cc  >> Welcome again to the  Wisconsin Historical Museum  and another installment  of History Sandwiched In.  Today, we have with us,  Ann Koski, who's the former  director of the Wisconsin  Historical Museum.  She'll be talking today about  decorating your Victorian home  for the holidays.  So, without further adieu,  Ann Koski.  (applause)  >> Ann Koski: Thank you.  Good afternoon, everyone.  I'm very glad to see  you all here.  Hopefully, we are having this  program a bit before the  Christmas holidays to enable you  all to learn a little bit about  Victorian Christmases,  about Christmas customs and,  obviously, in particular, about  how to decorate your Victorian  home for the holidays, or just  to decorate your home  in a Victorian fashion  for the holidays.  So without any further adieu,  I want to talk a little bit  about Christmas in general,  the history of Christmas and,  of course, the Victorian times.  We are concentrating on that  time when Victoria was queen  of England, so that would be  1837 to 1901. 

 Why then?  Well, in large part because the  holiday that we know as  Christmas and many of the  customs surrounding it and up to  12th night, which is epiphany,  actually emerged full blown in  this Victorian period.  Prior to that, Christmas has,  if you might say,  a somewhat checkered career.  In fact, if you look way back,  the Romans were celebrating  around the time of the winter  solstice with a feast called  Saturnalia, and that later goes  into the old Norse Jule,  J-U-L-E,  I may be mispronouncing it,  holidays, and into then,  of course, the Christian era in  the Middle Ages when Christmas  was widely celebrated  in a number of ways.  But interestingly enough  something happens on the way to  the Victorian period.  And what happens are the  Puritans and Oliver Cromwell  in England.  Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans  did not like Christmas, and  that's putting it mildly.  In fact, they hated it.  They hated it for a variety of  reasons.  They hated it because they felt  that Christmas and a celebration  of that event was not actually  included in the Bible.  And of course they were very  much traditionalists in terms of  taking the Bible at its word. 

 And in fact of the four books of  the New Testament, the story of  the nativity is only in two of  them and not in the other two.  Apostle John starts with: "In  the beginning was the word and  the word was made flesh,"  that's his beginning.  And then I believe it was either  Matthew or Mark who starts just  about at the time of Jesus  Christ's first miracle.  So it's very small part of the  Bible, and the Christian  emphasis at that time, if you  will, was on Easter, because of  death and resurrection.  And that's what they felt was  important.  As a matter of fact, many of the  important people at that time  and the way that they looked at  it is their death date was far  more important than their  birthday.  That seems very strange to us,  but that was the way it was.  So what happened is in 1644 in  England, Oliver Cromwell and the  Puritan parliament actually  outlawed public Christmas  revelries.  Everything was verboten, and, in  fact, for many years the English  parliament actually met on  Christmas day.  And they decreed that stores and  shops were to the open and no  church services unless it fell  on a Sunday anyway. 

 It was just not considered  to be seemly.  It's also partly because of the  way Christmas was celebrated  prior to Cromwell's time.  It was a time of drinking, that  doesn't seem so bad; singing,  that doesn't either except that  they were always singing bawdy  songs; and here's the part that  really got him, it was the  running riots in the streets.  And they really did, especially  in the bigger cities.  Groups of the thugs, I'm sorry  but it was primarily men, would  get to together and start with  the drinking and the singing  which led to the bawdy songs,  and then they would move to  roaming around, especially in  the richer parts of town.  And they would go and do what we  now think of as caroling, and  they would sing songs and so  forth, and they'd be beating on  the doors and they would want,  the custom was they would want  and, in fact, demand that the  people of that household would  provide them with food and with  drink and eventually money even.  And in fact, if you can think of  that song that comes out about  this time it's "We Wish You a  Merry Christmas."  Now, if you go through the lines  of the song and get to the part  where it gets "Now bring us some  figgy pudding," that's them  demanding food from the rich  homeowners, "Bring us some figgy  pudding."  And what's next?  "We won't go until we get some."  So there's an implied threat  there, and the powers that be  were getting a little bit uneasy  because these riots were getting  bigger and bigger, and so the  Puritans just put a big squash  on it.  Well, you say, okay, that's  England.  Well, that sort of idea makes  its way back to the colonies.  And in the 1650s Massachusetts  and Connecticut, for two states,  also ban all the idea of  Christmas day, Christmas  revelries, it's just a no-go. 

 So New England stretching from  basically Maine, what we now  know as Maine, all the way over  into Pennsylvania.  Christmas was just not a  celebrated holiday.  The south it was a little bit  different but not too much.  And here is some observation,  or an observation by English  actress Fanny Kemble  about Christmas day.  And she's basically saying, this  is in 1832, so it's just prior  five years before Victoria  becomes queen, that here in  America Christmas just isn't  much of anything.  Now in England at that time,  Christmas was not much of  anything either,  but New Year's Day was.  That's when people went  visiting, that's in fact when  many small presents were  actually exchanged and the whole  idea of the 12 days of  Christmas, which starts on  December 25th and goes to the  epiphany which is January 6th,  there was some observation in  Europe and in England about  those sorts of things.  But it's not the way it is in  America.  So what happens?  Well, Victoria and Albert  happen, if you will.  And they are the ones that make  Christmas basically, you might  say, a fad at first, but one  that gains in popularity. 

