The 25 Strangest days of Christmas Day - Why Victorian Christmas's Resembled a Tim Burton Movie

0:00 Speaker 1: Welcome back, dear listeners to the Strange History podcast. I'm your host, Amy here to remind you that Christmas wasn't always about sugar, cookies and department store sales. Once upon a snowy Victorian December, Christmas was spooky. Today begins our countdown of the twenty five strangest Victorian Christmas traditions, starting with the Holidays Forgotten identity. Christmas was a ghost story season picture a parlor lit only by firelight, Frost gathering at the corners of the glass, shadows stretching along the wallpaper.

0:35 Speaker 1: This was the Victorian Christmas Eve scene. Families gathered specifically to tell ghost stories. Not just a Christmas Carol, though Dickens perfected the formula, but dozens of tales printed each December in literary magazines like All the Year Round and Household Words. In eighteen sixty one, London Paper published eight new ghost stories just for Christmas Eve. Victorian's believed winter was when the boundary between the living and the dead thinned, so naturally Yule Tide meant spectral visitors.

1:09 Speaker 1: If Christmas once felt eerier, you weren't imagining it.

1:14 Speaker 2: This episode is sponsored by Missletoe's security systems the festive personal space solution. Tired of cousin Harold lurking under the mistletoe like a Dickensian goblin of romance, one sprits of our patented peppermint no thank you spray sends him gently but firmly, back to the eighteen forties social etiquette. Missletoe's security systems. Because consent is the greatest carol of all.

1:40 Speaker 1: So the next time someone tells you Halloween is the spooky holiday, smile politely and whisper Christmas was haunted. First Join me tomorrow as we explore another delightfully strange Victorian holiday custom. But be warned it involves dead birds and greeting cards. See you then,