Victorian Christmas Trees
In 1848, an etching of Victoria, Albert, and their children gathered about their decorated tree at Windsor Palace was published in The Illustrated London News, launching a craze that has never waned in the British mentality.
As a result of the Saxe-Coburg importation of Albert as Consort and the Christmas tree as his preferred form of decoration, such trees became a central feature of the Victorian family Christmas – interestingly, you can see this development in the work of Charles Dickens whose early books hardly feature Christmas trees but whose later ones do.
What made the Victorian Christmas tree so special was its elaborate decoration including gingerbread men, marzipan sweets, biscuits, fruit, Santas, paper fans, tin soldiers (as mentioned by Hans Christian Anderson in one of his stories of the period), whistles, wind-up toys, gilded pine cones, dried fruits, nuts, berries, and trinket boxes. Paper cornucopias filled with nuts, sweets, and other treats were a Victorian staple and it was not unusual to include small homemade gifts: tiny hand-stitched dolls or children's mittens, hair tidies for women, pen wipers for men and so on. A Christmas doll or angel could usually be found at the top of the tree.
Later in the century imported ornaments from Germany began to replace the homemade ones. First glass icicles and hand-blown glass globes called kugels appeared, followed by Dresdens, which were silver and gold cardboard ornaments in exotic shapes: moons, butterflies, fish, birds, ships, animals, flowers – and press out paper ornaments you could paint and fold yourself were available to the lower classes.
Victorian Tree photograph by Libar, used under a creative commons attribution licence.
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