A really traditional Christmas at the Geffrye Museum
Is Christmas nowadays too commercial for you? Do you hate the sound of Jingle Bells, the carols in shopping malls, the focus on the latest cult toy? If so, you’ll adore the Geffrye Museum’s Christmas exhibition – “Christmas Past”, showing the English Christmas through the ages.
This would not have been something you'd see in a traditional English Christmas in 1700 - find out why below!
The Geffrye Museum’s room sets, showing typical furnishings of different English periods from the Tudors to the 1960s, will be decorated in appropriate style. So you’ll see Victorian Christmas cards, or a Kissing Bough with apples and oranges suspended from the ceiling in the Elizabethan age. (No Christmas trees till Queen Victoria – the pine is a foreign import, which came to us through Prince Albert.)
I love the Geffrye Museum anyway. But I particularly like this exhibition because you feel for once that the rooms are inhabited – they stop being museum exhibits and become more like homes. (And actually that’s what we’re intended to feel, because the Geffrye isn’t about furniture the way that, say, the V&A’s galleries are about furniture. The whole museum shows middle class English life as it was lived through the ages, including all the furniture, the paraphernalia, the whole material environment – and that’s what the Christmas show really brings out.)
The Geffrye Museum has been running this same exhibition for 20 years, but apparently it changes every year as research finds new things to add.
There are loads of activities throughout the period, too – there’s an all day Christmas Craft workshop on 5th December (costing £25 for adults - there’s a free one for kids, too), a candlelit carol concert, and my favourite of the celebrations, the ritual burning of the holly and ivy on 6th January to say farewell to Christmas. That’s a particularly nice event as with the New Year out of the way, the calendar stretches bleakly ahead, most of your friends have given up drinking, and there’s not a lot to do elsewhere – turn up in the Geffrye’s garden at four o’clock in the afternoon and you’ll get some Twelfth Night Cake and a glass of mulled wine. For free.
Photo by John A Ross on
Where: Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road [] – bus 149 from Liverpool Street station
When: till January 3, 2010
How much: free