 And it starts partly because  Victoria marries her cousin  Albert who's from Germany, and  in Germany they have kept up a  number of these traditions.  So he brings those traditions  into England, and then  eventually it makes its way into  America.  Although, again, I have to  stress, and if you read some of  these books that I've got lined  up here on the table, you can  read about some of the various  things that we know happened in  the colonies that sort of  appears to be somewhat similar  to some of our aspects of  celebrating Christmas.  Now let's get, right off  the bat, to decorating.  And the parlor, the parlor is  probably the most important room  of the Victorian home.  Why is it important?  It's because it is the public  room of the household.  It is a room that you want to  make an impression upon those  who come to visit you.  So it's supposed to include your  most expensive and wondrous  things.  Christmas is no different.  Except when you start looking at  a number of the very early  photographs of what parlors  looked like at Christmastime  it's fairly simple in most of  the homes. 

 Basically, it's a Christmas  tree.  And so you could, if you wanted  to be very austere, and if you  wanted to do, if you will, the  very early parts of the  Victorian period in terms of  decorating, you can simply  put up a tree.  Now I can bet that maybe some of  you gentlemen are back there  thinking that's going to get me  out of a lot of things.  (laughter)  But my also guess is  that if any of you do have a  Victorian home it dates to the  later period of the Victorian  era, so about say 1870 to 1901.  So if that's the case, you're  going to see that things change.  So the tree is it in the parlor.  I mean, it is the focal point  of the parlor.  However, as time goes on  other things start to appear.  So for instance in this  particular parlor, which dates  to right before the Victorian  period ends, you can see not  only a tree, but wreaths.  The very first wreaths that were  used during this Victorian  period, the most authentic,  are made out of holly. 

 And holly was very important  symbolically, not only to the  Victorians, but to those people  earlier.  For one thing, like evergreens,  it's green in the winter.  The other thing is it has the  red berries.  Now the symbolism came about  during this Victorian time that  the holly represented the  crown of thorns worn by Christ.  And holly, according to the  legend, originally had white  berries, but when the crown of  thorns pricked Jesus' head and  he bled, the berries immediately  turned red.  So we've got those two Christmas  colors of green and of red.  And those are very important.  You notice it does have  a bow on it, but not velvet.  They were using red satin  ribbon, not velvet like we tend  to think of today in terms of a  Victorian decoration.  Garlands were also very popular. 

 Sometimes used very simply,  as you see here.  With the garland just draped  around the roof, or excuse me  the roof line, ceiling line of  the room.  And also notice holly here,  and behind the pictures,  and so forth.  Again, that use of holly, which  is also symbolic of the Pagan  festival that I talked about  earlier, Saturnalia.  And in that case, they would  often bring both evergreen  boughs, and holly, and ivy,  into the house at this time  of the winter solstice.  Again that idea of looking  forward to the spring and this  evergreen sort of optimistic  view that we're going to  celebrate the last day of the  season of winter, basically of  the cold and the shortest days  and the longest nights.  And we are now turning  into a period where we're moving  towards springtime.  Here's another example, not only  of a wreath, but the garlands  and then hanging down here are  snowballs.  Handmade snowballs.  For those of you who are  knitters, do we have any  knitters here?  A couple. 

 You know how to make pompoms,  right?  This is the same idea where you  cut lengths of string or yarn,  especially fluffy yarn, if you  will, and then tie it in the  center and fluff it out and you  now have a snowball pompom.  And this was, again, a favorite  sort of thing to do.  But notice one thing in this  particular instance they're  concentrating the decorations  all in one spot.  Now most of the photographs that  I'm going to show you here today  tend for be ones from lower  income to middle income houses.  Obviously as you get up into the  very wealthy homes, you're going  to see different sorts of  decorations, much more  elaborate, much more time  consuming to do and much more  inclusive of a variety of types  of decorations.  One thing that is pretty  ubiquitous, whether it's the  simple garland that you saw in  the one home earlier or some of  the suggestions as came out in  Vick's Floral Guide: "How to  Decorate," is that it does  include lots and lots of  garland.  Usually hemlock and other firs  and oftentimes, if you will,  with color added by putting in  colored fall leaves or berries,  and things of that nature.  So here you can see a suggestion  of how you might do your parlor.  And if you've got a very  interesting entry way  you can hang ropes of garland.  Now it's also, note, again,  where it's coming from. 

