Why Victorian Christmas Was So Different From Today | History for Sleep

It is Christmas Eve, 1888. Frost is gathering on the railings of a quiet English crescent. Inside a warm brick townhouse, a mother is dressing her home in holly and ivy, filling paper cones with sugared almonds, and fixing thirty-six small wax candles to the branches of a fir tree behind a locked door. Her three children are trying very hard not to look through the keyhole. Down in the kitchen, the pudding has been hanging in its cloth since November, and the goose is waiting in the cold larder. Tonight we follow one comfortable middle-class Victorian family from the first wet holly on the flagstones at dawn on Christmas Eve to the last cold candle on the tree late on Christmas night. Along the way we find out how surprisingly different their Christmas was from ours. Their tree was lit with real flames. Their stockings held an orange and a new penny. Father Christmas had no settled colour. The crackers held no paper hats. And on Christmas night, families gathered round the fire to tell each other ghost stories. Topics Covered: Christmas Eve customs and the superstitions around bringing greenery indoors Holly, ivy, mistletoe, and handmade paper chains in a Victorian home How Prince Albert and Queen Victoria made the Christmas tree fashionable in England What a Victorian tree really looked like: glass baubles, gilded walnuts, gingerbread and sweets Lighting real candles on the tree, and the precautions families took The first Christmas card of 1843, the halfpenny post, and some very strange card designs Tom Smith and the invention of the Christmas cracker Father Christmas before Santa Claus became one figure Christmas stockings and what Victorian children expected to find in them #historyforsleep #victorianchristmas #sleephistory #christmashistory #bedtimestory #victorianera