What Dickens knew about Christmas decorations
Baubles and ornaments sent the author wheeling through time and space. How do they affect you?
In 1849, Charles Dickens was working on David Copperfield. Ever the workhorse, he was also editing Household Words, a weekly journal, and he filled the last issue of the year with essays on Christmas themes, a series of writings by assorted hands with cheery titles such as ‘Christmas in Lodgings’, ‘Christmas in the Navy’, ‘Christmas Among the London Poor and Sick’, and so on. But Dickens wrote the first essay himself, a magisterial piece called A Christmas Tree. It is about time, memory, home, grief and death, and it is one of my favourite essays.
I reread it every December because, 175 years after it was published, it still holds mystery and power. Dickens reminds us what Christmas decorations are, what they should be and why we persist with them. Only after I have read it am I ready to deal with my own motley collection of odd objects.
In A Christmas Tree, Dickens recalls the decorations on the trees of his childhood — the ‘pretty German toy’, as he called it, referring to its introduction into Britain by Prince Albert in 1841. He describes these objects ‘clustering on the tree like magic fruit’ as devices to tell the stories and legends he loved as a boy, which he recalls in burnished prose. Some of these stories are delightful, some terrifying, some relentlessly sad.
Common things become uncommon to his child-self: a miniature flower pot is a vessel for Ali Baba to hide in; a rocking horse carries away the Prince of Persia; a wolf among the animals in a miniature Noah’s Ark becomes a monster. On and on he goes. I love his language. It’s delirious, as if the tree has put him in a kind of fugue state, wheeling through time and space.
Away into the winter prospect. There are many such upon the tree! On, by low lying, misty grounds, through fens and fogs, up long hills, winding dark as cavern, between thick plantations, almost shutting off the sparkling stars; so, out on broad heights, until we stop at last…
It’s Dickens’s version of the epic cosmic flight in Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman.
Edna Ferber’s line — ‘Christmas isn’t a season. It’s a feeling’ — is only half right. You could call Christmas a collective sensation, an abstraction that many of us sense is real despite there being no physical evidence for it. You could say that is a reasonable definition of religion. But Christmas is wider and more inclusive: you don’t have to believe in God and go to church to know when it’s Christmas and when it’s not. You just know. Why is that?
Through the secular stories in A Christmas Tree, Dickens asks us to acknowledge everything at this time of the year — the past and the future, triumph and failure, joy and grief, delight and terror — to welcome and celebrate it all. I think he’s reminding us that the tatty decorations we drag out year after year are there to prompt us. They are physical expressions of hope, and we rely on them in the absence of all evidence that Christmas is real.
Our tree goes up the weekend before the solstice and is taken down on New Year’s Day, so it marks the absolute darkest weeks of the year. This may seem brutally brief, but it is not so everywhere. I once spent Christmas in Jamaica watching people putting decorations up on Christmas Eve and taking them down on Boxing Day. It was a relief. For me, brevity is part of the point, but the decorations discourse — ‘Is November too early?’ ‘Why can’t we keep them up after twelfth night?’ — leaves me cold. Put them up in July if it makes you happy.
More interesting is how decorations are like time travel. They send me wheeling like Dickens and Briggs’s Snowman through time and space: a huge, 1960s Woolworth-Arabesque glass bauble that belonged to my parents; a miniature 1950s tree with plastic bells that my grandmother put on her mantelpiece and now looks scrappy and deformed; a glittery ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign; an Empire State Building; bits of deceptively real plastic sushi. It’s a mess, really, but the memories it evokes are precious, and far more vivid than the gloom outside.
Ironic decorations are everywhere. Liberty’s Christmas Shop is a riot of flamingos, cocktails, bananas, British bulldogs and Aladdin Sanes. My husband bought a washing-machine bauble, complete with miniature bottle of detergent, from a department store in Paris last year and I have a box of popcorn like Jamie Reid’s cover design for the Sex Pistols’ Silly Thing. But mostly I like my decorations sincere.
I buy a few every year from Horner Antiques, where Michael Horner sells nothing but Christmas relics from the former Soviet Union. He has rows of mid-century glass baubles in Quality Street colours: cosmonauts, zeppelins, rockets, Baba Yagas (the ogress from Slavic folklore who cooks and eats children — happy Christmas!).
A box of Michael’s delights was on the cover of the FT’s How to Spend It Christmas Gift Guide a few weeks ago. He once told me that the wife of the president of some former Soviet state came to London to fill an entire suitcase with stuff from his shop. She wanted to recreate the Christmases of her 1960s childhood and this was the only way she knew how.
Other people’s decorations are fascinating. I keep a folder for reference, even when I know they are staged. Jayne Mansfield standing on a stool to decorate her bonkers Christmas tree is in there. So is Diana Ross with her records and space-age tinsel. She looks like her party is just starting.
Most of all I love the Christmas mantelpiece assemblages my cousin puts together, kind of 3-D collages of old and new objects. Her snow-strewn scenes are a bit like the winter prospects Dickens imagines in his tree.
Of course, Dickens’ A Christmas Tree is a sham — probably. He wrote the essay when he was 36, eight years after Prince Albert introduced Christmas trees to Britain. Dickens almost certainly never had a childhood Christmas tree. What he claims is memory is fantasy, a phantasmagoria, yet the essay is startlingly vivid. He imagined the entire thing, every decoration and every emotion, but it doesn’t matter. Christmas is a sensation.
You can read A Christmas Tree by Charles Dickens here.
A few recent pieces by me:
Carole King — the genius and hard-won wisdom of a great American singer-songwriter (Financial Times, December 2)
Nostalgia for the 1980s New Romantic scene (The Spectator, December 4)
Art history is too important to be the preserve of the privileged (Apollo, December 5)
My website, where you can find a selection of my work, is here. I am mostly on hiatus from journalism because I am writing a book about the Beatles to be published by Pan Macmillan in 2027, though I am still writing the occasional piece.
Find me on Bluesky and Instagram. My agent is Eleanor Birne at RCW.