Victorian Christmas: Naturally Yours

Included in every regular daytime tour of Hearthstone

While German and Dutch speakers had been celebrating Christmas for centuries, the English-speaking world first started celebrating Christmas only in the middle of the Victorian Era, just 170 years ago. Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert brought the practice to the Windsor court from his childhood days growing up in what would become part of Germany. Soon everyone was bringing in trees and decorating them just like the royal couple.

But there was one problem… decorating them with, well, what? There were no established businesses to support the practice. So Victorians turned to an idea that was already part and parcel of their interior decors: Using nature, not only as inspiration, but also as a source of all the materials needed for holiday decorations.

The Victorians already loved to bring nature inside their homes. They had large indoor gardens, greenery everywhere, greenhouses and solaria, live birds, taxidermy animals, nests, flower arrangements, peacock feathers in vases throughout their well-to-do homes. Interior designs reflected nature with woodwork and etched glass featuring leaves and vines, birds, flowers, ferns, etc.

So for Christmas they “naturally” turned to decorating with items they found outside - evergreen trees and boughs, of course, but also pinecones, nuts, feathers, painted leaves, sugared fruit, berries, holly & ivy, and any other bits of nature they could find.

Victorian Christmas: Naturally Yours is this year’s theme with new decorations created from scratch (as they are every year) by Hearthstone’s talented volunteers and featuring design help from Fox Valley Technical College’s interior design students. Each room is overflowing with natural (and natural-looking… due fire safety concerns) materials. The decorations are a splendid reminder of a time when Christmas meant more by having less.

The decorations can be viewed on every day time tour as well as during special tours and open houses. See the Events page for details.

Lewis Latimer: Self-Made Renaissance Man

Permanent Exhibit

An inventive genius who worked along side some of the most famous names in American history - Alexander Graham Bell, Hiram Maxim, Thomas Edison - before gaining his own fame as an inventor and educator, Lewis Latimer is the subject of a new permanent exhibit at Hearthstone.

The exhibit, initially a part of Hearthstone’s celebration of Black History Month and now on permanent display, covers Latimer’s life and his most important inventions. The exhibit features artifacts and video presentations covering Lewis Latimer but also his parents’ fight for freedom from slavery. Their struggle was a cause celebre, championed by giants of abolitionism including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, that outraged New England society ten years before the Dred Scott decision.

Lewis Latimer: Self-Made Renaissance Man exhibit is included in every tour of Hearthstone.