A Light on the Water: A Star of India Christmas

Somewhere on the deck of an iron-hulled tall ship in San Diego Harbor, a brass lantern catches the last of a December sunset. The sea is the color of old gold. Snow drifts past the rigging — never mind that snow doesn't actually fall on San Diego Harbor; the whole point of a Christmas card is to put together the things you love into one small, perfect frame and let it stand for a feeling. A weathered ship's lamp. A sun going down on the Pacific. Holly and pine in the corners, a red ornament hanging from a frosted bough, a Merry Christmas! lettered in classic red script across the open water. Nothing about it is literal. Everything about it is true.

This card is about the kind of Christmas that sailors keep.

A Ship Older Than the Tradition

The Star of India was launched on November 14, 1863, at Ramsey on the Isle of Man — five days before Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Her original name was Euterpe, after the Greek muse of music and poetry, and she was an experiment: an iron-hulled, full-rigged ship at a time when most vessels were still being built of wood. Her first years were brutal. A collision off the coast of Wales. A mutiny. A cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that forced the crew to cut away her topmasts. Her first captain died at sea on the way home. By any reasonable measure, she should never have made it to her second decade.

She made it to her second century instead. After her rough start she settled into a long career — cargo runs to India, then a quarter-century hauling emigrants to New Zealand, circling the globe twenty-one times in the process. In 1901 she was sold to the Alaska Packers' Association, re-rigged as a barque, and given the name we know her by today: Star of India. For 22 seasons she carried fishermen, cannery workers, coal, and canning supplies from Oakland up to the Bering Sea, returning each fall with her holds full of salmon. By 1923, steam had won, and she was laid up.

San Diegans bought her in 1926 with the dream of turning her into a museum. The Depression and World War II put that dream on hold for thirty years. Volunteers finally restored her in the early 1960s, and in 1976 — for the U.S. Bicentennial — she sailed San Diego Bay for the first time in fifty years. Today she is the world's oldest active sailing ship, a National Historic Landmark, and she still sails at least once a year under a volunteer crew that trains all year for the privilege. A ship that has seen mutinies, cyclones, world wars, and 162 Christmases. Still afloat. Still working.

Christmas at Sea

There is a particular kind of Christmas that has belonged to sailors for as long as there have been sailors. It happens in lamplight. It involves rope, and rough hands, and a long horizon, and the awareness that family is somewhere very far away. It's quieter than a Christmas at home, but no less full. You can read it in old whaling logs, in Royal Navy diaries, in the letters merchant seamen sent home from ports halfway around the world. Calm seas, fair winds, and a Merry Christmas to all aboard.

This card lives in that tradition. The lamp does most of the work — old wrought-iron frame, wavy glass panes, a warm yellow glow inside that reads almost like a candle. It's the kind of light that has guided night watches and Christmas Eves for as long as there have been ships. The sun setting on the open water behind it picks up that same gold and carries it across the whole horizon. And the Christmas border — the holly, the pine, the snow, the red bow, the single hanging ornament — pulls the maritime world and the holiday world together without forcing them. They've belonged together longer than we tend to remember.

The painterly oil-painting finish gives the whole image the warmth of a card pulled from a family album decades from now. Equal parts maritime tradition and Christmas cheer. Built to be saved, not thrown out with the wrapping paper.

Who This Card Is For

Send it to the sailor in your family — the one who served, the one who still sails, the one who keeps a barometer in the kitchen and checks it every morning out of habit. Send it to the Navy or Coast Guard veteran whose Christmases have included a lot of horizons. Send it to the Merchant Marine officer, the cruise ship captain, the harbor pilot, the weekend cruiser who keeps a small sailboat in a slip somewhere and considers it an act of religion. Send it to a San Diegan who has walked past the Star of India a hundred times and never quite gotten over how beautiful she looks against a winter sky.

It works equally well as a Christmas card for maritime museum members, yacht club friends, lighthouse enthusiasts, and anyone whose heart settles down a little when they hear water against a hull. Blank interior cards also frame nicely at 5x7, making this small piece of holiday maritime art at home on a mantel, a captain's desk, or a bookshelf of nautical first editions.

A Light That Has Always Been Burning

A small lamp on a tall ship, holding its own against the dark — that's a Christmas image as old as Christmas itself. The Star of India was launched the same year Charles Dickens was still touring with A Christmas Carol. She has watched 162 Christmases come and go, most of them quietly, and her lights have come on for every single one.

Send one to someone who keeps the watch.

Explore the full collection of maritime, nautical, and Americana fine art greeting cards at Will Davis Studios.