Greeting Card
1909-1910

This is Clara Barton’s Christmas greeting card that she sent to friends and associates each year.
Paper. L 17.5, W 14 cm
Clara Barton National Historic Site, CLBA 4455

Transcript:
Greetings To Friends of the Olden Days and the New. Four years ago I sent to you my Greetings for a ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.’ I said that although eighty-four years of earthly life had passed, I was still ‘strong and well, knowing neither illness nor fatique, disability nor despondency.’ I also brought you an outline of my ‘Later Work,’ saying that, ‘You had never known me without work. While able, you never would, for it was a part of the best religion I had.’ Four years more have passed, and I come again to bring my Greetings and to repeat without change, what I said then. I still work my many hours, and walk my many miles. The heart is still open to the welfare and the woes of the world, and the hand-grasp ready for a friend.

The "Later Work" had taken root, grown, and is bearing fruit. In more than two-thirds of the states of the Union, the banner of The National First Aid Association of America cheers the eye and comforts the heart. Thousands have studied its wholesome lessons and hundreds have taken its instructions and wear its insignia. They serve in the hospitals, in the workshop, and manufactories, with the railways, the police and fire departments, with the man at his labor, the boy at his play, and the tender mother in her isolated home. The policemen, in a press of distress from panic, opens wide his ranks for aid when the little brown button on the lapel appears.
The child in school turns joyously from the hum-drum studies of the day for a lesson in "First Aid." The boy leaves his baseball to study it, and no longer sees his little companion in the water sink and drown, without an intelligent and well directed effort to succor and restore him, and the little girl bandages and splints her broken doll on "First Aid" principles.

Think, for a moment, what this will mean for these girls and boys and those about them, when they are women and men?”

Five years more of such advancement as the past, will plant the seeds of this world-wide humanity in every hamlet in the country. It will kindle a torch of human help for human woe where all was dark, and the helplessness of ignorance shrouded even the school and the church.

It is a glimpse of the patient work of five years that I bring to you, five incipient years, and I would, now that it is so thoroughly founded as to admit of assured membership, that each and all of you stand with us in the work. If ever from the hard worked, tireless staff at Headquarters comes and invitation to its rolls for membership, I pray you accept it, if you will, knowing that in standing with them, you stand with me, as well. 
In all the world are none so dear to me as the "Old Guard" that toiled by my side in the years agone. They made it their work, no less than mine.
It is to them, and to you all, that I bring my Greeting of 1909 and 1910, and my report of five years' work for the betterment of humanity, in the name and the love of the Master and the glory of the great Father who so loved His Children, and so cared for them, that He sent His own to show them the way. Let us follow.  ~Clara Barton

The following listing is written on the last page of the card,
“The National First Aid Association of America
Incorporated under the Laws of the District of Columbia
President-Clara Barton
Assistant to the President and Treasurer- Roscoe G. Wells
Vice-President-Mrs. J. Sewall Reed
Medical Director-A.E. Sohmer, M.D.
Secretary-Mary I. Kensel
Counsellors: Creed M. Fulton-Washington D.C.; I. Newton Williams-New York City, NY
The Board of Directors:  Clara Barton; Roscoe G. Wells; Mary I. Kensel; Mrs. Sewall Reed; Julian B. Hubbell M.D.

Advisory Board: Lieutenant-General Nelson A. Miles, Washington D.C.; Eugene Underhill, M.D. Philadelphia, PA; Charles R. Dickson, M.D. Toronto, Canada; Joseph Gardner M.D. Bedford, IN; Julian B. Hubbell M.D. Glen Echo, MD; Colonel B.E. Orr New York City, NY; Henry Chapman New Jersey State Branch; General William H. Sears Lawrence, KS.  Colonel G. Sterling Riverson M.D. A.M.C. Secretary for Canada, St. John Ambulance Association
Executive Office
6 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.