Yuletide at Winterthur Offers Literature-Inspired Festive Experiences

Decorations and holiday trees inspired by poems, traditional tales, and children’s books are on show at this year's Yuletide at Winterthur which runs through January 4 in Delaware.

Guests can enjoy displays based on A Visit from Saint Nicholas, Alice in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and other literary classics. Outside decorations feature festive vignettes inspired by the 1911 novel The Secret Garden while other nods to literary works include a tree celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the Visitor Center.

Decorated rooms on a self-guided museum tour pair holiday trees with the literary works that inspired them, theatrical props, and museum and library objects, such as Victorian combs, pocket watches, and historic toys, to bring the stories to life.

In addition, Delaware Shakespeare actors have recorded excerpts from several of the works that served as inspiration for A Literary Yuletide including Macbeth, The Great Gatsby, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Phillis Wheatley’s poems Hymn to the Morning and Hymn to the Evening.

The Du Pont Dining Room hosts a display inspired by A Christmas Carol. In an opulent scene from the story, Ebenezer Scrooge’s boss Fezziwig holds a grand Christmas party for his friends, family, and employees. Delaware Shakespeare recorded a soundscape that sets the mood for the party scene and dining room decor.

In one room, guests will peer through a rendering of an open wardrobe to see the holiday tree inspired by The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The life-sized illustration is based on a wardrobe from the museum’s furniture collection. With its doors flung open, the vignette evokes the moment when Lucy Pevensie first catches a glimpse of another world shimmering beyond. 

A purple tree in the Port Royal Entrance Hall evokes The Purple Cow poem by Gelett Burgess, a nod to Winterthur’s early days as a farm where founder Henry Francis du Pont bred prized Holstein Friesian dairy cattle. While the poem, published in 1895, begins “I never saw a Purple Cow …,” visitors can see a life-sized purple cow statue in the entrance hall, reflecting the whimsical spirit of Burgess’s famous poem.  

Les Fleurs Animées, a book of illustrations from Winterthur Library’s rare book collection that depicts flowers personified as women, also inspires a Yuletide tree design. Winterthur owns two copies of the book published in the mid-1800s, an original single-volume French edition and a two-volume English translation bound with decorative elements in a striking emerald green on the cover. The vibrant color indicates the use of a pigment historically known to contain arsenic, and these works have become known as poison books. The books are displayed with the tree in the Empire Parlor.

Other literary works that will be brought to life inside the museum include Gift of the Magi, The Black Tulip, Moby-Dick, the life and works of Edith Wharton including an 1897 edition of Decoration of Houses, and William Wordsworth’s poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.