As the medium spread worldwide in the late 1970s and early 1980s, services in different countries began to exchange yearly messages in the form of teletext Christmas cards.
As early as 1982, Ceefax received artwork from Keyfax and Electra in America, SevenText in Australia, NOS Teletekst in the Netherlands, ARD/ZDF in West Germany as well as messages from Switzerland, Hungary and Sweden. In a Ceefax in Vision broadcast on 24 December, this segment was billed as “Teletext International”, with greetings from other “Ceefax-style services,” their “fellow broadcasters overseas.”
“Unexamined Culture”
When artist Paul B Davis of Lektrolab got the opportunity to speak with “the old guard” at NOS Teletekst in 2006, an engineer wanted to show him teletext Christmas cards they had received from the BBC, and the ones they had sent back.
Davis would hear about how there became a community between services, a previously unexamined “culture inside the institutions that were developing teletext,” and how through Davis’s Microtel project, they were grateful someone was taking “an interest in the medium that they dedicated their entire careers to.”
Revival
In the 2020s, The Teletext Art Research Lab revived the Christmas card format, with messages from artists all over the world being sent in the form of 1kb teletext pages to Finland’s Yle Teksti-TV. These were broadcast as part of Advent calendars from 2021 onwards.
Christmas teletext art is a tradition that began in the mid-1970s with graphics expertly-crafted using rudimentary teletext software that would have been more difficult to navigate than today’s variety of editors.
Like lovingly gift-wrapped delights positioned under an evergreen tree, services would often leave a selection of artworks for people to enjoy over the holidays while employees took their annual leave.
In association with long-time champions of teletext art Yle Text, we are aiming to continue the tradition of those low-res wonders with our own humble little project, the Teletext Advent Calendar(s).
–Teletext Art Research Lab, 2025
Sources
- Christmas 1982 Ceefax, uploaded by David Baldwin, 24 December 2018
- Teletext People: Paul B Davis, Byte High No Limit, uploaded 21 April 2023
- Advent Calendars return to Yle Text for 2025 (1 December 2025 – 6 January 2026), teletextart.co.uk, Dan Farrimond, 1 December 2025
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