The two pages of this card were in different styles.
Front page
The “smiley” face here represents the word Happy, and the stylised Christmas tree the word Christmas.
Inside page
Here the message is represented in the style of children’s picture puzzles. Each picture represents a word, which then has to be modified by the deletion or replacement of some characters to produce the required word or syllable. The explanation is:
a hand, with “h” deleted: and
a nest, with “n” replaced by “b”: best
two fishes, with “f” replaced by “w”: wishes
the figure “4”, with “u” deleted: for
a glass of wine, with “w” replaced by “n”: nine
a (Heinz) food tin, with “i” replaced by “ee”: teen
a straight line, with “l” replaced by “n”: nine
a (Dunlop) tyre, with “r” and “e” deleted: ty
a packet of (Be-Ro) flour, with “l” deleted: four
a frog, with “g” replaced by “m”: from
a brain, with “a” and “i” exchanged: Brian
a barber’s pole, with “b” replaced by “k”: Barker
Apologies, by the way, to my U.S. readership, who may have been puzzled by thinking that the tyre was a tire.
I had thought that recipients would have needed to be “of a certain age” to have recognised “Be-Ro” as a brand of flour, but it transpires that it is still sold (by Premier Foods Group Ltd). Thomas Bell apparently solved the problem of needing to remove the word “royal” from the name of his “Bells Royal” flour by abbreviating it to “Be-Ro”.
Version 24: Revised 23 December 2018
Brian Barker