I’m going to take a shot in the dark in saying that whatever you know about Victorian Christmas traditions comes from Charles Dickens’s 1843 novel, “A Christmas Carol” (or, if you’re a 90s kid like me, from the rather less bleak adaptation “A Muppets Christmas Carol”). Yet to limit yourself to either of these two masterpieces would be doing a disservice to your pub-quiz knowledge of quirky Victorian Christmas traditions. For it just so happens that our devoutly religious ancestors had a whole host of weird and wonderful ways to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Spanning the ludicrously long reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 – to 1901, the Victorian Age brought about the birth of Christmas as we know it. It gave us Christmas cards, gift-giving, and Boxing Day, not to mention football festive fixtures and Christmas trees in homes up and down the land. Indeed it’s no small wonder that Christmas trees should have made their way from Germany to Britain with such ease. Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was German, after all.
As well as what we would consider “traditional” aspects of Christmas, the Victorian Age also saw a great deal of experimentation with slightly stranger traditions. For reasons we will come to see, many of these have not survived into the modern age. Quirky, creepy, and often downright odd as they were, this may be for the best.
Sinister Christmas Cards
The Victorians loved their postcards.
Uniformed postmen had been hitting the streets since 1793, but it wasn’t until the invention of the adhesive stamp and the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post—a parliamentary act passed in 1840 fixing the price of all postal correspondence at one penny—that Britain went post mad. Writing to wish friends and relatives seasonal greetings soon became a popular, if not rather time-consuming pastime. Then, in 1843, a chap called Sir Henry Cole, decided that writing to each person individually was too time-consuming and that a card with a festival image would serve just as well. And thus the humble Christmas Card was born.
Things didn’t get off to a great start for Sir Henry. Despite being well received by his presumably many friends, the 1,000 Christmas cards he initially printed weren’t so well received by the British public. Most people were apathetic, but some were actively hostile. The depiction of young children enjoying a small glass of wine around the dinner table brought strong opposition from the Temperance Movement, whose advocates argued that the depiction of alcohol on the front of some of them could encourage people to drink. At Christmas. Imagine that.
Eventually the idea of Christmas cards caught on. People realised the simplicity of selecting an image, filling in the salutation, and popping their card in the post. Within a couple of decades, Christmas cards had become the roaring success they are now (or at least were until the arrival of Facebook). And with their popularity came great potential for artists to get creative. As well as the quintessentially Christmassy scenes of nativities, cherubs, and hearty lunches around a glowing table, artists began decorating their cards with a wide range of utterly batshit designs. Ready?
The Beautiful Game
Though football in one form or another has been played in Britain for centuries, the “beautiful game” as we know it was born in the Victorian Age. The catalyst was the Factories Act of 1850, which banned employers from making people work after 2 p.m. on Saturdays. This gave rise to the new and potentially dangerous concept of free time. Indeed to make sure that men didn’t spend their free time drinking, gambling, and fighting (as Victorian men were wont to do), churches, factories, and military groups set about forming football teams to keep employees out of trouble.
Despite the increasing importance the Victorians attached to Christmas, it still wasn’t enough to dampen their football fever. At Anfield in 1888, Everton drew a crowd of 2,000 (a considerable number for the time) when they played two matches on Christmas Day. Their reward for winning both was a match against Bootle the following day. But whether because of weary legs, hailstorms pelting the players throughout, or the fact that Everton never really could do it on a cold, rainy night in Bootle, it wasn’t such an exciting affair, ending as a goalless draw.
The following year saw the first-ever Premier League match played on Christmas Day between Aston Villa and Preston North End. It was a momentous occasion, drawing some 9,000 spectators. It was also a civil and convivial affair, which is more than can be said for future Christmas Day fixtures.
There was little festive cheer in the air, for example, in the match between Blackburn Rovers and Darwen at Ewood Park on Christmas Day 1890. The teams’ reluctance to field their best for the match resulted in a full-scale riot that saw crowds burst onto the pitch, dig up the turf and smash up the goalposts.
Even the First World War wasn’t enough to kill this tradition. On Christmas Day, 1914, sporadic groups of British and German soldiers met in no man’s land, at various points up and down the Western Front, to fraternize, exchange gifts and kick a makeshift football around (the match probably ended in penalties, and Germany probably won).
Football fever has continued well in our time, though technological advances have changed its nature considerably. Most notably, the invention of the TV and its widespread dissemination into houses up and down the country from the mid-1950s onwards made it a much more domestic, housebound, 2020 lockdown kind of event.
The Festive Pickle
No Victorian Christmas would have been complete without the traditional festive pickle. The green glass ornament would be hidden within the Christmas tree (helped in no small part by its natural camouflage), and whoever was lucky enough to find it first on Christmas would either be treated to a special present or would be allowed to open their other presents first. This rather odd tradition of a fortune-bringing pickle comes from a loosely coherent medieval legend.
