A blue-grey Art Nouveau Christmas card blooms with painted holly boughs heavy with red berries and trailing sprigs of white-berried mistletoe — the "Language of Flowers" banner curling in white relief across the upper left while a tender verse by poet C. Preston-Wynne teases the recipient: "The mistletoe hints — I'm afraid I'll offend you — That now is the time you might spare me a kiss." Sent by a young girl named Minnie to her friend Bettie in the small Mills County community of Star, Texas, this undivided-back transitional card captures the sweet social rituals of rural Edwardian America — school attendance counted ("there are 18 at school today"), and an earnest invitation to come visit Mr. Schwartzs on Sunday. The floral illustration, likely chromolithographed in Germany for the American market, exemplifies the Victorian floriography craze that assigned romantic meanings to every bloom and berry.