That was indeed true - hypothermia was a merciless killer. A few voices lamented the unwavering popularity of a white Christ-mas, warning that ‘no misconception should exist as to its cost in disease and death’ among the poor. Newspaper editorials seemed to become obsessed with snow. Holiday window-dressers also got in on the act: a Liverpool department store created a snow-filled Christmas Fairyland for children in 1870, the forerunner to Santa’s grotto. The sending of cards had taken off by the late 1870s and the white stuff became a big part of designers’ arsenals: they deployed quaint village greens carpeted in snow, animals sheltering from snowstorms, even terrifying snowmen and skating frogs, all in the service of spreading Christmas cheer. The Queen’s own diary entry for Christmas Eve, 1860, hints at the success of the white-Christmas PR machine - she viewed the snow more kindly than in former years: ‘Already this dear Festival returned again,’ she wrote, ‘& this year with true Xmas weather, snow on the ground & sharp frost.’Īs the annual celebrations became steadily more commercialised, retailers and manufacturers jumped on the snow-covered bandwagon.
Newspapers published illustrations of their idyllic tree, draped with artificial snow, and depictions of the royal children on their sleigh.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert played their part, too. Surrounded as they were by white Christmases in fact and fiction, the Victorians began to tie the bonds between snow and the festive season as tight as the strings around a Christmas parcel. Soon, in the works of everyone from Anthony Trollope to George Eliot, Christmas Day came with a ‘crisp white frost’ or a snowfall that ‘clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness’. Where Dickens led, other authors followed. It was a relatable, desirable concept for his contemporary audience. Seen through rose-tinted glasses, Christmas then was about charity and neighbourly hospitality, about warmth and benevolence lighting up a cold and punishing winter season. Indeed, he tapped into that almost aching sense of nostalgia for the festivities of the ‘Merrie England’ of centuries gone by. ‘But Dickens was really responsible for making people think about white Christmases. ‘Dickens was very influenced by Irving’s story,’ admits Lucinda Hawksley, the writer’s descendant and the author of Dickens and Christmas. A teenage Queen Victoria found it inconvenient, writing on December 27, 1836, ‘snow very deep and very cold… I am very much annoyed not to have been able to get out now for two days’. In 1799, Woodforde was dismayed by its depths, writing that ‘people obliged to walk over hedges &c’ and ‘mail coaches &c unable to travel’ - a state of affairs that continued well into the following century. Snow drifts of 20ft deep or more weren’t uncommon, making roads completely impassable. There was snow to contend with, too - it usually came thick and fast in the winter months and, sometimes, from September onwards. Christmas Day of 1830 was bleak - it was -12˚C at Greenwich - and Britain’s coldest Christmas Day on record is 1878, when the temperature hit -18.3˚C in Durham. Country Life's Top 100 architects, builders, designers and gardenersĬountry parson James Woodforde’s famous diaries are littered with complaints about the debilitating cold, both indoors and out: in the 1790s, he wrote that even the contents of the chamberpots froze indoors, as well as his household’s milk, bread and meat.
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