The Secrets Behind Colonial Williamsburg's Christmas Decorations
Image courtesy Colonial Williamsburg
As far as stuck-in-time Christmassy villages go, you can’t do much better than Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg, the 301-acre living history museum and onetime pet project of John D. Rockefeller Jr. There’s just something about all those handmade fruit-dotted evergreen wreaths that puts anything from a big box store to shame (shame!).
To dive deep into the history of Colonial Williamsburg’s Christmas decorations, we turned to their tricorn-hatted pros to suss out the whys behind each age-old adornment. Here, their best takeaways.
GO GREEN “The Colonial Williamsburg Christmas décor follows English traditions of decorating homes and churches with whatever winter greenery was plentiful. In England and Virginia, garlands of holly, ivy, mountain, laurel, and mistletoe dangled from church walls, encircled pillars, and clung to second-story gallery railings.”
SOUTHERN COMFORT “Native materials readily available in the Tidewater region included the familiar pine, mountain laurel, magnolia, and mistletoe, which was not easy to gather. The parasite grows high in the tops of hardwood trees, and shooting it down was a popular holiday sport for boys.”
THROWBACK TREE “The earliest known Christmas tree in Virginia was in Williamsburg. In 1842, Judge Nathaniel Beverly Tucker invited a German-born professor at the College of William and Mary to share his family’s Christmas celebration. Professor Charles Minnigerode asked the judge if he might prepare the children a little tree after the German custom. He brought a small evergreen into the parlor and showed the Tucker children how to make simple decorations with bits of brightly colored paper, fastening candle stubs to the ends of the branches with twisted pieces of wire, then finishing it by hanging a gilded star at the top. Every year Colonial Williamsburg commemorates this event by setting up a replica of that first tree in the same room where it first appeared in the St. George Tucker House.”
Image courtesy Colonial Williamsburg
FACT-CHECKED FUN “To keep within the boundaries of colonial American history, Robert Furber’s prints and other period documentation were used as reference points to select only those fruits and plants known to have been available to colonial Virginians. The famous “Colonial Williamsburg wreaths” were originally inspired by the work of Italian sculptor Luca Della Robbia. Colonial Williamsburg began creating them in 1939, and these days 2,500 wreaths are hung, many featuring fruit like pineapples and Osage oranges along with greenery. Some even feature items from the businesses like playing cards at the tavern and pipes at the pipemaker’s shop.”
BONA FIDES “Authenticity concerns caused the banning of ribbon and bows (too Victorian) and any materials not available to eighteenth-century residents of Williamsburg such as poinsettias and baby’s breath. Conservation concerns led to the elimination of running cedar and mountain laurel. After 1976, Colonial Williamsburg promoted the use of pine as an alternative to prevent destruction of native mountain laurel and holly for wreaths and roping.”
TABLETOP STAR “The single most enduring Williamsburg table decoration is the fruit pyramid. Appearing in European prints as early as the 17th century and on Virginia dinner tables from the colonial period through the Civil War, the pyramid was one of the first table decorations used when Colonial Williamsburg began to decorate for Christmas. Initially, these pyramids were made with sweetmeats, berries, or some small fruit such as cherries or grapes packed with sugar in a cone-shaped tin mold, and removed to stand on a platter until consumed by the guests. Though purely decorative today, fruit pyramids were an edible fixture on European and colonial dessert tables at least as early as the 17th century.”
Image courtesy Colonial Williamsburg
Editor’s Note: Due to varying local and state regulations surrounding Covid-19, confirm all travel plans before booking.
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