Over the past few years we’ve had to get used to more uncertainty at Christmas than most of us would have liked; the pandemic ensured that big family gatherings and lots of long-held traditions had to give way to scaled-down celebrations. This year, again, it feels as if we’re living with lots of challenges, both globally and nearer to home, so the festive season will once more develop to suit the times we’re living through. And it turns out, in fact, that this has been the case throughout the decades that we’ve been publishing Good Housekeeping – the festive season is one of evolution.
With this year marking our 100th birthday, we’ve taken the opportunity to look back through our archives and it’s quite an eye-opener seeing how celebrations have developed. In the 1920s, for instance, adverts for Hoovers promised husbands they’d make a memorable present for their wives that would ‘add to the joy of her New Year’!; in the 1930s, a copy of GH was not complete without sheet music so that readers could gather around their pianos to sing carols; and in the 1940s, during the Second World War and its aftermath, we were publishing recipes with substitutes for the suet, eggs and sugar used in traditional recipes and encouraging readers to make modest gifts out of felt or hessian, as these fabrics were unrationed. Roll forward and the 1960s were a time for cheese and wine parties; the 1970s saw Jilly Cooper imparting sex advice to readers; and, in the 1980s, Bejam’s frozen, self-basting turkeys were de rigueur! I do hope you enjoy our retrospective looking at Christmases of the past (page 36) and will also find our experts’ future predictions interesting: turkeys delivered by drones; colour-changing party frocks; and holograms of family members who can’t be
