Best wishes or darkest nightmares?

We often caricature the Victorians as staid, sober types - but they could also be delightfully eccentric and weird, as this gallery of very odd Christmas cards suggests. If there were once perfectly rational reasons for some of the images and scenarios depicted on the cards, then those reasons seem to have been lost in the mists of time.

On a similarly seasonal note, what your festive decorations are missing, obviously, are "paper snowflakes with winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics incorporated into the designs"...

(Thanks to Seralynne for the links.)