 It's coming from a floral guide.  Interestingly enough, if you go  to like Godey's Lady's book or  Peterson's Lady's book, they  don't recommend the use of a lot  of garlands and things like this  especially like this.  Why would you expect that so?  >> Because the needles get all  over the floor.  >> Exactly, the needles drop.  And then you've got a mess  in terms of house cleaning.  So you read those books and they  say the practical housewife  does not use real garland.  And you get artificial things  as early as the 1840s.  In large part it comes out of  Europe.  In large part it comes out of  England.  Why?  Because people get so excited  about all the Christmas trees  and all the garlands and things  like that, that they're actually  denuding the countryside of  trees, and so forth. 

 And you think that wouldn't  happen in America, but actually  by 1902 President Theodore  Roosevelt was worried enough  about it that he was trying to  get a moratorium on cutting  American trees, evergreen trees.  And the folks in what became the  DNR convinced him that it's okay  because cutting out of smaller  trees opens the forest canopy  out.  And also this is the birth  of the Christmas tree farm.  So Teddy, how shall I say it,  relaxed his views so we don't  get that banning of trees  like they did in England.  Now here's, I'm going to show  you more elaborate little  niches.  In the house, in the parlor.  Parlors are where the  Christmas tree always is.  So for us, obviously that  translates into the living room.  But here you can see they cut  out either board or cardboard,  covered it with cotton batting  and made, again out of the  batting, icicles and then put  the greens above it.  That is not very difficult for  any of us to do, other than the  fact that you have to have sort  of a bay window or a niche to do  it in. 

 Here's one that even more  elaborate with lots of greenery,  garland made out of the  ubiquitous strung popcorn.  They did use that.  A red honeycomb bell and, of  course, the Christmas tree.  Now, that red honeycomb bell is  kind of interesting, because  that comes in just prior to the  end of the Victorian era.  So you can see they were first,  actually it's just after,  because they were first made in  1908 and first advertised in  1910.  Which is kind of interesting,  because then when you start to  take a look at photographs,  you can start to find some of  these honeycomb bells.  And look at the dates.  There's one bell there,  one bell there.  They're about be hung from the  chandelier in the dining room.  Again notice the main decoration  is a tree; there's some holly  around the photographs; bells  hanging from the chandelier. 

 But that's it in these  lower class homes.  Also note that the Christmas  tree is a floor to ceiling one.  We're going to talk a little bit  more about trees in a few  minutes, but this is more of a  later on thing, a type of  custom.  It is one that is primarily  more American than Europe.  Here is a house where they have  several Christmas trees and  the holly and the evergreens  decorating above the  photographs.  Now, this is interesting,  this is drawn by Thomas Nast,  the illustrator  for Harper's Weekly,  who basically started out one of  our major versions of how  we think about Santa Claus.  He calls this one "Christmas  Flirtations," because notice  the mistletoe up here.  There's all sorts of symbolism  about mistletoe, and personally  I think she's also got it here.  (laughter)  Although that's probably holly,  but I figured if he called it  "Christmas Flirtations,"  she's taking no chances.  (laughter)  In America, the very best holly  was considered to be  English holly, or excuse me,  mistletoe. 

 There is America mistletoe  but it was not considered to be  quite as pretty.  So there would be hundreds and  hundreds of tons of mistletoe  shipped every year from England  to the Americas.  Now that poses a certain  problem.  Number one is mistletoe is a  parasitic type of plant and  eventually England runs out of  mistletoe and then they start  having to import it from France.  And of course, the Brits get  a little bit upset, because  much of their best mistletoe  is being sent to the Americas,  and they have to settle  for the French stuff.  But eventually not only do the  Americans start getting the  French but they also start using  their own mistletoe much more,  simply because it's fresher.  And not only fresher, that means  the berries hang on longer.  Now, why is that a problem?  The thing is the custom was when  you kissed, and this was put up  Christmas morning, but when you  got a kiss under the mistletoe,  you were supposed to remove  one of the white berries.  So the kissing would last as  long as there were berries.  Now it's rumored that there were  some young ladies who would  make sure that the berries  never ran out. 

 And in fact, believe it or not,  augmented the mistletoe with  more berries so that they would  have a chance.  There's a wonderful story about  a gentleman being interviewed in  the late 1890s.  He was a seller of Christmas  greenery in New York City.  And he had a big ball of  mistletoe.  And of course the bigger the  ball, the more expensive.  And of course the bigger the  ball, the more the berries.  And he said he always knew the  father who had many girls who  had to get married, and he would  ask the gentleman, the father,  for different amounts of money  depending on how desperate  he figured the fellow was to  get his daughters married off.  So if it was a fellow who only  had one or two daughters, he  didn't really need the mistletoe  very much, so he would  get sold a smaller branch  with not so many berries.  But the fellow who had nine  daughters, he said he always was  managing to sell that great big  ball of mistletoe for about $20.  And you figure in 1890,  that's quite a bit. 

 So I just find this very  interesting.  Although, this is my favorite,  my very favorite,  parlor decoration for Christmas.  Any hunters here?  Well, if you've been wondering  what to do with that buck, you  don't have to worry about just  doing the head now and stuffing  that, you should stuff the whole  thing.  And look, and then you could  have your children or your  grandchildren in a little sleigh  and have their Christmas  portrait taken in the parlor.  So they were very inventive.  And I really do like that one.  But what about the tree?  That is the focal point.  There have been trees  noted since 1510.  Although the one noted in 1510  was actually outside,  and it was burned.  So I guess in a way you can't  say that as part of the ceremony  we have the Christmas tree  burning ceremony  on Christmas day. 