- Clearly it’s a Christmas Pickle
According to said legend, two Spanish boys were travelling home from their boarding school for the holidays when decided to check into a roadside inn. Lacking TripAdvisor, however, they soon discovered that the owner of the inn was a complete and utter psychopath, who their possessions and stuffed them inside a (presumably rather large) pickle barrel. Luckily for the boys, St. Nicholas stopped by the inn later that day, and upon learning about what had happened he freed them from their captivity and sent them home to their families.
According to a second, slightly darker version, three Spanish boys who happened to be in St. Nicholas’s hometown of Myra, Turkey, (presumably inter-railing?) were kidnapped by a local shopkeeper. This shopkeeper had a particular hatred for children, but not content with merely holding them hostage, he chopped them up with an axe and stored their remains in a pickle barrel. When St. Nicholas found out about this, he did what any upstanding member of the community would have done, assembling a mob and marching on the shop.
Nah, just kidding.
St. Nicholas fucked off back home, where he prayed for the boys to be returned to human form. Miraculously, God heeded his prayers, and the three boys emerged unscathed from the pickle barrel. In some countries, the tradition of the Christmas Pickle has been preserved into the modern day. Sure, it’s shrivelled up in the UK, but the US city of Berrien Springs, MI is (not particularly well-) known as the Christmas Pickle Capital of the World, holding a unique, and presumably not particularly well-attended annual pickle festival towards the beginning of December.
One Ibble Dibble
As we fall ever deeper into the technological clutches of TV, tablets, and smartphones, we might complain that Christmas today is becoming a much less intimate, family-friendly celebration. There may well be some truth in this, but in a sense we should be grateful. For if we had been born in the Victorian Age (or in any other age since the end of the sixteenth century for that matter), we would most likely have been expected to participate in a group game of Snapdragon.
The premise of this parlour game is simple. First, you fill a shallow bowl full of raisins. Then you drown them in brandy. After that, you set the brandy alight so blue flames dance above the bowl, lighting up the faces of loved ones so that they come to resemble demons.
Finally, in a blatant disregard for health and safety quite typical of a culture that thought sending people to the workhouse was sound socio-economic policy, people would take it in turns to reach into the flames, grab a flaming raisin, and eat it before it could inflict significant burn damage to the tongue or fingers.
- Anyone up for a game of Snapdragon?
Singed fingers and swollen tongues weren’t the only hallmarks of a very merry Christmas. Though it may predate the Victorian Age by some 2,300 years, Blind Man’s Buff (or Blind Man’s Bluff, as it’s more commonly called) was a particularly popular parlour game, despite the extreme violence with which the Victorians played it. As a contemporary chronicler would seem to suggest, more than just blindfolding the seeker or trying to verbally disorientate them, the Victorians had no qualms in throwing obstacles in their way in an attempt to break arms, legs, or heads.
Not all Victorian parlour games were violent, mind you. Charades, Truth or Dare, and a number of other games still played today were popular classics. They were probably more inventive with their forfeits than we are, however. The unfortunate losers of these challenges might, for example, have to make like a statue and allow other members of the group to rearrange their limbs. Or gentlemen might be made to come up with a dozen compliments for a lady that didn’t use the letter “L” or—for the luckier few—to navigate the room and give every lady a kiss.
Have Yourself a Randy Little Christmas
It might strike us as strange that less affluent Victorian families would steer clear of beef and turkey for their Christmas dinner and stuff their faces with aphrodisiacs. However, while today we think of oysters as something of a luxury, in Victorian Britain they were in the preserve of the poor. As one of Charles Dickens’s characters, Sam Weller, astutely commented, “Poverty and oysters always seem to go together.”
- The original oyster card AM I RIGHT
Oysters were particularly popular among the poor of London and the South of England, so much so that they picked up the name, “the poor man’s protein”. They had been eaten in great quantities when there was no meat around since pre-Roman Britain, in fact, only becoming a delicacy when the Romans developed a taste for them and started shipping them back to Italy. The oyster industry grew once again during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the shellfish harvested and served in pubs up and down the country, often with a pint of stout.
They weren’t the only option available to poor families (and by poor, I mean families with an income of as little as £100 a year). Geese would often find their way onto the Christmas dinner table, in lieu beef or turkey. When families had enough money for beef, they would often bake beef and oyster pies. The ratio of meat to mollusc varied, however, depending on how much families had to spend.
It made sense why these families wanted to count the pennies around Christmas time. A theatre production of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” from 1844—the year after the novel’s publication—revealed that Bob Cratchit, the underpaid and undervalued clerk to the protagonist Ebeneezer Scrooge, would have had to put aside a week’s wages just for the basic Christmas feast. To break it down, the goose would have cost around seven shillings, the dried fruit Christmas pudding five shillings, and the sage, onions, and oranges three shillings.
Ghost Stories
It’s symbolically powerful that, in Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts: Christmas Past, Present, and Future. It means to say that during the dark of winter ghosts are all around us; an idea that the Victorians absolutely revelled in (even if it’s something they might not have completely believed in). But while Dickens offers us perhaps the most famous example of this ghostly tradition, the association between Yule and ghoul wasn’t a product of the Victorian Age.
