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Vintage
Christmas Tree Photographs
Just for the fun of it, presented here
are a few vintage photographs of some timeless Christmas trees of the
late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries...
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A family Christmas photo of the very
late 19th century. Notice the tree is lit with candles, and that the
lighting chandelier is gas powered. Even the ceiling is wallpapered in
this charming Victorian home. This photo is from the collection of
Marshall
Gulbranson.
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Kindly shared with us from the
collection of David Neely, this circa 1900 photo show a pre-electric
tree
lit with beeswax candles. Apparently this was the tree of a fairly
wealthy family, as evidenced by the large number of store-bought glass
decorations and garlands used on it, and the expensive dolls and
Schoenhut child's piano under the tree. This is a beautiful example of
an early twentieth century American Christmas tree, and is unusually
well decorated.
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Here is another interesting picture from
the collection of Marshall Gulbranson, and is from the very early
1900s. Notice the elaborate Putz scene under the tree, and the almost
life size doll sitting between the children at the bottom of the photo.
The tree appears to be lit with exhaust tipped carbon filament lamps,
and sits on a covered table, a practice typical of the times. |
| This 1907 British hand tinted postcard
shows a rather slender Santa with the Christmas tree in his bag. A long
standing early tradition in many homes both in America and Great
Britain, Santa would bring the tree with him on Christmas Eve, where he
would set it up, decorate it and load it down with gifts to surprise
the family on Christmas morning. The tree in this scene is lit with
candles. The excellent restoration of this photograph was undertaken by
Lee Lowry. |
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The back of this 1912 photograph
states that it was "hand colored from life", meaning the hand tinting
was executed according to the colors of the actual scene. Turn of the
century photographers would often make notes during an in-home picture
session, so as to more accurately colorize the picture after it was
processed. In this case, the artist was a bit over zealous in
colorizing the packages beneath the tree, as they were all wrapped in
white paper with red ribbons-traditional in the days before commercial
wrapping paper was introduced by the Hallmark company. This tree has no
electric lighting...
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