When you picture a nineteenth-century Christmas, do you imagine scenes out of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? “The Ghost of Christmas Past” shows Scrooge several scenes offering glimpses of Georgian-era Christmas celebrations. My favorite illustration by John Leech is probably “Fezziwig’s Ball,” which shows us what an eighteenth-century Christmas party might have looked like. (H/T to The Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz.)

However, many of the customs we associate with an old-fashioned Christmas developed after the Regency era. Though Queen Charlotte introduced the custom of Christmas Trees to England in 1800, having a Christmas tree became more popular in the Victorian period, thanks to the influence of the Royal family. Meanwhile, the development of railroads made winter travel easier, safer, and less expensive, so more people could travel to visit relatives or attend holiday house parties.

But Regency-era Britons certainly did celebrate Christmas. In fact, their Christmas celebrations lasted longer than ours, because the Christmas season extended through to Epiphany (read more here). Though some Regency Christmas traditions would be strange to us, others would be very familiar.

For example, if we could travel back in time to hear a group of Regency carolers, we would recognize many of the carols they sang. While some “classic” Christmas carols date from the Victorian period, others are much older. Regency carolers would not have sung “Good King Wenceslaus” or “We Three Kings,” but they might have sung “Here We Come A-Wassailing” or “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

I’ve put together a short playlist of Christmas carols and hymns that would have been known in the Regency era. You can listen on Amazon Music, but one warning: the songs are historically accurate for the time period, but the perfomance styles are not!

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