Everyone has their favorite Christmas movies, and most of mine are classics from the mid-twentieth century: there is the Barbara Stanwyck double feature of Christmas in Connecticut and Remember the Night followed by the Bing Crosby double feature of Holiday Inn and White Christmas and then I turn to Holiday Affair and The Bishop’s Wife. Very close to Christmas, I put on variations of A Christmas Carol, saving my favorite (the Reginald Owen one) for last. And that brings me to the one Christmas movie that is a family favorite in our house which is actually from our own time: The Man Who Invented Christmas. Both my husband and I love this film, and if we are hosting we force our guests to watch it. It’s all about Charles Dickens and his struggle to write A Christmas Carol, with its characters making regular appearances in his study. I wouldn’t say it’s a great film, but it’s certainly a joyous one. And the title gets you thinking. Those Victorians were definitely changemakers in many realms, including that of celebration. If Dickens “invented ” Christmas with his text, did his contemporaries pile on with their visual displays? Queen Victoria debuted her family’s German-inspired Christmas tree in the same decade (the 1840s), when the first commercially produced Christmas card also appeared. Several decades later, an American woman produced sketches which seem to have been quite influential in their representation of  “decking the halls” in the nineteenth century, at least on this side of the Atlantic: Lucy Ellen Merrill (1828-1886) of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Merrill’s pen and ink sketches of Christmas interiors, in the collection of the Museum of Old Newbury, often surface this time of year as inspiration for museum holiday decorating, and were published in 1961 as a portfolio in Christmas in the Good Old Days: A Victorian Album of Stories, Poems, and Pictures of the Personalities Who Rediscovered Christmas, edited by the prominent Salem author, Dan Foley. According to Foley, the sketches were produced around 1870 as illustrations for a planned publication by local poet Anna Gardner Hale to be entitled Merry Christmas, and they are featured alongside photographs of the decorations reproduced in 1958 at the Museum’s Cushing House in Newburyport.

Garlands everywhere! Apparently Merrill also included notes on which evergreens she used in her creations. Her sketch of a dining room is the most charming of her embellished interiors: you see it reproduced regularly, and a colored version is out there too (missing the large dog in the corner). Here garlands are draped around everything, even the place settings, with little stacks of presents adjacent: this particular arrangement/custom does not seem to have caught on. While many of Merrill’s creations seem a bit tortured, her advocacy for lush garlands still lives on today: the quest to find the perfect faux greenery has dominated my social media for weeks as my own search for decorating ideas for Christmas in Salem definitely triggered the algorithm.

Dan Foley deserves his own post. A native and lifelong resident of Salem, he was a garden and horticultural authority who designed the Colonial Revival garden at the House of the Seven Gables and authored over 20 books, including three bestselling Christmas classics: in addition to Christmas in the Good Old Days he published The Christmas Tree: An Evergreen Garland filled with History, Folklore, Symbolism, Traditions, Legends and Stories and Christmas the World Over in the 1960s. When I bought my house, two people told me that he had designed its garden and while I could never confirm that, I did buy an old copy of his 1972 book Gardening for Beginners to help me take care of it, and it remains my essential guide.