Victorian Christmas Decorations for the Dining Room Table Centerpiece and Sideboard

If you've been wanting to decorate your dining room with old Victorian Christmas decorations, this video will inspire you.  This is the O'Dell House Museum in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Canada. Thank you to rgsheritage for posting this lovely video to YouTube. As you can see, many of the decorations come from nature, which would also add beautiful scents to the room. 

Fruit looks so much more tasty when it is displayed in such a gorgeous way as their decorations in the video. Long ago, people appreciated fruit much more than they do today. I was fascinated in "Little Women" that limes were such a luxury in those days that they were traded in school for other things.  It was a fad, and the girls felt pressure to have limes and keep up with this fad (I think in the book they are pickled limes, and in the movie, they are simply limes). You don't see students trading limes these days, but you might see college students cutting up limes, squeezing a piece of lime into a bottle of Corona, shoving the piece of lime into the bottle, and then chugging the bottle of Corona. Somehow that just doesn't sound as charming as the Victorian school children trading limes. 

When my grandmother came over from Sweden as a little girl, her first memory after getting off the ship in America was the site of a giant basket of oranges. They looked so delicious to her that she couldn't stop pointing to them while saying to her mother, "Apelsiner! Aplesiner! Apelsiner!" (which means "Oranges!" in Swedish). Although oranges were a luxury to them, her mother purchased an orange for her. She appreciated every bite, as though it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. Whenever I think about that, it makes me appreciate fruit, particularly oranges. When we think of fruit as a luxury, as it was to my grandma as a little girl, we appreciate it so much more.

In their retirement years my grandparents moved to Florida where there were grapefruit trees in their yard and a little orange grove just around the corner. I'm glad she got to have as much fruit as she wanted. To this day when I smell grapefruit, I am reminded of their home. There's no place like home for the holidays, and there's no taste like fruit for the holidays.