Hello, this is Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast. Did you ever wish you could get a glimpse of what Christmas was like in the Gilded Age? Well, now you can. Join me and Bowery Boys Walks on December 9th for a special VIP one-day bus trip from Manhattan to Lindhurst Mansion in Terrytown, New York. Gilded Age financier Jay Gould's Country Home.

For more information and tickets, please visit Bowery Boyswalks.com.

I hope to see you on December 9th.

Welcome to the Gilded Gentleman Christmas special for 2023.

It's really hard to believe that a whole year has gone by since my last Christmas show,

and we have covered so many people and places over the past year.

Well, needless to say, like so many of you, I just love thinking about a 19th century Christmas.

And in this show, we delve into what Christmas

was really like in parts of Victorian America and even into the early years of the 20th century.

Queen Victoria's reign was long and very influential, of course, in America as well as Britain,

and it ended with her death in 2001, at which point her son became King Edward the 7th and reigned until 1910.

Many historians like to say that more change occurred on all levels, social, cultural,

and political during the 19th century than ever before in history.

And, well, you could say that's certainly true of how Christmas holiday celebrations evolved, too,

from the very early Dutch-inspired traditions of New Amsterdam here in New York,

to the years of the Gilded Age with some very extravagant

mansions as the setting and some very extravagant gifts. Well, for some anyway. In this show,

we will look at two families, the Treadwell family who prospered in their New York City townhouse in the middle of the

19th century, and then we'll see the Mills family who, during the Gilded Age, for at least a few

Christmases that we know about, celebrated the holiday in their grand mansion in the Hudson Valley.

We'll talk to a curator and a historian about these families, these mansions,

and just how each of them in very different ways and at very different times celebrated

...