A Victorian Christmas at Beaconsfield

The pandemic cut short planned public tours for Christmas at historic Beaconsfield house in Charlottetown, but you can take a virtual tour here.

The P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation put together the display to provide Islanders with a view of how Islanders celebrated Christmas in the Victoria era more than 100 years ago.

"The holidays are a great time to make memories — maybe not history in the traditional sense we think of it," said foundation executive director Matthew McRae.

"Christmas is a time to make memories and attach memories to people, to places, and to objects."

The display included an array of Christmas cards: an idea that was first introduced in the 1840s, as postage rates became more affordable. By the 1870s everyone was sending them.

The early decades were an era of experimentation in the cards, and the display included a variety of decoration: from winter scenes, ornately inscribed messages, and kids getting up to highjinks.

Entertaining was as important an element of Christmas then as it is now, and the display included one of the foundation's newest acquisitions.

The china tea set dates back to 18th century, having been brought to the Island by William and Janet Simpson in 1775, following an early escape from disaster. Their ship wrecked off Point Prim, but the tea set was salvaged.

It spent almost 200 years in various homes around the Island but in the 1940s it was moved to British Columbia. In the 1980s, still in the family descended from the Simpsons, it was serving tea in Sydney, Australia.

The family donated the tea set to the museum foundation in 2020. McRae describes it as the most Island tea set you'll ever encounter, and not just because of how far back its pedigree goes.

"Janet and William Simpson were the great-great grandparents of Lucy Maud Montgomery," he said.

While the Victoria era brought the dawn of mass production, handcrafts were still common.

An example is a 19th century model house made of seashells collected from Bedeque Bay.

"It's an excellent example of the kind of family handicrafts that might have happened in a place like Beaconsfield in the 1800s," McRae said.