The Invention of Christmas
Judith Flanders
When I started researching my book Consuming Passions: Leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain, I thought it would be fun to finish it off with a look at Christmas. It would be a good way of joining together so many of the subjects I had already looked at separately: shops and shopping, holidays, advertising – pretty well everything we take for granted today, in fact. It also seemed to me that it would be fun to go back to a typical Victorian Christmas – all those traditions, and I could write about them in their heyday.
We have in our minds an idealised vision of Christmas: all rosy-cheeked angelic children singing carols while the picture-postcard extended family gathers around the tree. Well, this must exist in some parallel universe, because what I discovered is that this picture is no more Victorian than I am. The Victorian traditional Christmas turns out to have been just a myth.
O Christmas tree
Even Dickens was a surprise. When he first described a typical Christmas, in 1837, the year Queen Victoria came to the throne, while some of the standard markers of the festival were already in place – family parties, mistletoe and holly, plum pudding and mince pies – just as many traditional Christmas symbols were missing. There was no tree, no carols, no cards, no stockings, no crackers, no Father Christmas and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, no presents.
It was only in the 1830s that the most abiding representation of Christmas arrived: the decorated pine tree. There was one brief reference to a Christmas tree in Britain in 1789; then, for the next 40 years, nothing at all until, in the early 1830s, German merchants in Manchester imported one of their cultural traditions: ‘pine tops’, as they were known. Even so, the custom did not prove strong enough to feature in Dickens’ work. And Prince Albert, who is often assumed to have introduced the tree into Britain, did not set up the first ‘royal’ tree for another decade.
Carols and Father Christmas
From trees, I moved on to carols: another big shock. After all, Dickens had called his most famous story ‘A Christmas Carol’, so carols had to be common, right? Nope. Most had been suppressed by the Puritans in the 17th century – to them, the whole idea of Christmas was pagan – and it was only in the 1850s that carol singing really took off. Its success had nothing to do with religion. Instead it was the arrival of pianos in middle-class homes and printing technologies that could produce sheet music cheaply that created the demand. Families could now gather around the piano and carol away together.
Yet while many travelled home for the holidays, one Christmas visitor was still absent: Father Christmas had yet to appear. Instead I found pictures of Old Christmas or Sir Christmas: a thin old man, bearded and a bit droopy. It wasn’t until the 1880s that the American ‘Santa Claus’ was melded with Old Christmas and transformed into Father Christmas, the jolly, red-robed figure we all recognise.
Pudding, pie and turkey
Father Christmas was an import, and imports, I discovered, were the core of the new holiday. Even Christmas dinner had been transformed by new arrivals. Plum pudding, Christmas cake and mince pies all depended on dried fruit which, until the steamships and railways of the 19th century, were both rare and expensive.
Railways also brought about a change in the main course, which traditionally had been goose. In the early 19th century, turkeys, originally from North America and then bred in East Anglia, were driven to London wearing little leather boots to protect their feet. They had to begin their trek in August, because they lost so much weight on their forced march that the fattening-up process had to be recommenced once they reached the market. It was the arrival of the railways that made it possible for people across Britain to have this foreign festive bird.
Cards and shopping
One of the last Christmas ‘traditions’ to arrive was the Christmas card. Until 1840, it was a letter’s recipient who paid for its carriage, and paid a heavy price – as much as 9d for an ordinary letter (£2.39 in today’s money). But then the penny post arrived: now minimum weight letters cost only 1d (27p). Even then, it was only when printing technology caught up and cards could be coloured cheaply that the seasonal card became a reality: by 1878, 4.5 million cards were being sent every December.
Then the Post Office set up a parcel-post department. This changed everything. In the early part of the 19th century, it was food that had symbolised Christmas, but as time went on, it became presents. Even so, as late as the 1840s Christmas presents were still mainly for adults. But by 1888, the link between children and Christmas became crystal clear when a shop in Stratford set up what became an annual Christmas grotto. Probably Father Christmas’s first outing to a department store, by 1889 he was making multiple appearances across the country, promoting shopping for children as the seasonal activity.
Even retailers of non-Christmas items joined in, now running seasonal advertisements even for the most non-seasonal of goods. Eno’s Fruit Salts had a picture of three people dancing and the strap-line: ‘Happy Xmas/We feel jolly and well,/Thanks to Eno’s Fruit Salt.’ Advertisements for Pear’s Soap showed a small child hiding under an overturned bathtub, with the caption: ‘Oh! Here’s a Merry Christmas.’
Home-made?
What I also realised was how international it all was: Germany supplied the trees, the United States both Santa Claus and mass advertising, the Dutch the origin of Santa Claus’s name and shoes to hold presents (even though somehow, in the transmission, the shoes turned into stockings).
So, by the end of the century, the traditional Christmas – that luxurious moment of home-grown tradition – was produced by manufacturers, delivered by railways and advertised by newspapers and magazines. Everything had been reshaped, reordered and repackaged, to be sold commercially as the perfect image of the home-made holiday.
To find out more about this period, check out our Time Traveller’s Guide to Victorian Britain.
