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All Dressed Up for the Holidays: A Glimpse of Christmas As It Used To Be
Where else but this region could you find such an abundance of historic homes all dressed up for the holidays and open to the public?
by Denise Cowie - 11/25/2008
A Nativity scene is part of the holiday decoration at Nemours.
A photo almost obscured by decorations captures a black-and-white image from long ago.
A jolly Santa is part of "A Brandywine Christmas."
Holiday display at Hagley includes 19th-century toys and dolls.
Welkinweir will celebrate the season with "Deck the Halls" house tours, and a dinner.
A tree decorated with dried flowers graces a room at Winterthur.
This tree at Winterthur pays tribute to the famous March Bank on the estate.
Pieces used in table settings are part of the exhibit "Feeding Desire" that complements Winterthur's holiday displays.
Dazzling on the ice under the stars, a pair of skaters enchants the holiday visitors at Longwood Gardens.
Christmas on a large scale is celebrated at Longwood Gardens in Chester County.
There’s something about the holidays that makes us nostalgic for good old days that most of us never lived through.
You know – sleigh rides, skaters on the pond, holly and mistletoe, elegant family parties, somebody else to do all the work…
And the great thing about living in the Philadelphia region is that we can easily indulge that nostalgia. Where else could you find such an abundance of historic estates and stately manor homes all dressed up for the holidays and open to the public?
Ever since I adopted Philadelphia as my home, I’ve loved the holiday houses, from the Fairmount Park mansions to the grand du Pont estates along the Brandywine. It’s intriguing to imagine the people who actually called these places home, and to wonder whether their Christmases bore much resemblance to the scenarios their erstwhile belongings conjure up for us.
That thought crossed my mind as I looked at a couple of images from Nemours Mansion & Gardens, which is decorated for the holidays for the first time since the grand restoration that closed the former Alfred I. duPont estate for a couple of years. It reopened to the public this summer, and now it’s aglow with Christmas trees, garlands, sprays and ornaments.
“We want visitors to have a seasonal experience and see the home as the guests and family of Alfred and Jessie duPont might have seen it,” says Nemours spokesman Steve Maurer, though he points out that the decorations are a combination of old and new.
“We have original old hand-painted tree ornaments, toys taken from the attic (such as Jocko the drinking monkey, dollhouses, and a miniature bear on wheels), Christmas crackers, miniature churches, Christmas cards – all personal items that belonged to the duPonts. We’ve certainly had to update lights and trees, but all in all we try to have a display that is historic duPont.”
So you look at Nativity figures carefully set out on a bed of moss in one photograph, and the framed black-and-white image of a long-ago young girl in another, and wonder, Was this Nativity hers? Did she cherish these figurines, or did she occasionally commandeer them to populate her dollhouses? And would that have been permitted in those more-formal times?
It’s often the children’s toys that make an emotional impact in historic holiday displays. Antique toys and games are a big part of Hagley’s holiday display at Eleutherian Mills, the ancestral du Pont family home in northern Delaware – from porcelain dolls and a toy carriage complete with horses to wooden toys, puzzles, and an 1887 version of the Old Maid card game.
Back across the Pennsylvania state line, the Brandywine River Museum features another great “toy” as part of A Brandywine Christmas. It’s a Victorian dollhouse dating to around the turn of the century, and it’s complete with most of its original furnishings, including curtains, lights, and toys, and many of its original bisque dolls. Displayed with the front façade open, this extraordinary dollhouse also contains a collection of musical instruments and a nursery with a dollhouse of its own. Now that’s some toy!
Of course, not all the toys in the holiday exhibits are for kids. In conjunction with Yuletide at Winterthur, the H.F. du Pont country estate is featuring “Feeding Desire,” an exhibit about tools of the table over the centuries that has much to say about us. Some of the featured flatware is extraordinary, and the idea of eating sumptuously fits right in with the holidays.
At Welkinweir in Chester County, they’re celebrating at year’s end not just with holiday house tours but with a formal dinner on December 13 that’s also necessarily exclusive – they can only accommodate 20 guests.
“We had a terrific year, making very good progress as an arboretum, and that’s what the dinner will celebrate,” says Victoria Laubach, Welkinweir’s director, who introduced the first holiday dinner last year. Among the year’s highlights were more group tours to the property than ever before, and its selection as the “client” for the Professional Outreach Project of the Longwood Graduate Program.
It was enough to make anyone want to Deck the Halls, which is the theme chosen for Welkinweir’s Holiday House tours on December 12 and 13. The decorating will be done by a variety of garden clubs, including the Herb Society of American/Philadelphia Unit, Conestoga and Twin Valleys garden clubs, horticulture students from Owen J. Roberts High School, and Blue Moon Florist.
But probably no garden in the region celebrates Christmas quite like Longwood Gardens. In addition to the fabulous displays in the conservatories and the hundreds of thousands of lights sparkling in the grounds, there are organ sing-alongs, choral performances, bell choirs, and, of course, outdoor skaters.
It’s hard to imagine anything more picture-postcard-perfect than high-profile skaters dancing across the ice under the stars, with all those holiday trees and dazzling lights as a backdrop.
Bring on the holidays!