Victorian Christmas! The stuff of Pinterest dreams, right? Red and gold baubles, nutcrackers, rocking horses, stockings by the fire, and twinkling candles on a tree – perfectly cosy and magical!

But… wait a minute! Where’s the MORBIDITY? You know, that deliciously dark and peculiar side of Victorian life: obsession with death, wild mourning rituals, cemetery picnics and post-mortem photography. Let’s not forget the macabre hobbies, like taxidermy or turning Aunt Eleanor’s hair into a tasteful brooch. People back then surely had a knack for making everything a little creepy!

But Christmas?! Can you turn the ultimate season of cheer into something dark and creepy??? Oh, you bet! Over the 19th century, Christmas celebrations shifted from pagan shenanigans (mostly 12 days of heavy drinking and raunchy song-and-dance routines) to family-friendly festivities we know today, so Victorian Christmas were actually a really weird mix!

Of course, the darkest and weirdest bits didn’t survive… But fear not, my friend – you know I don’t like things like these being forgotten! Here’s a list of the most unusual and morbid Christmas customs, so you can celebrate the season with a delightfully dark Victorian twist!

Victorian style Christmas tree ornaments? Yes, please! But forget about gilded walnuts, slices of orange, paper chains and popcorn-on-string garlands… I’m talking about clip on birds – you know, something like these ones – only real, dead and stuffed.

Yup, taxidermy was all the rage in the 19th century, as a way to celebrate nature in a world of industrial chaos. It was everywhere – from museums to fashion accessories and jewellery, but also home decorations, proudly displayed in the parlour. Stuffed exotic birds were popular travel souvenirs, but also family pets often ended up preserved and perched under glass domes. You could hire a professional, but at some point it became the trendiest hobby for upper-class women and children – so popular, that even the smallest towns had taxidermy shops! Believe it or not, but Beatrix Potter was casually turning dead pets into stuffed keepsakes long before she started writing about fluffy bunnies!

With taxidermy taking over Victorian homes, it naturally crept onto Christmas trees and tables – especially with bird ornaments considered a symbol of happiness and joy. Even if you weren’t too crafty, you could easily buy a box of ready-made stuffed birds at every millinery – there were also fake ones with real feathers available for those on a budget! So, what do you think? Nothing says festive cheer like a lifeless robin on a branch!

Christmas is all about family! Now, take the Victorian obsession with both death and family, add the winter solstice, and a belief that during this time the veil between worlds gets thinner than ever, allowing the dead to return home… Put it all together with burial grounds turning into landscaped sculpture galleries, and voilà – a perfect reason to head to cemetery and visit your dearly departed!

Actually, this tradition is still alive in some countries, like Finland and Poland! Mini Christmas trees, festive wreaths, and even sparkly Santa-shaped grave lanterns are sold at cemeteries – and literally every grave gets a holiday makeover, so it looks lovely when visited on Christmas day. We also put an extra chair and plate at the Christmas Eve dinner table for the unseen/ dead guests.

So, embrace your inner Victorian – craft some festive decorations and bring them to your dearly departed! Sing great grandpa his favourite carol, before he follows you back home for dinner…

Today’s Christmas cards are all twinkling lights, serene woodland scenes and cheerful Santas. Back in the Victorian era, though, holiday cards often featured rather unsettling imagery – violent frogs, creepy clowns, vengeful puddings, dung beetles waltzing with toads, children riding bats, and best of all, dead birds (again!). What’s the deal with that?!

Well, Victorians loved death, no doubt about that, and they were big on good old folklore, too. In Celtic traditions December 26 is also known as St. Stephen’s Day, or Wren’s Day, when boys would hunt wrens, stone them to death, and parade their tiny, feathered carcasses on poles decorated with holy and ribbons… Why? Because one lovely bird had betrayed Steve the martyr – precisely gave away his location, contributing to him being stoned to death. So, the wren’s killer was believed to have good luck for a year – and receiving a card with it, wished nothing more than that!

Victorian cards are full of eerie images we don’t associate with Christmas today, because in the 19th century, the visual language of Christmas was still evolving, and the festive illustrations reflected dark Yule traditions and spooky Celtic folklore, both unknown in the modern world. But back then, everyone perfectly understood the illustrated messages. Also, these cards doubled as conversation starters and scrapbook treasures – so basically the weirder and more unusual, the better! So, how about a creepy card exchange with your parents?

Victorian Christmas dinners were equally extravagant and unsettling, featuring dishes like turtle soup (luxury in a bowl!), calf’s head pie (yep, complete with brain and tongue), a whole boar’s head (elaborately garnished) and meat-filled mince pies (hard pass).

Well, I don’t eat meat, so they all sound disgusting, but the real star of the show would be a Victorian-gothic-staple-inspired masterpiece, THE MULTIPLE BIRD ROAST – a chicken stuffed into a duck, stuffed into a turkey or goose – like some poultry Frankenstein’s monster! Anyway, to make it even creepier, Victorians would often serve it with feathers reattached for dramatic flair… Ok, but feathers of which bird – the outer one or all three mixed to match the inside?! I need to knooooow!

Feeling inspired? You can easily get a ready-made one these days – sadly with no feathers, but you can buy some at Hobbycraft and attach them yourself. And if you want to get really fancy, and not so much historically accurate, the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, offers an absurd TEN BIRDS ROAST, where a turkey is stuffed with goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock. Ten birds frankensteined into one dish. Seriously… I’ll stick with mashed potatoes, thanks.

Victorian family games were slightly different then your charades… They would leave you burned, puking and thankful for modern safety regulations.

The most popular and extreme one, Snapdragon, was traditionally played on Christmas Eve. You would gather your family around a wide and shallow bowl of brandy with raisins floating in it, then turn off the lights… and set the brandy on fire. Yes, you light it up. Now, you would take turns sticking your hands into the flames to grab a flaming raisin, extinguish it in your mouth (preferably without screaming) and eat it. The flickering flames cast spooky shadows, making everyone look like demons, just adding to the charm…

Yes… because nothing announces Christmas morning better than blistered lips, scorched tongue and third-degree burns on your hands!

While we’ve confined everything scary to Halloween these days, the Victorians knew better: Christmas was the spookiest time of a year, with long evenings perfect for huddling by the fire, sharing tales of supernatural. It’s no coincidence that A Christmas Carol – the ultimate Christmas classic – is a ghost story! Also Henry James’ famous gothic novel The Turn of the Screw, opens on a Christmas Eve gathering, and the main narrative is a ghost story told by one of the partygoers. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl is another Christmassy haunting tale of a poor girl’s visions as she freezes to death…

So, light a candle, and enjoy a spooky ghost story – from a book, your own experience, or watch a film… Just no slashers, please – don’t forget your great-great grandparents are spending the night with you!

And there you have it – Victorian Christmas traditions that took festive season to a whole new level of weird! From decorating trees with dead birds to burning your hands for raisins – honestly, who needs sugar plums when you’ve got a poultry-mix monster to share with dead grandpa? So, why not sprinkle a bit of Victorian eccentricity and macabre into your celebrations this year? After all, it’s historically accurate!

What’s on your Christmas agenda? Anything dark and taphophilic??? I feel like learning the taxidermy now, so I can start preparing my robin ornaments for next year…