 But as you get further and  further, and closer and closer  to the Victorian era, you find,  especially in, or coming out of  Germany, more and more stories  about decorated trees,  especially indoors.  But it's not until this image  is published in England in 1848  that the idea of a Christmas  tree indoors, a decorated tree  indoors, really becomes popular.  This really kicked it off.  It was published in the London  Illustrated News, 1848.  And what you have here is  Queen Victoria, notice the  crown, Prince Albert with his  sash here, surrounded by their  children and here's the  Christmas tree.  It's a tabletop tree,  it is not floor to ceiling.  So the first trees that were out  there were tabletops.  And what Victoria does by  putting this image out is to  convert the idea of Christmas  from the previous medieval  version of running around  in rioting crowds  singing bawdy songs  to a family-oriented event.  Now how is this translated  over in America?  Well, two years later in Godey's  Lady's Book, they take the same  image and look what they do.  Well, they make it  an American family. 

 So I'm going to back up here  again.  You have the servant, you have  the Queen with her crown  and Albert with his sash.  And now you've got the  grandmother, the mother,  crown gone, and the father,  sash gone, but still exactly  the same idea of a tabletop tree  with a creche underneath,  that's actually a very dramatic  type, or Polish custom,  and the family.  Now it was very easy for folks  who lived out in the country,  and that's most Americans at  this time, to simply go out into  the woods and harvest their  tree.  For others living in cities, it  was necessary to go to a market,  a Christmas market, where folks  from the countryside would bring  in the different trees and  evergreens and so forth.  And of course, then there comes  the whole part about decorating  the tree.  And it's kind of fun when I saw  all you gentlemen coming in,  I figured that you're here  because you're going have to do  this, right, with some  direction.  Obviously, with supervision.  So I have the supervisors and  the workers here today.  Well, notice it wasn't any  different in the 1800s. 

 (laughter)  And father and mother  decorating the tree.  And it would be decorated on  Christmas Eve in the parlor with  the parlor shut so the children  would not be able to go in.  And then the parlor doors were  opened on Christmas morning  to a beautifully lit tree  where the lights were candles  and lots of candles.  We're talking about, say,  if you had a 12-foot tree,   they said you needed 400 candles  to light that tree properly.  Now, what does that first mean  to all of you?  >> Fire.  >> Fire, right.  So that's one of the reasons why  the candles were lit just before  the children came in and then  promptly extinguished.  They may be lit one other very  short time during the Christmas  day festivities when the family  was there.  But they weren't left on.  They weren't turned on at night  and then left on for the evening  or lit in the morning  and kept on all Christmas day. 

 No, it was a very short period  of time, and the smart homeowner  would have a bucket with water  or a bucket of sand with  a shovel right behind the tree.  Now Americans had both in the  sense of the tabletop tree, the  short one, as well as the very  big ones, floor to ceiling.  That was of course for us,  we had a plethora of those trees  available.  The first way that they kept the  tree up was simply boards formed  in the shape of a cross and  nailed on to the bottom of the  tree.  By the late 1800s, folks started  to invent different tree stands.  So a tree stand is authentic  except what's missing in here?  >> Water.  >> Water, right.  Because the Christmas tree  would not last for very long.  It would be taken out usually  the day after Christmas.  So they barely needed a way to  make it stand and be more secure  because the other thing you'll  see as we go through more and  more objects get put on the tree  so you need a more and more  stable base to that. 

 One other thing is, it's a  little hard to see in this, but  there's actually holes in here  and they would screw that down  to the floor.  Why?  Well, because one of the things  that they hung on the tree  were presents.  So when all of the kids were  plucking their presents off the  tree, you really wanted to have  it fairly stable.  Now my father, I don't know  about you, but when my brother,  the first Christmas he walked  he took down, I'm told, our tree  three times before my father  wised up and he wired the tree  up on the top to grommets  in the ceiling.  Any of you guys  know that trick, too?  Yeah, I'm seeing some nodding  heads.  Now here's one of the very  earliest decorated trees  I could find in a photo.  Sorry to say it's from  Minnesota.  But you get the idea.  It's a tabletop tree.  There's not a lot of decorations  on it. 

 Certainly you have the popcorn,  the strung popcorn.  Sometimes they would put various  berries on it.  Not necessarily cranberries.  Cranberries, if they could get  them, if they lived near a  source, but other types of  berries would work as well.  Now, here's a little bit later.  1898.  And you see here one of the most  popular forms of Christmas tree  ornaments.  And they're being made,  they're cornucopias.  Where you just take a piece of  paper and make it into a cone  and put a little handle on it  and you decorate it, and then  inside you put nuts and candies  and maybe other little tiny  gifts, novelty presents  and so forth.  And you see occasionally  a glass ornament. 

