Charles Dickens is often with inventing modern Christmas. But his writing did give us a unique insight into the ways both ordinary and elite Victorians celebrated the festive season.
Writing in his magazine, Household Words, in December 1850, Dickens described the gifts and decorations on a typical Christmas tree in a middle-class household.
There were rosy cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves … there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, all kinds of boxes … there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation cards, bouquet-holders … imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, ‘There was everything, and more.’
“Everything, and more” may sound like a modern retail slogan, but many of these things can be made at home with things you already own. So if you’re looking to cut down on your consumption this year, you may benefit from recreating some Victorian DIY projects.
1. Cornucopias
In December 1848, a newspaper printed an illustration of Victoria and Albert’s Christmas tree. The image prompted a great deal of public interest, which has frequently been credited with popularising the Christmas tree in Britain.
Victoria and Albert’s tree includes a number of what Dickens refers to as “sweetmeat boxes”. These could be as simple as a box of sweets from a confectioner’s or a more elaborate lacquered miniature chest. Many families, though, would have had a simpler variation, like the cornucopia.
These could easily be made at home. The cornucopia was created by rolling a sheet of card or thick paper into a cone, glueing it and then knotting a ribbon across the opening. It can then be filled with small sweets and hung from the tree.
The cornucopia (Latin for “horn of plenty”) embodied the two sides of Victorian Christmas: thrift and indulgence. Easy and cheap to make, it embodied the values of economy and efficiency, but its contents promised the material luxuries of the festive season.
If you’re looking to cut down on waste, try recycling a newspaper or toilet roll as the base for your cornucopia.
2. Christmas wrapping
Want to capture the style of an early Victorian Christmas and save money? Get rid of the shop-bought wrapping paper. The tradition of wrapping presents only became widespread in the mid-to-late 19th century.
The rise of gift wrapping was closely related to the move from homemade to shop-bought gifts. Although shops would wrap purchases in white or brown paper, re-wrapping presents with your own paper was thought to make them more personal. As the historian Judith Flanders notes in (2017):
Wrapping a gift … was a way of decontaminating it, both of marking that it had been removed from the world of the shop, and of associating care and the personal with otherwise mass produced items.
Try wrapping your gifts using recycled pieces of fabric and thread from the home for that personal touch.
3. Conversation cards
The “conversation cards” mentioned by Dickens were a popular Victorian Christmas amusement. The cards consisted of two illustrated decks: questions being asked by cartoon men, and answers provided by cartoon women. A man’s question card might ask: “Can you find a place in your heart for me?” A woman’s answer card might respond: “You do make me laugh.”
Male players could choose a particular card from their hand, to which female players would choose an appropriate answer. Alternatively, cards might be drawn blindly from the tops of the two decks for comic effect. These rules were not dissimilar to the modern game . The “conversation” was primarily between the characters on the cards, but inevitably prompted conversation between players.
Victorian packs of the cards occasionally surface on auction sites (often for high prices), but homemade variations can be easily produced. Modern versions could expand the questions and answers to move beyond the romantic topics of the Victorians – or at least allow the female characters to ask some of the questions.
4. Celebrate Twelfth Night with a performance
Although modern retail culture would have us believe that Christmas is well under way by the end of November, Victorians were in no doubt that the 12 days of Christmas started, rather than ended, on December 25.
I have purchased … the entire stock in trade of a conjurer, the practice and display whereof is entrusted to me … if you could see me conjuring the company’s watches into impossible tea caddies, and causing pieces of money to fly, and burning pocket handkerchiefs without hurting ‘em – and practising in my own room, without anybody to admire – you would never forget it as long as you live.
The last thing many of us want to do in January is spend more money, and indeed Victorian celebrations of Twelfth Night to those who could afford to take a full 12 days of Christmas off. But marking the occasion needn’t be expensive.
Charades was a popular Victorian Christmas and Twelfth Night entertainment, as was reading aloud. Performing all of A Christmas Carol might be a stretch, but there are shorter Christmas pieces in Dickens’ (1836). Reintroducing Twelfth Night would make a fitting end to a neo-Victorian Christmas.
, Senior Lecturer in English Literature,
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