12/22/2025
🎄 What did Christmas actually look like 153 years ago? Let's take a look through old diaries, letters and even recipes to see how people back then spent their Christmasses!
On Christmas Eve, Fredericton’s Georgina Parry hitched up her horse and sled and drove to the orphanage, delivering “shirts, dresses, and petticoats to all the children.”
She’d ordered them from England and was relieved the box arrived just days before Christmas. She then took the children to the Exhibition grounds for tea and to decorate a large outdoor Christmas tree.
The holidays weren’t entirely comfortable. Georgina spent them battling a toothache — possibly thanks to New Brunswick’s obsession with Christmas doughnuts.
A rather unusual editorial in the Saint John Globe newspaper fawned over doughnuts, writing: “The doughnut is the king of the feast: fat, juicy, and crisp, well-cooked and wholesome. We are half ashamed of them, though a requisite of Christmas culture, we eat them in a furtive manner. Most old fellows carry doughnuts around in their pockets and eat them at all sorts of unreasonable hours. Some families make them by the barrel!”
Fredericton cook Elizabeth Ann Odell jotted down her recipe for what she called “Elizabeth’s Healthy Doughnuts”:
“a cup and a half of sugar, one of sweet milk, two eggs, one tablespoonful of butter, one teaspoonful cream of tartar, half a teaspoonful of soda, add 3 ¾ cups flour until it is almost as stiff as pie crust. Cut into U shape, twist the ends, and fry in hot lard.”
Christmas Day was also Georgina’s 24th birthday, noted only in the margins of her diary. After church services, she visited her friend Juliana Horatia Ewing, the British author, then living in Fredericton.
On her friend's porch, she left a package. On its tag she wrote only: “ Thank you for putting up with me all year.”
"Inside the box," Juliana wrote in a letter to her sister back home in England, "was a VERY pretty silver coffee pot!"
Up at UNB, student Robert Raymond finished exams. The students sang 'Auld Lang Syne' three times after the term was declared closed.
That night, he wrote in his diary, his professors “opened their hearts and gave us a couple of turkeys.”
Raymond went back home to Saint John for Christmas Day. There he attended not one but two separate church services. He wrote that the sermon was “quite animated and humorous,” although he complained: “the singing was not extremely good.”
Meanwhile, out on the Kingston Peninsula, farmer Benjamin Crawford’s Christmas Day diary entry read simply: “We thought to take a sleigh ride but the ice was too thin, so we came back again.”
🎙 There's far more to this story, hear it all come to life in this very special Backyard History Podcast episode: https://apple.co/499DiOE
📘 This story appears in the book 'Backyard History: Forgotten Stories From Atlantic Canada's Past Volume Two,' available at backyardhistory.ca/books