 And here you see another way of  stringing the popcorn, so not  just looped from branch to  branch.  But if you want a little bit  more of a different type, you  can see the different garlands  of popcorn coming down.  By this time also there were  various vendors selling wooden  popcorn or wooden beads that  could also be strung along with  your popcorn.  But notice one thing here, this  is a couple years later, you see  more and more of the glass  balls.  That's because by the 1870s and  starting in the '80s,  commercially made ornaments  were available.  And it's interesting that the  first ornaments actually  came out in Germany.  They were blown glass  in Germany, 1860.  But they don't actually start  to show up here in America  until the 1870s.  So if you're trying to do  an 1860s tree, it would be  inaccurate to put glass balls  on it.  By the 1870s, yes,  but not a lot of them. 

 It's not like what we often do  today where we might go out and  say I want a red Christmas tree  this year, so we put on red  lights and we buy a whole bunch  of red balls and put that on.  No.  What they would do is every year  or so buy a few glass ornaments.  So five years into this,  you might have 20 different  glass ornaments on,  and the rest are handmade.  Or you could buy these special  cutout, basically cardboard  figures that were then decorated  with tinsel and glitter.  So these are some of the very  earliest ones.  This photograph, I believe,  if I remember right,  dates to about 1880.  Now what about lights?  We talked about the fact that  the first lights that you had  are candles.  But the folks of the time did  realize the fact that it was  highly dangerous.  So they started looking very  early on for different ways to  have that sparkly look on the  tree. 

 One of the very first lit  Christmas trees was 1888.  Why then?  Well, a couple years earlier  Thomas Edison had invented the  light bulb.  And in 1888 some of his  employees actually blew glass  bulbs and wired them  individually onto a tree that  was standing in a bay window  in a very fancy house  in New York City.  And they wired these light bulbs  onto the tree in 1888.  So that's the first electrically  lit Christmas tree.  Well, it wasn't very much longer  before the others started  putting out lights.  Only they started first  with individual bulbs  like Thomas Edison's VP had.  And you would actually buy them  in sets of 12.  But then you would have to hire  an electrician to come into your  home to wire up your tree  to get them all wired,  and then it would go into  a electric socket, usually  into the chandelier nearby.  And it wasn't until 1907, as you  can see here, the EverReady  Company actually came out with a  strand that had eight bulbs. 

 Now the only problem with that  is if you had a fairly decent  size tree you had to have a  zillion strands.  Because it wasn't like today  where you could tie them into  each other or where you have a  hundred bulbs or so forth.  So it was very, very difficult  to, in fact, have a lit  Christmas tree.  So what about presents?  They go with the tree, right?  Well, you'd have very many  different examples of the types  of things that Godey's Lady's  Book, or Peterson's or whomever,  would recommend to give for boys  and girls and adults.  And originally in early  Victorian times, presents  weren't exchanged between  adults, it was simply for kids.  That changes as there becomes a  bigger middle class, they have  more money, and so presents  become available, if you will,  to boys and girls and adults.  Now here's an example I love,  this is a before and after.  Many of the Christmas presents  were actually hung on the tree.  This is another reason why you  needed that sturdy Christmas  tree stand.  And you can see here's one,  it's got all the kids in there  Christmas morning and they're  gazing with rapture on the tree  with the presents. 

 So that's the before.  Now take a look at the after.  That poor tree has been ripped  to shreds.  All the presents that were  tied on there are now gone.  So that's how you handle the  smaller ones.  What about the bigger ones?  Well, they were laid out  around the tree.  And this was by 1899.  It's kind of fun if you on  www.wisconsinhistory.org  and go to the visual images  and type in Christmas, you will  see a series of this family's  tree from about the late 1870s  up to about 1910.  And it's fun to watch, because  you can see how the tree  changes, how there becomes more  and more ornaments and the  presents.  There gets to be more and more  presents, not only because they  have more and more children, but  because they have more money to  be able to spend on this. 

 But the presents are all here  underneath the tree.  And they're not wrapped.  And you often took photographs  of your children with their  trees.  Now this one, now notice this is  Wisconsin in December so they're  obviously having a warm December  like we're having a warm  November, and they had their  various presents out there.  It's kind of interesting to  note, I'm going to go back here,  that like I said none of these  are wrapped.  So when does wrapping begin,  wrapping of presents?  If you go read some of those  books it will tell you wrapping  of presents begins when the  first commercial presents  start to become available.  And people wanted to disguise  the fact that they had bought  you a present instead of made  you a present.  I'm not so sure that's quite it.  I think it's more that we like  to decorate and Victorians  love decoration and the more  decoration the merrier.  But the first wrapping paper  was basically plain white paper. 