The supernatural element of Christmas long predates Christianity, stretching back to pagan traditions around the Winter Solstice. Anthropologically speaking, it makes sense that we used to think of the coldest, darkest days of the year as the time in which our connection to the dead was at its strongest. And the Victorians capitalised on this association in their newspapers, novellas, and stories told around the parlour table.
One of the most famous ghost-story writers of the Victorian Age was M. R. James. As provost at King’s College Cambridge, on Christmas Eve James would invite small groups of graduates to his college dorm where he would read them a ghost story he had just written. Still widely read or adapted for TV, some of James’s stories are genuinely terrifying, not least the 1904 short story “Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You My Lad.”
There were several socio-economic reasons behind the importance given to ghosts in the Victorian mind. For a start, this was a new age of urbanisation, in which people from the country were moving into packed townhouses already crowded by servants. In such buildings, it was not uncommon to hear creaks in the night, or to see shadows of unknown and unexpected guests. Then there was the fact that everything was illuminated by gaslights, which could induce hallucinations through the carbon monoxide they emitted. Also running parallel to all of this was the rise of Spiritualism.
The prevalence of ghost stories at Christmas died off remarkably slowly. Rather than the Disney films and comedy reruns that plague our screens today, throughout the 1970s, the BBC would broadcast chilling tales on Christmas Eve and the early hours of Christmas Day, and right up to the early 2000s they would wheel out Christopher Lee to read out one of the horror classics of M. R. James before a roaring fire.
“Christmassing”
When it comes to decking the halls and decorating the house, we’re not so different from the Victorians. Around Christmas, households both rich and poor would hang holly and mistletoe in plain sight, as would pubs and churches up and down the country. So plentiful was mistletoe around this time, in fact, that Victorians were even known to sprinkle it over their Christmas puddings. These days it’s impossible to avoid these Christmas decorations as they’re sold almost everywhere. But how did the Victorians get their hands on them?
Written in the 1840s, Henry Mayhew’s book, “London Labour and the London poor”, offers us a valuable insight into the trade of Christmas decoration selling (or “Christmassing” as it was commonly known). On all accounts it was a booming business, bringing in around £15,000 a year. And considering that enough holly was sold not just for every house in London but for practically every room, it’s easy to see why.
Mistletoe was the more traditional plant under which people practised various “ancient” ceremonies (kissing remains one of them). But it was also a lot rarer; a parasitic plant specifically to the apple-tree grown only in the South of England. Its rarity meant that it was mainly in the preserve of the rich of Victorian society: a fashionable status symbol and one of the centrepieces of any respectable Christmas party.
While there was little difficulty shifting these natural decorations, procuring them wasn’t always so straightforward. In the lead-up to Christmas, desperate vendors would scour the streets of London searching for holly. As it was rare to find some not already attached to someone’s house outside, they would sometimes resort to trespassing on private property—hoping not to be caught by an irate homeowner or servant. Their efforts at acquisition weren’t always successful, however— particularly when it was mistletoe they were after. Collecting mistletoe meant combing through orchards that were often well protected by guard dogs and hidden traps.
(Experi)Mental Victorian Christmas Traditions
These days, the only science involved in Christmas is domestic science: namely for how long and at what temperature to cook the turkey so as to neither poison the guests nor incinerate the bird. However, surprising though it may seem, science once played as important a role at Christmas time as gift-giving or cracker-pulling do now. This was in no small part down to the fact that just as Christmas was undergoing its transformation to become a popular festival, so too was science coming to capture the minds and intrigue the imaginations of Victorians the land over.
Newspapers, books, magazines… all advertised family-friendly, science-related Christmas presents and experiments that could be purchased and practiced at home. Not that science mania was only confined to the home of course. Pantomime productions took up science-related themes, and in the 1830s London’s Adelaide Gallery started putting on productions of popular musical pieces—Hayden’s “Creation” and Handel’s “Messiah”, for example—which featured electrical light shows or giant projections of microscopic organisms.
Then, in the late 1840s, the show business scientist of Victorian Britain, John Henry Pepper, arrived on the scene to really spice things up. He treated the Victorians to several scientific marvels, transforming the Royal Polytechnic Institution, of which he was head, into a winter wonderland of electric lights, wacky inventions, and a giant Christmas tree packed full of scientific gifts for kids.
The real showstopper, though, was “Pepper’s Ghost”. Aghast crowds would be treated to an uncannily lifelike phantom floating onstage; the projected plate-glass reflection of an actor concealed from view in another room.
There is, however, one yuletide tradition that has yet to fall by the wayside.
Excluding 1939 – 1942 when any would-be participants were too busy fighting the Germans, every year since 1825 the Royal Institution in London has held its annual Christmas Lecture. The man behind the idea was renowned scientist Michael Faraday, who delivered 19 of them himself. The lectures were aimed at a general audience, and those giving them sought to deliver a scientific topic in an engaging, accessible way. Guest speakers throughout the years have included Sir David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, and other men who have forsaken God.
