Queen Victoria's 'Family' Christmas

We can thank the young Queen Victoria and her Prince Albert for our concept of 'Christmas Joy and Caring'. To them we owe our celebration of Christmas Day as a hallowed family holiday. There was little joy in Christmastide when Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Christmas Day was dull working day for all but the rich and noble and not celebrated as a national holiday. It was the new Queen Victoria and her beloved Prince from Germany who brought sparkle and light into the ordinary home at year's end by promoting their own Christmas at Windsor Castle in 1841 as a family holiday celebration. In doing this, they identified and gave crucial royal impetus to a journalistic call for a new spirit of Christmas harmony and reconciliation. Their family initiative was to be emulated and transported by her subjects across an expanding Empire in the years to come.

Christmas in England had not always been drab. Tudor Henry VIII was as lavish in his patronage of song, dance, pageant and feasting during the Twelve Days of Christmas. But his patronage had less to do with the Feast of the Nativity on 25 December and more to do with the Feast of Epiphany on 6 January. This was the English sovereign's traditional identification of spiritual kinship with the Three Kings.

This tradition originated 400 years earlier in the annual demonstration of royal power and munificence at the royal banquets organised by William the Conqueror to impress his assembled nobles, prelates and ambassadors. By the turn of the 16th century 500 years later, this Palace tradition of Twelfth Night pageantry and feasting had been entrenched as a 'Royal Spectacular'. On this day, the Sovereign, suitably robed and crowned, led his subjects in giving and receiving gifts; processing in state to the Chapel Royal where he reenacted the manifestation of the Magi to the infant Christ and their offerings of gold, frankinsense and myrrh. After this Chapel Royal ceremony, which lingers on to this day in truncated form, the King would preside over the most sumptuous royal banquet and entertainments of the year.

We have 12th century records of King Henry II, last of William the Conqueror's Norman dynasty, giving his court jester a position for life to perform saltum, siffletum et pettum, (a leap, a whistle and a fart), at his annual Christmas banquets at Woodstock Palace, (where the Duke of Marlborough's magnificent 18th century Blenheim Palace now stands), near Oxford. Some 200 years later, William Langland in his Piers Plowman wrote of minstrels contributing a pettum to harmonise with their piped melodies for the delectation and merriment of patrons at such festivities. But all merriment, (together with the pettum as musical expression), was axed with the head of King Charles I in 1649. His beheading by Oliver Cromwell and his regicide followers marked the onset of 11 years of Puritan rule and the suppression of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

In this England's governing regime followed the bleak example of religious Reformists in Scotland. They legislated against the 'Heathen traditions' of carols; the frivolity of decorated trees in home and church; the immorality of traditional English Kissing Boughs; the garnering of pagan 'lust-inducing' mistletoe, together with all pageants and joyful singing and dancing during the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Such laws had been enforced in Scotland for nearly 100 years. In 1573 magistrates punished miscreants in St. Andrews for the 'observing of superstitious days, especially of Yule Day'. Two years later in Aberdeen, a group of ladies were similarly punished for 'playing, dancing and singing of filthy carols on Yule Day at even'. (It is worth noting that carol singing was accompanied by dance in earlier times).

A winter of unrelieved gloom enveloped the now Puritan England as any glimmer of seasonal joy and light was extinguished together with the 'popish superstitions of Saint's Days'. The Feast of the Nativity and its concomitant 12 Days of celebration was abolished. Christmas Day itself became just another gloomy working day in a gloomy week at the cold tag end of a gloomy year.

Fun and festivals returned with the 1660 Restoration of that sensual womaniser King Charles II and his reprobate Court. And, at the turn of the 19th Century 150 years later, the portly 'Prinnie', (Britain's future King George IV and Queen Victoria's uncle), pursued his own decadent version of fun and festivity within his Brighton Pavilion surrounded by a hedonistic coterie of revellers. Their singleminded gluttonous debauchery was lampooned by the press. Such 'festive' holiday spirit was not shared with the rest of the country and national memories of such scandalous royal behaviour were to colour Queen Victoria's attitude for life.
Illus: Gillray's 1792 cartoon of 'Prinnie', the obese Prince Regent

When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the Industrial Revolution was changing the face of England's countryside and tearing down the long established social fabric of a once rural Britain. For the common man, woman and every able bodied child toiling in the newly opened coalmines and industrial mills in the rapidly burgeoning, smoke-filled and unhealthy towns, Christmas was as cold, colourless and pennypinched as the drab rest of their painfully short and humdrum lives.

