For my Ancestors' Advent Calendar (with lots of ideas for how to decorate your home at Xmas) Click here
Greenery and fruit, sparkle and snow, colourfully-dressed tables and walls
inscribed with Yuletide mottos - Christmases past were decorated using much the
same general combination of ideas as Christmases today. But the specifics of the way our ancestors
decorated their homes at any given time in the past depended not only on
tradition, but also on what was currently most novel and up-to-date.
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Yew, box and fir were all used to decorate the house at Christmas as well as the more obvious holly, mistletoe and ivy. The Girl’s Own Paper, December 8th, 1888, Vol X, No.467
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In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, domestic and church decorations
at Christmas tended to be simple and worked on the principle of bringing
something of the outside world indoors. Our ancestors would decorate their
lamps, candles and tables, very shortly before Christmas Day, with material such
as holly, ivy, mistletoe and berries collected from hedges and winter gardens. The candles (attached to the greenery with wax
or pins) would be lit only on Christmas Eve to
minimise the danger of fire hazard). The Rev. James Woodforde, who kept
a diary from the mid eighteenth century onwards, recorded that he filled his
house with holly and lit a great wax candle especially for Christmas. Fruit and vegetables, imported from overseas,
or newly-grown in British hothouses, were considered decorations in and of
themselves. The Market Post of
December 25th 1848 noted that in Covent Garden that Xmas season, the supply of pineapples, apples, pears, hothouse
grapes, foreign grapes, walnuts, lemons and oranges was ‘seasonally good and
sold readily.’
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Victorian Christmas Postcard: Wikimedia Commons
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A typical home at Christmas in the mid-Victorian period, would have been
decorated to draw the eye towards the fireplace, which would have been ablaze
with colour and sparkle. The popular installation of a Christmas tree in the
domestic environment was widely attributed to a widely publicised etching of
the Royal family at Christmas, complete with a tree (decorated with tinsel made
from real shavings of silver) in the London
Illustrated News of 1848. Mottoes or biblical quotations, with the
individual letters cut out from paper and decorated with coloured rice or
cotton wadding to imitate snow were often strung across the walls. Trees were
decorated with ornaments made from lace, paper, scraps of newspaper and
magazine illustrations.
Spurred on by the royal endorsement of Christmas, our Victorian
ancestors proceeded to go decoration-crazy as the century progressed. As the Supplement
to the Sheffield and Rotherham
Independent of Saturday December
24th 1881 commented, '(Christmas decorations) are no longer hung around a room
haphazard - as pineapples, apples, holly bough here, a bunch of berries the, a
trail of ivy elsewhere. They are carefully planned and artistically constructed.’
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Girl's Own Paper December 20th 1884, Vol VI, No.260.
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An ancestor might have started preparing for Christmas many days or
weeks before the event, and there was plenty of advice around to suggest just
what tools he or she would need to make a good job of it: ‘A good deal table to work upon is an
essential; some stout brown carpet paper for cutting out letters or making
backs for monograms and medallions; cardboard for suspended letters; wadding to
imitate snow; strong twine; fine wire; a few old barrel-hoops; some whole rice
uncooked; red sealing wax; spirits of wine; needles and woollen threads, scissors;
hammers and tacks, are among the domestic trifles which come in usefully. Supplement to the Sheffield and Rotherham
Independent, December 24th, 1881.
By the end of the Victorian period, Christmas had become big business.
Homemade decorations were supplemented in wealthier families by shop-bought
items. The image of Father Christmas, as a prolific gift-giver - rather than
simply in his old evocation as an expression of festive hospitality - appeared frequently
in the press, on cards and other festive paraphenalia. New department stores
across the country stocked up with the latest glass and lead toys and baubles
many of which were manufactured in Germany, (though, even as early as the
1890s, some came from the East). Conway, Jones and Co. of Northgate in
Gloucester, was typical of a small family-owned shop which
boasted a Christmas window full of ‘thousands
of clever Japanese toys and novelties suitable for Xmas trees and bazaars, at 1
d each.' The Citizen, December 18th 1897.
