Christmas Decorations from Colonial Williamsburg, Part Two: Windows

Following up on the preceeding post, here's a collection of 18th-century windows bedecked with holiday cheer!

 

Additional photos from Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg can be found in our flickr album here.

Christmas Decorations from Colonial Williamsburg, Part One: Doorways

As we mentioned in the last post, one of the highlights of every Christmas season at Colonial Williamsburg is the decorations.  Made entirely from natural and hand-made materials, these festive wreaths, garlands, swags, and sprays add a splash of color to the often drab landscape of the winter city.

Christmas decorations were an integral part of the holiday season in England and Colonial Virginia, with candles abundant and evergreens, mistletoe, holly, and bright red berries brought into homes and churches to drape across mantles, wind around banisters, and frame windows and doorways.  Yet while archival sources in the form of written descriptions and prints attests to the popular use of indoor decorations, there is little to no evidence to suggest anything similar was done out-of-doors.

With newly-restored Colonial Williamsburg less than a year old in 1935, researchers and historians were challenged with a way to cater to elaborate visitor expectations of what a "colonial" Christmas might have looked like.  Using only natural materials, they envisioned a historically-inspired but not strictly historically accurate holiday display full of "old-fashioned" and "homemade" charm and character.  As Oliver and Theobald explain, "Christmas in Williamsburg was never meant to be a re-creation of the eighteenth-century version" (41).

We took so many pictures of the decorations that we've decided to divide them into several posts.  Here's a selection of doorways to Christmases past.

Sources and Resources:
- Colonial Williamsburg's "Christmas in Colonial America" page
- Kostyal, Christmas in Williamsburg
- Oliver and Theobald, Williamsburg Christmas: The Story of Christmas Decorations in the Colonial Capitol
- Rountree, Christmas Decorations from Williamsburg

A Boxing Day Visit to the Milliner

For the second year in a row, our family congregated in VA for the week of Christmas to celebrate the holiday together.  The highlight of any trip to Colonial Williamsburg during this season is, of course, the incredible all-natural decorations that festively gild the 18th-century restored city for five weeks of the year.  We've got a picture-packed post full of images of those to share with you, but in the meantime, here's another glimpse into one of our personal favorite all-year-round Williamsburg stops: the Margaret Hunter Shop!  And how appropriate that I visited on Boxing Day, for one never knows what tempting treasures might be lurking in the mysterious white boxes that line the shop's many shelves!

To mark the Christmas season, the shop had on grand display one of their masterpiece creations: a shimmering changeable red silk taffeta gown elaborately trimmed with self-fabric ruffles, poofs, and ruching.  The stomacher features paste jewels and bows trimmed with lace.

Cold-weather winter fashions were strewn about the shop on the counters and shelves, with muffs of silk and fur neatly stacked,...

...and that absolutely gorgeous fox-fur-trimmed silk pelisse that we all drool over every year when it comes out of hiding for the season...

...and an impressive display of quilting on the counter, with a quilted ivory silk petticoat and a quilted and embroidered waistcoat.

And no holiday season is ever complete at the Margaret Hunter Shop without a visit from the dolls and their own wee millinery confections!  I love seeing how the ladies of the shop set this up every year, and can't decide which miniature delight I like the most (though the bonnet on the doll at the left is quite smashing!).  There's just so much detail in each of the pieces and I never tire of looking at it all.

The usual display of completed and currently-in-progress projects was of course also on view, the afternoon sun casting a golden glow across the silks hanging from wall pegs behind the work table.  One could easily spend days in here and never be able to take in all there is to see and admire!  For instance, do you see the ladies' newest completed project, the pink silk "Morning Ramble" jacket, hanging all the way to the right?  Did you happen to catch the recent "live" Facebook chronicles of its progress and the finished photo shoot?  It's even lovelier in person!

18th-Century Interiors: A Closer Contemplation (Part Two)

In the previous post in this mini-series, I shared a collection of images that give insight into the domestic life of the family at the apex of colonial Virginian society: that of the Royal Governor, who was appointed to his eminent position by none other than the King himself.  The Governor's Palace, so named as an acknowledgement of the money and time poured into the exquisite building, includes architectural and design features rarely - if ever - seen in the homes of other colonial Virginians.

Even the wealthiest of colonial families lived a noticeable (and respectful) step below their royal representative.  Next to the Royal Governor, the most prosperous citizen of Virginia's colonial capitol city was Peyton Randolph, Virginia Burgess, patriot, and president of the First Continental Congress.  It was said by many of his contemporaries that had Randolph lived through the war, he would probably have been our new country's first president.  Alas, he died in 1775.

His home in Williamsburg, just down the street from the Governor's Palace, is one of the largest in the city.  Randolph's household was correspondingly grand; though he lived alone with his wife (and the occasional niece or nephew), the inventory taken at his death reveals that 27 slaves were also housed on the property.  That same inventory has been used to furnish and present the house (it is an original structure dating to 1715) as it would have looked in 1775.  Here is a peek into the domestic space of one of Virginia's gentry on the eve of the Revolution.  Keep in mind as you view these pictures that the majority of Virginia's population lived in a single room with a dirt floor.