 And it was often sealed  with gum seals or with string.  Later on they started using  decorated boxes.  So this is kind of the evolution  of wrapping paper.  And it's not until about the  nineteen-teens about 1917  when you first started having  decorated paper.  And it was sold in small sheets.  And people didn't take to it  a lot, but it was available.  But in the early 1930s  guess what becomes available?  Scotch tape.  And with the advent of scotch  tape wrapping paper just goes  crazy.  Stockings.  The stockings were supposed to  be hung by the chimney with care  but sometimes they were put in  the parlor, and other times they  were, in fact, hung by the  chimney. 

 And you can see some are  commercially made  or made according to a pattern,  some are just stockings.  And there's all sorts of  traditions, again, that go with  the whole idea of stockings  that have to do  with St. Nicholas.  So, of course, our next topic  has to be Santa Claus,  or St. Nick.  Our real version of Santa Claus,  or the modern version,  comes in 1823, when  "The Night Before Christmas"  is actually published.  Clement Moore claims that he  wrote it in 1822 but it wasn't  originally published until 1823.  There's some very interesting  books out there that claim he  was not the author.  That in fact another gentleman  was.  And so regardless, you've got it  there and this is where you get  the first idea of Santa Claus  coming in a sleigh with eight  tiny reindeer and leaving  presents for the children.  Now here's the first depiction  of Santa Claus.  1837. 

 Now tell me would you want this  man coming down your chimney?  (laughter)  I'd be a little worried what  kind of presents he's bringing.  And he goes by a whole variety  of different names of course.  But it's Thomas Nast, the  illustrator, who really brings  forward then the look of Santa  Claus, the first modern look of  Santa Claus.  And this is his first version.  It's 1863 and he does that on  the behest of President Abraham  Lincoln who's showing the troops  as having a very wonderful  morale and Santa Claus is here,  and notice almost an Uncle Sam  type of a uniform  with the striped pants  and stars on blue fur  handing out gifts to the troops.  Now here's a Thomas Nast image  from 1881.  And Thomas Nast goes on  to define it.  The next defining moment,  believe it or not, comes later  in the 1930s when Coca-Cola  starts their advertisements  with a Coca-Cola Santa Claus.  But people did dress up  like Santa even then.  This is actually again from  Minnesota, but this one too,  I'm not so sure I want this  Father Christmas coming to my--  Look at the look on  these children's faces. 

 (laughter)  I think that they can't quite  decide if they should stay and  get presents or run screaming.  So we're going to end with the  dining room because that's  the second other public room  in the house.  So it's the other one that would  have been decorated in one form  or the other.  Of course the whole thing with  Christmas feasting is the whole  idea of gathering the family  beside you.  And the cooks would actually  start some of the Christmas food  preparation a month ahead.  Here is a typical Christmas day  menu.  So for breakfast, they  recommended a light one with  oatmeal and French chops, which  are like pork chops, omelets,  pulled bread and coffee.  So then you do that, then you go  and do the tree and while the  kids are having a great time  the mom has to rush out because  she's got to get Christmas  dinner ready to go.  So she does all this and then  she's exhausted and the kids  are playing and there's no TV,  so they aren't watching whatever  football game is on.  But she, after she cleans up  from all this, then gets supper  ready as well. 

 So she's got a pretty big task.  But sitting down, notice the  chandelier above has either  greenery or holly.  That's very, very typical.  Also remember in some of those  places we saw the red honeycomb  bells being hung beneath it.  This is a table set for  Christmas from Villa Louis.  Now who's been to Villa Louis?  It's a great, wonderful  historical site.  They actually have documentation  that this was the way that the  table looked.  We know they had red tapers.  We know that they had their  fruit piled high.  We know from the bills what they  actually had to eat. 

 So this is a very sumptuous sort  of table that was being set.  However, that's what they do  in the dining room.  They did very little else,  at least here, because we're not  able to substantiate it.  Again this one's a little bit  different, but you see crepe  paper, which Dennison Company  comes out with fairly early in  the 1900s, a little Christmas  tree there.  They're some instances in the  late Victorian of upside down  Christmas trees, especially in  the dining room.  That's more of a Polish custom  actually than an English one.  But they did exist.  And that came back, if you will,  a couple years ago they were  very big and Hammacher  Schlemmer, that catalog,  was selling them.  So then to end up with, because  I do need to finish you up  fairly shortly, there's just  some fun Christmas facts.  Notice the first state to  establish Christmas as a legal  holiday was Alabama. 

 And that's partly because in the  south when the Puritans were  squashing Christmas, the folks  in the south, coming from a  different religious tradition,  still celebrated it.  So southern Christmases became  quite well known.  Wisconsin did so in 1861, just  at the start of the Civil War.  So you can see some of these  other sorts of things.  The poinsettia.  Should you have poinsettias  as part of your Christmas  decoration?  Yes.  It was a very important flower,  religious flower,  for the Aztecs.  And in Mexico, the poinsettia  was used heavily during  the Christmas holidays.  It doesn't get up to us until  about 1870, but by 1870 it has  been brought to America  by the Mexican ambassador.  He has popularized it and they  are being sold in flower shops  and so forth. 