The boon in decorating for Christmas went on right through the Edwardian
period at which time, every nook and cranny became a possible location for
ornamentation: mantelpieces sported homemade convex wire cages, through which ‘the
stalks of ../ flowers, holly, etc’ could be passed,’ trellis decorations surrounded doorways, wooden
hoops trimmed with holly hung from ceilings, and (the middle-classes in
particular) sought to outdo each other with decorated friezes and dado rails.
No longer were Christmas decorations confined to the home and church,
now a vast array of public buildings were resplendently dressed for Christmas. Schoolrooms
were festooned with chains of paper roses or coloured flags looped high across the
room, or draped from the corners of the walls to a the centre point where they would
be fixed to a hook or ceiling rose. In
1916, despite the First World War, Walsall Hospital boasted a huge Christmas
tree which ‘ stretched right up to the ceiling, with a lovely fairy doll at the
top and hundreds of shining stars and balls hanging on it, as well as dozens of
small trumpets and whistles.’
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Wikimedia Commons
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Christmas decoration in Britain continued to keep pace with international
politics and technological developments. Unsurprisingly, the First World War
(1914-1918) saw a huge drop in the sales of ornaments made in Germany. In 1917, electric Christmas lights for
Christmas trees were first on commercial sale (although they had actually been
invented as early as 1880). The 1920s brought the invention of adhesive tape
and artificial holly and mistletoe. Of the new imitation greenery, one lady
correspondent eulogised to The Evening
Telegraph, ‘they are very clever imitations and can scarcely be detected
from the real thing.’ (20th December 1927). Crepe paper (which had first appeared in Britain
in the late nineteenth century) had its heyday in the twenties. It was perfect
for Yuletide artistry since (as the same lady continued) ‘it was ‘obtainable in
a multitude of colours and patterns… [was] tough and strong, [and] possess[ed]
an elasticity which [was] ideal for the making of decorations.’
The difficulties of affording and sourcing luxury materials were
everywhere apparent during the Second World War (1939-1945) and this was
reflected in a move back towards a more natural kind of Christmas decoration in
most British homes at this time. The Burnley
Express and News commented grimly on December 27th, 1941, ‘Except
for holly of course, of which there appeared to be quite a lot, Christmas
decorations in the home were not on the same scale as in previous years, there
being obvious reasons for this.’
Once the War was over, however, our ancestors returned to decorating
their homes with renewed zest and an eye for modernity. Cellulose paper (first
manufactured in Britain in the 1930s), was newly popular because it sparkled in
firelight or electric light, artificial tinsel garlands were at the height of
their popularity and aluminium Christmas trees arrived in 1955. Plastic novelty
ornaments and tree decorations could be purchased cheaply from Woolworth’s (the
American-owned emporium increasingly to be found on every British high street).
The festive celebrations of the 1950s gave a focus for the mixture of nostalgia,
patriotism, but most of all, the optimism, that characterised the decade.
Christmas, of course, is a peculiar time when we are wont to reflect
that both everything and nothing remains the same. It’s perhaps comforting to know that our ancestors, like us, always welcomed the
festive season by experimenting both with natural ingredients and traditional
ideas, and with new materials and novel technologies. Long may it remain a
magical combination!
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Useful
Books
Mark Connelly, Christmas:
A Social History, I.B. Tauris, rept., 2012.
E. G. Lewis, All
Things Christmas: The History and Traditions of Advent and Christmas,
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.
Clement A. Miles, Christmas
Customs and Traditions, Their History and Significance, Dover Publications, 1976.
Rev. James Woodforde, A Country Parson: James Woodforde’s Diary, 1759 -1802, Century,
1985.
This article first appeared in Discover Your Ancestors Online Periodical - December 2015. http://www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk/
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