help celebrate the holiday season and the turning of the year.

A festive take on our atheist bus logo.