In May of next year, 11,000 buyers will gather at the Javits Center in New York to peruse the wares of 900 exhibitors at the National Stationery Show.

According to the show's website, buyers for the $7.5 billion industry will come from card and gift shops, bookstores, bridal shops, party stores, department stores, big-box retailers, online retailers and mail order catalogs.

They will scoop up wedding invitations by the ton, but the second biggest seller each year, according to Kelly Bristol of the Greeting Card Association, which runs the annual show, is birth announcements.

Birth announcements, Bristol said, "are a way for people to celebrate life."

That's especially important on Christmas, when Christians celebrate the most famous birth announcement in history.

Rochelle Lulow editorial creative director at Cleveland-based greeting card company American Greetings said a birth announcement "goes beyond that one moment in time."

"It's a very happy occasion — a reason to celebrate. But it's also important to document, to establish that moment in time," Lulow continued. "A new baby is a new relationship, so you document that exciting time and share it as part of the human connection."

American Greetings has been helping people document and share those moments for more than a century, but the tradition of announcing a birth goes back millennia. Though at the time of Christ's birth, the task was achieved with stars and angels instead of cards and stamps.

There are two types of announcements of Christ's birth in the Gospels. The first type occurs ahead of the birth, as Mary and Joseph are told about their incredible future plans. The second happens immediately after Christ's birth as shepherds and kings see signs in the sky that something important has happened.

But the inclusion of the baby's name in the announcement was just as important then as now. In the Gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel visits Mary and tells her that she would "conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus."

The new baby would be given the Hebrew name "Yehosua," which translates as "Yahweh saves," or "He saves." It was popularized into "Yeshua," or 'salvation," which is rendered in Greek as "Jesus."

In his book, "The Birth of the Messiah," biblical scholar the Rev. Raymond Brown points out that birth announcements in the Bible have a specific pattern — one that the author of Luke's Gospel followed to the detail from six centuries earlier.

That older story, from Genesis, tells how God explained to a 100-year-old Abraham, that Abraham's 90-year-old wife, Sarah, would give birth to a son named Isaac.

In both Luke 1:26-37 and Genesis 17:1-21, there are five steps, according to Brown:

1) The appearance of an angel of the Lord (or appearance of the Lord.)

2) Fear of the visionary confronted by this supernatural presence.

3) The divine message.

4) An objection by the visionary as to how this can be, or a request for a sign.

5) The giving of a sign to reassure the visionary.

Additionally, Brown said, the divine message itself has many formulaic parts:

a) Visionary addressed by name.

b) Qualifying phrase describing the visionary.

c) Visionary urged not to be afraid.

d) Woman is with child, or about to have a child.

e) She will give birth to the child.

f) The name by which the child is to be called.

g) An etymology interpreting the name.

h) The future accomplishments of the child.

Both the so-called "Priestly" writer of Genesis and the author of Luke include nearly all of these steps in their stories of the announcement of an impending birth. Brown pointed out that there are other places in the Bible — elsewhere in both Genesis and Luke, but also in Judges and in Matthew — where the writer generally followed the birth announcement formula.

The Gospels were written decades after Christ's death by evangelists eager to spread the Christian "good news."

The Rev. Roger Karban, a biblical scholar and the administrator of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Renault, Ill., said that "what Mary and Joseph discover in each annunciation only was discovered after Jesus rose from the dead."

"Annunciations are for the readers, not for the original recipients," Karban continued. "That's why we have three of them. In Mark to Jesus, in Matthew to Joseph and in Luke to Mary. Each evangelist has a … different twist on who Jesus is and what he accomplished."

Of course, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, after Christ's birth in Bethlehem there are announcements that come from the sky — an angel of the Lord, and a star — to signal to the rest of the world that "the child," "king of the Jews," "a savior," "the messiah," "the Lord," had been born.

What the shepherds and kings found when they got to Bethlehem was vulnerability — "a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." For Christians today, that moment was the beginning of a new relationship, a new connection between humans and the divine.

"Jesus' love of us makes him extremely vulnerable," Karban said. "But it is in that weakness that we discover the power of God."