 So can you decorate with  poinsettias?  Absolutely.  I think it's kind of interesting  that Clement Moore  or Henry Livingston, depending  on who you think wrote  "The Night Before Christmas,"  he did one of the reindeer,  he named them.  And one of them was called  Donder, but it was changed in  1930s when they wrote the song  Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,  and they changed it because it  was easier to sing, to Donner.  So another, just all sorts of  fun sorts of facts about  Christmas.  And, as I mentioned, there's  plenty more in those books, and  they only gave me 45 minutes to  talk and they said if you get it  done in less so people can ask  questions, that's even better.  Obviously, I will stick around  but I could go on forever and  ever and ever about a lot of  these Christmas customs because  we didn't cover Christmas cards,  we didn't cover carols and  singing, in large part because  I was trying to focus in on how  the Victorians actually  decorated their home and throw  in a little bit of information  about customs.  So does anybody have any  questions for me?  Yes?  >> Do you know where it came  from that naughty children  got coal?  >> Well, actually the whole idea  of naughty children goes way  back.  And in many instances,  Father Christmas, as he was  often known then, or Old Man  Winter, had a companion.  In Holland, it was Black Peter.  In Finland, it was the goat. 

 And they would be there to watch  over and see what children were  good and which children were  bad.  So it's not until about, say,  the 1920s and '30s where  the whole idea of Christmases  as being a fun thing, not as  a being a retribution for  bad behavior comes forward.  Although it's still out there;  it's still being used.  I know we have a great story  about my niece who I was  babysitting at one point,  so her parents could go out  Christmas shopping, she was  probably three at the time.  She was giving me a little bit  of hassle, and I told her she  had to go to bed.  She wasn't going to go to bed,  and I said, hey, Santa Claus is  watching, you got to be good.  So she starts up the stairs to  go to bed, stops, turns around  looks at me and says,  he's got to sleep sometime.  (laughter)  I pointed out that's why  he has elves, so they're 24/7.  And then she went to bed.  So it's a long tradition. 

 Yes?  >> Are you going to make me look  in the books or do you know  offhand the symbolism of the  ivy?  >> Ivy is pretty much the same  as the evergreens and so forth.  It's interesting that holly was  always considered sort of a male  aspect and ivy the female.  So ivy was considered softer.  And it was not, it was used as  you would use any other  evergreens, but it didn't have  the symbolism that the holly did  just because the holly was  masculine and had the dark green  and the red berries.  Yes?  >> Were the first Christmas  cards postcards?  >> No, they actually come later.  The first Christmas cards were  1843 printed up by a fellow by  the name of Clay out of England.  And Christmas cards got to be  real big until about 1910.  And that's when penny postcards  really came in, and they  literally crushed the Christmas  card business at that time.  And then Christmas cards come  back in later on in the 1900s.  It's also interesting that  Christmas cards evolve at the  same time a reliable postal  service comes about. 

 Because why would you send  Christmas cards if you couldn't  get them to people.  So one went in hand with the  other.  >> We had the opportunity to  visit Williamsburg at  Christmastime not too long ago,  maybe others have too, but not  really thinking we remarked  where are the Christmas trees?  Well, Williamsburg is a 1700s  US town, and of course this is  pre-Christmas tree for America.  >> Right, although some of the  Germans did have them at that  time, but it was few and far  between.  >> We heard too that the  Hessians, which were mercenaries  during the Revolutionary War,  had brought the custom of the  Christmas trees from Germany.  >> And that's a good story  but nobody's been able  to confirm that.  And if you read these books  they will say legend has it.  And supposedly when George  Washington was crossing the  Delaware on Christmas Eve,  supposedly one of the reasons  why the Hessians were caught  flatfooted is that they had  their Christmas tree up and they  were wassailing it.  >> But in Williamsburg they did  have evergreen wreaths that they  decorated with fruit or nuts and  they also had a few garlands.  >> And holly was often done in  wreaths earlier and brought in  as part of this whole winter  solstice idea. 

 You have to remember the  Christian clergy is trying to  replace the Pagan festivals with  Christian ones.  So the whole idea of wreaths and  stuff made of holly, they put  their own, if you will, story to  it, the whole crown of thrones  and the red representing  Christ's blood and so forth.  Yes, ma'am?  >> You mentioned Villa Louis?  >> Yes.  >> And I've not been there  but do they decorate in this  traditional fashion for the  holiday if you go out and tour  the home?  >> They have in the past, and  this year for the first time  they are not doing that.  It's partly because of budgetary  reasons.  I know that they hope to do it  again.  And they do.  The Dousman family is wonderful  and that house is great, in  large part because they have  records.  So they are able to look in  Mrs. Dousman and the girls'  diaries and their correspondence  and their bills, which tell them  what kind of food they're buying  from the local grocers, what  kind of foods they're actually  importing in like oysters and  different types of desserts and  so forth that they're having  shipped from Minneapolis  St. Paul, or from Milwaukee.  So we know what they're  serving at different times. 

