’Tis the season when supermarket shelves fill with selection boxes and tubs of chocolates that shrink a little more with each passing year. But despite Christmas “shrinkflation”, our festive love of sweets has endured for hundreds of years and shows no sign of abating.
From cards and crackers to ghost stories by the fire, we often think of the Victorians as having invented Christmas as we know it. Indeed Victoria, like many of her subjects, was partial to Christmas sweets.
As a young queen in 1839, she recalls a boisterous Christmas dinner that ended in “fun at dessert with all sorts of curious figurines filled with bonbons” and “crackers”. These were not yet the explosive novelties we know today, but paper tubes specifically designed to contain sweets.
