In the years following the Civil War, Christmas trees continued to rise in popularity. Where Europeans favored trees they could sit atop a table, Americans preferred big, full floor-to-ceiling trees that ranged between 7 and 12 feet in height. And they decorated their trees with homemade ornaments, as it would be decades before store-bought varieties became commercially available. For [...]
The Christmas tree lot was born in 1851. That was the year following the Christmas tree illustration in Godey’s. What happened is that a woodsman by the name of Mark Carr chopped down a couple dozen evergreens in the Catskill Mountains. He loaded them on a sled and transported them with a team of oxen to Manhattan’s [...]
In the days before social media, Twitter and TMZ, what happened behind palace doors did not filter down to the masses, who were largely ignorant of the lavish Christmas trees the royals decorated every year. But thanks to a 16-page illustrated supplement printed by the London Illustrated News on December 23, 1848, that landscape changed dramatically [...]
