How The Victorians Invented The Modern Christmas | Christmas In The 19th Century

By the 19th century, Christmas had taken on many forms, from the Anglo-Saxon origins of church and fasting, to the Tudor revelry, to the Puritan cancellation of the season, to the Georgian decadent food and balls. But now, Christmas was to undergo another reinvention, and this time, many traditions we might now recognise were about to make an appearance with the Victorian era. While the Georgians had brought back Christmas, it was at first very subdued. With the dawning of the Regency, Christmas began to once more pick up some of the frivolity it once had. But it was still an adult-centred holiday of two halves. A religious holiday with quiet reflection and a gluttonous, booze-filled festivity with plenty of dancing. But in the mid-19th century... Christmas began to take on a more family-orientated feel. This began with one of the most famous modern symbols of Christmas, the Christmas tree. The first decorated evergreen tree was introduced to Britain by George III's German-born wife, Queen Charlotte. In 1800, she set up a table decoration of a Christmas tree at Windsor, complete with tapered candles and presents for the children. But it wouldn't be until the 1840s, when the Victorian press published an image of Queen Victoria with her husband, Prince Albert, and their children standing before a beautifully decorated Christmas tree that the public imagination was grabbed. This famous illustration showed the royal family in a cosy scene, smiling and happy, their tree lit up and covered in colourful toys. But what about the ornaments? Various tree decorations had been around since the first Christmas trees. The first glass baubles and tin figures, produced by Hans Greiner in the 16th century in Lauscha, Germany. The popularity of these ornaments grew, and skilled artisans would blow glass into clay moulds, creating fruit and nut shapes. By the 1850s, the whole of Germany was renowned for its tin and glass tree decorations, and wealthy Victorians eager to emulate the royal family clamoured for them. Other ornaments could include tiny paper baskets filled with sweets, And gilded walnuts, which were often tied with a red ribbon with a hidden fortune inside. The 19th century in Britain brought with it industrialisation and the advent of the railways. As tracks were laid across the British Isles, railways grew as an affordable and convenient means of travel. Soon, even working class people could travel long distances by train, enjoying the first bank holidays, national days of no work. Christmas Day was usually given as a holiday by most employers, although the long 12 days rest from work was a distant memory of the Tudors. The new middle classes, funded by their wealth, enjoyed both Christmas Day and Boxing Day off from work. But unlike their Georgian forebears, Victorian workers were now able to travel by train to see families still living far from the new industrial centres. Helping the idea that Christmas was about seeing people and visiting during the festive season. Boxing Day also still included a form of gift for servants and many workers, with employers perhaps providing a small item of clothing or a cheap cut of meat, but it was a far cry from the Georgian boxes with multiple items. However, in Queen Victoria's own household, servants were shown respect. On Christmas Eve, before the royal family had opened their own gifts, everyone would gather in the servants' hall, and gifts would be given out to the over 100 staff working at places like Osborne and the Isle of Wight. But trains and locomotives weren't all industrialisation brought. While in the past, gifts of any kind had always been made by hand, factories and fast machinery powered by Britain's numerous industrial workers meant mass production became a means of providing people with many new items. While for the poorer parts of society, Christmas gifts might still mean just a few handmade items, some fruit or a hand-sewn garment, the new entrepreneurial middle classes were able to buy gifts at lower prices than in the past, for the first time connecting Christmas gift-giving and shopping. Toys especially boomed, with jigsaws now a popular form of entertainment. The first kaleidoscopes being made in 1817 and rocking horses becoming a toy that also helped children learn how to sit in a saddle and get used to moving on a horse safely. Girls enjoyed wooden and porcelain dolls, dolls houses and skipping ropes, while boys had marbles, tin toy soldiers and toy trains, some of which were powered with methylated spirits to make them move. If someone did still make a homemade gift, paper flowers were a surprisingly adored option in the Victorian period. Real flowers would be carefully taken apart in order to trace their exact shapes, and they were extremely fashionable. A bunch of well-made paper flowers would have gone down very well with a fiancé or mother. Something else new to the Victorian Christmas... was the invention of the commercially available Christmas card. Sir Henry Cole is usually credited with creating the first Christmas card available to buy. He was a civil servant working in the Public Records Office, and just a few years earlier in 1840, had helped Roland Hill in creating the Penny Post, the first postal system in Britain. that allowed someone to buy a prepaid stamp for a penny, attach it to a letter and guarantee its safe arrival. Henry Cole soon saw how this system could be used for