A.N. by WILSON ’Tis the season to be JOLLY grateful for Prince Albert!
IMAGINE a Christmas without the smell of a seasonal fir tree, without cards, colourful lights and decorations – and even a turkey feast. Or a festive period in which the celebration of Epiphany – or Twelfth Night – on January 5 was a bigger national festival than Christmas Day itself. This was a world where ancient traditions such as mumming – dressing up in silly clothes and acting out stylised plays featuring a green-clad Father Christmas – provided the main entertainment.
Together, of course, with the annual alcoholic bacchanalia fuelled by the wassail bowl, a huge communal drinking cup filled with mulled ale or cider with curdled cream, eggs, cinnamon, ginger and sugar.
It seems strange now. But this was the traditional Christmas in this country until the festive season was transformed by the Victorians in the middle of the 19th Century. Rapid industrialisation brought millions into the cities, severing the links with the old traditions and creating a new and prosperous middle class.
The push for workers’ holidays made Christmas Day a bank holiday for the first time in 1834 – before then, December 25 was a working day for many. New, cheap printing technology and the introduction of the penny post in 1835 meant we could send Christmas cards for the first time and also allowed the mass publication of many of our now-familiar carols.
Confectioner Tom Smith’s invention of the new-fangled cracker in the 1840s, filled with paper hats, jokes and fruits or sugared almonds wrapped in paper, allowed every party to go with a bang. And the publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1843 popularised the idea of Christmas as a time of family, goodwill and compassion.
It also brought the phrases ‘Merry Christmas’ and, in counterpoint, ‘Scrooge’ into the popular vocabulary. Boxing Day became a bank holiday in 1871 and the advent of the railways allowed families to be together over the festive period.
But as viewers will see on tomorrow night’s special episode of Victoria on ITV, the towering figure in the history of the English Christmas – Scotland didn’t adopt the Christmas Day holiday until 1958 – was that great German, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert. The continental Christmas conventions he had a crucial role in popularising swiftly elbowed out the older traditions – and they endure to this day.
Albert set out to stage-manage the Royal Christmas – the Royal Consort came from the small town of Coburg in Thuringia, bringing with him all the German ideas about how to celebrate the festive season.
He did not, strictly speaking, invent the tradition of Christmas trees – Victoria’s grandmother Queen Charlotte, another German, first put up a tree outside the Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, at the beginning of the 19th Century.
But it was Albert who took trees and tree-decoration to their most beautiful extremes, and who popularised the domestic Christmas tree. Smaller trees would be placed on tables and the larger trees were hung from hooks in the ceiling so that the great rooms would seem like magical German forests gleaming with fire and frost. The trees, in the days before Health and Safety, were ablaze with candles.
A brilliant PR man, Albert commissioned a picture of his family gathering in the glow of their tree.
An engraving was given, on Albert’s instructions, to the Illustrated London News in 1848 and the image created an instant sensation among those who aspired to celebrate Christmas like the Royals.
Albert deliberately used images of
Before 1834, December 25 was a working day for many
the Royal Family enjoying Christmas as a way of promoting his vision of monarchy as a wholesome, family-centred institution, as opposed to the boozy, sexually licentious image given out by Victoria’s ‘wicked uncles’, King George IV and King William IV, with their mistresses, illegitimate children and uncosy excess.
Christmas was also a way of exorcising his own unhappy childhood as the son of warring parents – Albert was determined to make his own children remember happy, festive Christmases. An obsessive aesthete, he planned Christmas for months in advance.
Albert brought the German notion of the Advent calendar to Britain – making one for each of his nine children with sweets or treats lurking behind each window.
Each child would also have a present table, designed by Albert himself.
These were elaborately constructed devices, low church Lutheran equivalents of a High Altar, on which the carefully wrapped presents were displayed on Christmas Eve.
In one journal entry from December 24, 1850, Queen Victoria wrote: ‘At a little after 6 we all assembled & my beloved Albert first took me to my tree & table, covered by such numberless gifts, really too much, too magnificent’.
The children would give presents to their parents of things they had made, but, best of all, would be the ‘present’ of being able to recite some lines of Shakespeare or German poetry to their father.
Victoria and Albert gave one another works of art for Christmas with him often designing jewellery for her. The interiors of Windsor Castle, where they always had Christmas, were carefully decorated to Albert’s designs. Boughs of holly and ivy and greenery festooned all the great rooms.
But not all his German innovations caught on. Albert kept the German tradition of December 6, Saint Nicholas’s Day, when Saint Nicholas (Albert in disguise) and his assistant Knecht Ruprecht (usually played by Albert’s German librarian) summoned each of the children in turn to a sort of Day of Judgment.
The children stared wide-eyed at ‘Ruprecht’, who seemed to know all their faults, however secret. He knew which was pert, and which was greedy and which splodged their copy-books. Ruprecht told the child all their faults and sins and if these were bad enough the child would have to pay a forfeit or not get a present. The benign Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas could then praise them for their virtues and give them a present if they had been good.
For the most part, he was pleased with their behaviour, having taught his Royal children the middle-class value of work. In this, he led by example. As well as running the Great Exhibition, advising the Army and the Foreign Office, reforming the universities, constantly travelling to the industrial heartlands of the North and devising schemes to improve housing for the working classes, he was a full-time ‘home educator’ of his nine children, supervising their lessons and timetables.
He oversaw not just their booklearning, but their recreations. At Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, they each had their own small garden and had to earn their pocket-money by selling the vegetables which they grew.
The dinner on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day would be substantial – up to 20 courses. Albert was a lifelong dyspeptic but his wife loved to guzzle – a ‘baron’ of beef (two sirloins joined by the backbone) – would be adorned with flowers and Royal insignia and borne in by several footmen. A boar’s head on a golden platter was heralded by trumpets.
There would be a goose with innumerable sweetmeats, marchpanes, Christmas puddings, mince-pies etc. All the food would be brought in at once, so the choice of goose, game and beef – turkey featured in Victorian Royal Christmas feasts, but did not become affordable for the masses until the end of the century – would be overpowering. In 1851, the year when Albert amazed the world by stagemanaging the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, the Royal Family enjoyed an especially happy Christmas. As historical adviser on the programme, I can be sure of its accuracy because Queen Victoria, the unstoppable diarykeeper, recorded it all in her journal. Her account shows how, for Albert and herself, Christmas Day was a fine balance – church, charitable visits, taking ‘boxes’ or presents with money to their servants and to poor families in the neighbourhood; enjoyment of the presents which had been given the night before; and, of course, guzzling. ‘The Christmas dinner, is always a gay, merry one,’ she notes. ‘The sideboard with the Baron of Beef, Wild Boar’s Heads & Brawn, all ornamented with holly & evergreens, & 3 Xmas trees which were lit at dessert. ‘It had all such a pretty effect. Music during, & after dinner.’ How tempting that baron of beef on the sideboard sounds. The Victorian balance of feasting, a festive atmosphere and goodwill is still something we should aim for today but, of course, I should warn you not to try constructing Albert’s Christmas décor at home. Our hard-pressed fire service is quite busy enough, without us Victoria fanatics placing innumerable lighted candles in the branches of a highly flammable pine tree and hanging it from a hook in the sitting-room ceiling.
Albert brought the Advent calendar over to Britain Dinner would be substantial, with as many as 20 courses