The change from Christmas drabness to Christmas light was as sudden as the conversion of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Its author, Charles Dickens, was no stranger to poverty himself in his earlier years. He published A Christmas Carol late in 1843, penning it in a three months burst of explosive creative passion. It was a personal social indictment and plea for the replacement of pecuniary greed and avarice with charity at Christmas time. It underlined the Royal message emanating from the Palace. Two years earlier Prince Albert had initiated his new concept of 'Family Caring at Christmas', promoting a brand new royal image, with the Queen, himself and baby children, pictured together around a decorated Weinachtsbaum; a 'Christmas Tree' of light. This was a far cry from the centuries of mindless Royal revels of medieval, Stuart and Regency England; a deliberate response by the Prince Consort and his Queen to a nascent mood of social responsibility generated by by social reformers and fostered by the press.

The Weinachtsbaum is a German Rhineland folk custom first recorded in the 1520s. It was brought to England by Germans settling in Manchester during the reign of Prinnie's father, the Hanoverian, George III, (1760-1820). From 1789 it is regularly mentioned, (by George's Consort, Queen Charlotte, among others), as being used by them, their guests and German governesses. In 1832 the young Princess Victoria wrote about "trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments"s that Christmas in Kensington Palace. By 1840 the custom had begun to percolate into the homes of the emerging middle classes in southern England.

The high profile royal adoption of the now anglicised 'Christmas tree' by Prince Albert and the Queen at Windsor Castle in 1841 as a royal symbol of family caring struck an immediate emotional chord in the newly industrialised England at this time of social change, stress and growing spiritual uncertainty. The Queen herself spoke of that first 'family' Christmas as "like a dream", and the Prince wrote to his father of his children being "full of happy wonder at the German Christmas tree and its radiant candles" when they were ushered in to stand in awe before that sparkling tree at Windsor Castle on Christmas Eve.

This was a reinvention of English Christmas by The Queen and Her Prince Consort, expressed in the mood of the day that the emerging middle class and new industrial rich could feel comfortable with in an age marked by radical moral fervor but wracked by religious doubt and appalling social deprivation. With the support of socially aware politicians such as Lord John Russell, writers like Dickens and his fellow journalists in influential magazines like Punch and Illustrated London News, Queen Victoria and her beloved Prince portrayed a new beginning. Together they succeeded in transforming a December workday into a glowing Winter holiday for the family; a blessed time of giving, caring, remembering, and reconciliation.
Illus: Press cartoon of the Royal Family at home

The Prince's Christmas Tree and his Family Christmas became instantly fashionable. Today's 'Traditional English Christmas' was born in a blaze of Christmas Tree lights that Christmas Eve, 1841. By 1850 Charles Dickens was ardently recommending the newly fashionable Christmas Tree custom in the magazine Household Words. He described the tree as lit by 'a multitude of little tapers' and hung with 'books, workboxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat boxes, peep-show boxes'...'there were tee-to-tums, humming tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling bottles, conversation cards, bouquest holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears and walnuts, crammed with surprises'.

By the end of the decade the English publication Lady's Newspaper was writing about the 'very popular' family Christmas Tree hung with gifts and lights. The Weinachtsbaum and all that it now stood for had become universally accepted as a central feature of the new English Christmas.

The custom of present giving, once a feature of the New Year and Twelfth Night celebrations, was brought forward by general usage to Christmas Eve and Day, with gifts becoming a significant part of the Christmas Tree decoration. By the mid 1850s the German Christmas stocking custom was making its way into the households of England, particularly among poorer families who could not afford to pile gifts high beneath the tree. The Christmas tradition of a Santa Claus to fill the stocking arrived from Holland via America at the same time and within three decades Father Christmas and his stocking was a firm favourite with English families and retail outlets.

The clatter of today's shopping mall and High Street cash registers may drown the gentle tinkle of crystal baubles or silver bells on your traditional Christmas Tree. But 160 years later we can still hear that caring family message of Queen Victoria and her beloved Albert, as they stood in silent wonder around that sparkling tree and marveled with the children at the light from the flickering tapers. And I believe we always shall.

May your holiday, whether you celebrate the light of the Nativity, the light of Hanukkah, or the light of the New Year be "like a dream" and "full of happy wonder"; a blessed time of giving, caring and reconciliation.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Author's note. I am indebted to Professor Ronald Sutton, Reader in History at Bristol University, for details of Scottish court cases and Charles Dickens quotes. His books The Stations Of The Sun - a history of the ritual year in Britain, and The Rise and Fall of Merrie England - The Ritual Year 1400-1700, (published by Oxford University Press) are valuable and sometimes provocatively controversial reading on the history of England's religious and social customs.

I have now retired to the Isle of Wight. I invite you to share my weekly jottings at Rosemary Lane, my weekly chronicle of the changing seasons and unhurried village life at my country cottage on Wight, my island idyll.

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Related links
Queen Victoria's picture album

Ever growing archive of photos and portraits from Queen Victoria's reign.