sending festive greetings. Instead of writing out several endless letters to friends and family with a personalised message for Christmas, he created the idea of a single generic message that would cover all people And could be sent cheaply. And be quicker. The artist John Calcott Horsley was commissioned to create the artwork for the initial print run of A Thousand Cards for December 1843. He created an image of the Cole family sharing a drink with scenes of charity on the sides, with the poor being given food and clothing. However, there were some criticisms from temperance societies at the sight of people enjoying an alcoholic beverage, and especially at the image of a child sharing the wine. The cards were a success, however, and another 1,050 were printed. Black and white versions were sold for a mere sixpence. While a hand-coloured version would set someone back a whole shilling. As a result, they were still considered quite expensive, and it wouldn't be until the 1870s, when the cost of mass-produced cards decreased substantially, that they would really take off amongst all classes. Another new creation for the Victorians was crackers, invented in 1847 by Tom Smith. Tom Smith had started work as a young boy in a baker's, quickly learning how to create beautiful sugar designs and confections to place on cakes. In 1840 he set up shop on his own, travelling to Paris for inspiration and bringing back to London the bonbon, a sugared almond wrapped in a brightly coloured twist of paper. They were hugely popular that Christmas, but by January, sales had fizzled out. To try and increase sales, Smith included a small love note, known as a motto, inside each bonbon. Sales went up once more with his regular customers, and the business grew enough that by Christmas, Smith was once again trying to think of another way to profit on the short but lucrative festive period. Apparently, it was the crackle of a log he threw on his fire that gave him the pioneering idea And most famous element of a cracker, the noise it makes when pulled, whether called a snap, bang or crack. Eventually the snap would be created, two thin strips of paper within the cracker that made a snapping noise caused by a chemical reaction and friction when they were pulled apart. The bonbon was discarded, the wrapping grew larger and a surprise gift was put inside instead. At first, these novelties were called Cossacks, but after rivals attempted to make their own, the name changed to the colloquial term used, Crackers. After Tom Smith's death, his youngest son, Walter, was responsible for changing mottos to something more Christmassy, such as a festive joke, and introducing the Paper Crown. But no matter what era Christmas is celebrated in, it wouldn't be the same without the food. And the Victorians were no exception. Poorer Victorians would have been more likely to eat a goose for their festive meal. Goose clubs would be set up within factories and communities in which individuals could pay a little money in each week until they had enough at Christmas to afford the goose that would grace their Christmas dinner table. If they didn't have an oven in their own home, which was very common, they would also have to keep a few pennies back to pay the local baker to cook it for them. The Christmas Day menu for Queen Victoria's family in 1840, by contrast, included roast beef and a couple of roast royal swans. But by the end of the 19th century, turkey had slowly made a comeback and was now the main bird of choice for most people for their Christmas dinner. The turkeys were walked from Norfolk Farms in October on an 80-mile journey to London and its markets. Exhausted from their long walk, the poor unsuspecting birds would have then been fed and fattened up in the few weeks before Christmas Day. But there were still several strange dishes to be served up. The recipe book of Miss Leslie includes recipes for calves' feet jelly, sweetbread croquettes, and mock turtle soup. Mock turtle soup was created to try and imitate green turtle soup after the green turtles were almost hunted to extinction. It was made up of brains and various organs. Usually from a calf, fermenty, a medieval dish, was still eaten. It was a kind of wheat porridge served with mutton or ham. Among the upper classes, turkey ballantine was enjoyed. It was a turkey which had been boiled, stuffed and covered in gelatin, then served cold. For dessert, mince pies were still popular. But now had been made small enough for an individual portion. And while they could at times still contain meat, several Victorian recipes call for it, plenty of mince pies were now starting to take on their sweeter non-meat filling. Plum pudding was a big favourite with all social classes, a descendant of the meaty plum porridge of the Tudors. Discarding the meat broth and adding flour and suet, the Victorians turned the appetiser soup into a dessert. The Christmas pudding was made in advance, placed into a muslin cloth or a cheesecloth, and left to mature until the big day, when it would be liberally coated in brandy and set aflame. It would also often be served with custard, another Victorian favourite. Blancmange was also enjoyed, a sort of milk jelly, along with so-called fruit table jellies. Blancmange was another dish that had started in the Middle Ages with milk, almonds and chicken but by the 19th century had become a sweet dish that was also often made into different colours and shapes, as were table jellies. In aristocratic households, table jellies would be set with layers of fruit in ever more incredible and complicated moulds in order to impress guests. After the meal, Victorians would enjoy a variety of parlour games, some of which could be very dangerous. Blind Man's Buff was a favourite, in which the Blind Man was literally blindfolded, and then had to run after guests who were hiding to catch them in a sort of blind tag. After a few rounds of mulled wine, there were probably more than a few injured guests. Snapdragon was another favourite. Raisins would be liberally soaked in brandy or rum, then set alight. Party-goers would try to snatch one of the sweet raisins out of the dish without burning themselves, or setting fire to the surrounding furniture. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this game is that it was very popular amongst children. This in itself was another change for the Victorians, in that Christmas stopped being a mainly adult festival and started to become a family one. In the 19th century, there was a shift to thinking about children as innocent and in need of care, rather than simply being small workers. The family began to change, and activities became more centred around the home. As Christmas became more Victorian, not only did gifts start being more focused on children, such as toys, but other elements were introduced, such as stockings. These began with a legend surrounding Saint Nicholas. The story went that he was staying with a poor family, and the father was planning to sell his three daughters into prostitution in order to save them from starving. Knowing the man would never accept charity, but wanting to help, St. Nicholas waited until it was dark, and threw three bags of gold through the open window in the room where the girls slept. The bags of gold landed in stockings they had hung up by the fireplace to dry. In some stories, they were three balls of gold, and this became represented over time by an orange or satsuma. Children would hang their stockings up in the hope they would be filled. Although this tradition started on St. Nicholas's Day, two separate traditions emerged from this by the early 1800s. One of putting shoes out on the 6th of December and the other of putting a stocking out on Christmas Eve. This, of course, tied in with the other famous legend that started with Saint Nicholas, that of Santa Claus. By the 19th century, Father Christmas, the English personification of Old Christmas, had started to merge with Santa Claus, whose name came from the Dutch Sinterklaas. A variation of Saint Nicholas. Although he wasn't quite in his trademark red suit all the time yet, Clement Moore's famous story, The Night Before Christmas, written in the 1840s as A Visit from Saint Nicholas, was fast establishing more details about Santa. In the famous poem, Santa carries a sack full of toys, flies with eight reindeer in a sleigh, And appears on Christmas Eve by coming down the chimney to fill the stockings. Belief in Santa sometimes wavered, however, just as it does now. Famously, in 1897, a young girl called Virginia, from America, wrote to the New York Sun, asking if Santa was real. In response, she received an editorial, which was initially anonymous, but was later revealed as Francis Farcellus Church. In it, he confirmed that Santa was indeed real, that as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, so must then Santa Claus exist. He argued that just because something couldn't be seen, did not mean it was not real. And that Santa was the embodiment of everything good in the world. But Francis Church wasn't the only one thinking good thoughts about Christmas. Earlier in 1843, Charles Dickens published his now famous novella, A Christmas Carol. A concerned philanthropist of his age, Dickens tied in the horror of ignoring the poor through his main character, the grasping and cold Ebenezer Scrooge. Through the visitations of three ghosts, Scrooge was forced to see the damage he had done in not helping his fellow human beings and mend his ways. Dickens used the book to show the Victorian middle class that they needed to play their part in repairing society and helping the poor. And he used the imagery and traditional associations of the festive season to tie it in with Christmas. Within the story, Dickens captured what was then a Victorian revival in festive customs, as well as the creation of many new ones, and promoted them in the story, such as family gatherings, generosity of spirit, dancing and parties. And thinking of others at Christmastime. The Victorians were the first to create what we might consider a modern Christmas. They popularised the Christmas tree and its ornaments, gift-giving and Santa Claus, Christmas cards and crackers. They also started to shake off the old medieval styles of food and created dishes that were closer in taste, most of the time, to our own palates. The Victorians also made the holiday about family, moving away from adults' revelry and instead focusing on children, party games and thinking of others. Through works such as A Christmas Carol, charitable thinking and giving was revitalised, and the season once more became one of helping those less well off than oneself. So this year, while you enjoy your Christmas turkey, or tofurkey, pop a silly festive hat on your head, open your stocking gifts and pull a cracker, remember to thank the Victorians for their invention of the modern Christmas. If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss any new documentaries.