 The other thing is that in the  1890s, one of the daughters had  a birthday, her 18th birthday,  which was right close to  Christmas.  So they had a huge ball and  there's an account of that ball  in the newspaper, and they list  some of the things that the  people who came to the house at  that time could see.  So we have a very, very good  idea of what it looked like.  So they do it very  authentically.  Yes, Hank?  >> When did fruitcake become  associated with Christmas?  (laughter)  >> You mean figgy pudding?  (inaudible)  Well, actually it's figgy  pudding, it starts out  as figgy pudding, and  it's popular from way back when.  And it's certainly very, very  popular in Victorian times  especially because Queen  Victoria for her wedding cake  had a fruitcake.  Of course it was 40 feet wide,  Victoria's fruitcake wedding  cake.  And then she had hundreds of  smaller fruitcakes that she had  made up, and she and Albert gave  them to like the guests and  retainers and so forth  to take home as a memento  from their wedding.  So it wasn't just for  Christmastime.  >> Was it more of a German idea?  >> No. 

 Yes, ma'am?  >> I went to an -- program in  the summer in New Jersey  and we toured--  (inaudible)  But anyway, I saw  a celery dish and I noticed  celery was one of the things on  the menu served at dinner, and  I guess that was considered,  you served celery to guests  it was like you were showing,  displaying your wealth, showing  you were rich and everything,  trying to impress people.  I would have thought that dish  was a vase if they wouldn't have  told me that that was for  celery.  >> Yes, if you've never seen a  celery dish, it does, it looks  like a vase.  It's got a tall columnar  main part of the body  on a little platform.  And you stick the stalks of  celery in it so it sticks out.  I know I always thought it was  more like a boat, like so.  And then you'd lay the celery  in.  But it isn't.  It's an upright type of,  it's usually glass.  And they also had, this is kind  of fun, what's happening in the  1870s, '80s and '90s is this  growth of the middle class. 

 And with the growth of the  middle class you have  a large group of people  with money to spend.  It doesn't have to be just to  buy food, shelter, clothing.  You now have things that you  can buy jewelry, you can buy  presents for people,  you can buy your own clothes.  All this sorts of things that  in 1840 you couldn't do,  and definitely not earlier.  So with that comes a great  proliferation of stuff.  And in fact, in 1870s the  Montgomery Ward catalog was  about that thick, same with  Sears, and by 1880s, mid-1880s,  it's like this thick.  So in that very short period of  time, all sorts of stuff.  And one of the things they try  and do is say you need all these  different forks and knives and  dishes and so forth.  There's a book written at the  time that suggests a woman  should have this full complement  of dishes.  Which includes place settings  for 12. 

 If you would buy the whole  thing it's 544 individual  pieces of dishes.  That's not the flatware,  that's just the dishes.  And other things come up  like for instance the banana.  And the banana starts showing up  and being imported and being  available to Americans  in about the 1870s.  And not long thereafter  everybody had to have a glass  banana boat to put the bananas  in.  You couldn't just put them  on a plate anymore.  That wasn't good enough.  You had to have a banana boat.  So sometimes I swear when you're  out antiquing, and especially if  you're looking at Victorian  glass, you really need like a  cheat sheet.  Oh yeah, that's a celery dish,  that's a banana boat,  that's a finger bowl, etc. 

 Very interesting.  Yeah?  >> Was there any difference in  the development of Christmas  between Catholic and Protestant  groups?  (inaudible)  >> Well, not really, because  at least in that early time,  because the Puritans, they  didn't like Christmas period.  The Catholics were more focused  on Easter like the Puritans  were.  Although, the English, if you  read some of these stories  about the whole evolution of  Christmas, there was the  monarchy and then Cromwell comes  in and he over-tosses the  monarchy, and then he gets  over-tossed, and there's the  reestablishment of the English  monarchy.  And some of these authors  claim that one of the reasons  that that happened,  and was able to happen, was that  the English people were so upset  about their Christmas being  trashed and basically forbidden,  that that's one of the reasons  that they got rid of Cromwell  and his buddies.  However, Christmas was quite  never the same again until  Victoria comes to the throne  and makes it popular.  And at that point, they're still  trying to bring not only the  family aspect but the religious  aspect into it.  So you do see, especially with  Catholic types of ethnic groups,  the creche underneath the tree,  the nativity set.  That's a big one.  So you see that especially in  Poland and some of those areas  that are highly Catholic. 

 You don't see that, for  instance, in most New England  states, because they weren't  settled largely by Catholics,  they were settled by  Presbyterians and Puritans and  others.  Yes?  >> Can the green and red color  be traced specifically to the  holly?  Where does that come from?  >> Well, that's one of the  legends of where it comes from.  Another is that some of the  earliest forms of trees that are  precursors to the Christmas tree  is something called a Paradise  tree.  And they tended to be more  outdoors or they tended to be  cut-outs.  And they were decorated with  apples.  So the green comes from the  Saturnalia and the Druids and  everybody else who wants to  celebrate and give hope towards  these long days of winter.  The red originally comes from  those apples in a Paradise tree.  Anything else?  Well if not,  thank you all very much.  (applause)