Warmth and Light: Creating a New Experience for the Holidays

Every three, or in this case four, years DAR Museum education staff and curators develop a new period room exhibit for the holiday season. As education and preservation are our guiding principles, decorating period rooms must be accompanied by a unifying theme and information for our visitors that expand their understanding. We cannot hope to decorate all 30 of the period rooms, for various reasons; some relate to time and others to the way we know our visitors experience Memorial Continental Hall.

This year our efforts are led by our new Curator of Education Kevin Lukacs who joined the museum staff in late August and who wrote the bulk of this blog post. Our planning centered on the many traditions that take place in American homes around this time of year. Just as some of us may celebrate St. Nicholas Day in early December, these are traditions and religious observances brought here from the many places around the globe Americans have come.

So, this year in addition to some of our rooms being decorated in a more traditional manner we hope to offer a few new visions of the American home, as well. We will look at a small sample of celebrations held in December from around the world. Some of these celebrations are centered around the winter solstice.

Some of these celebrations have myriad variants on traditions, and some have begun to wane in popularity in their home cultures. Each has a distinct cultural flavor (sometimes literally), and due to the wonderful diversity of the United States, there are immigrants and descendants here today that still observe or remember these touching holidays in one form or another.

Visitors will discover how Christmas was celebrated in Revolutionary War era Massachusetts and compare it to early twentieth century Michigan. They will take in some of the different traditions brought to this country from around the globe by generations of immigrants that enrich our American holiday celebrations and make them unique. We hope that learning about these traditions will only add to the warmth, light, and spirit of the holiday season.