Christmas Window 1 in Lancaster, Dec 2021

In November 2021, I submitted a window design inspired by the Ghost of Christmas Present who features in Charles Dickens’ novella, ‘A Christmas Carol’. Me and my design were selected by the team at Lancaster BID and paired up with Arteria, a beautiful, contemporary gift shop in the heart of Lancaster.

If you want to know more about the design and inspiration, scroll further down the page to see my initial drawings and process.

Proper, northern, winter weather; it felt Dickensian heading out to this job in the snow.

Drawing the city’s Town Hall clock on Arteria’s shop window before my hands went numb.

There had to be a Christmas pudding in the design. You can see the real town hall clock in the window’s reflection.

Handdrawing the designs in Posca pen

Adding Christmas warmth and light in the form of lots of candles. Spot the yule log and pears.

I added a Victorian top hat to fit the Dickensian theme and the character of Scrooge.

Some of the finished design; a scene of plenty full of food, light, gifts and living winter greenery.

I wanted to create a design that would look full - fullness of motifs would suggest plentifulness and generosity, both personified by the Ghost of Christmas Present in ‘A Christmas Carol’. And I wanted the design to include recurring themes found in the book; time, light, warmth, benevolence, joy and living well.

This was my initial rough sketch.

Time - I wanted to represent this using Lancaster’s Town Hall clock

Warmth and light - represented by an abundance of candles

Life/vitality - living winter greenery such as ivy, fir, holly, mistletoe and winter flowers

Food - in the form of Christmas fruits, puddings and generous, lavish dishes

Generosity - represented by gifts

After submitting an inital design, I was paired up with a business. I then had to adapt my design to a specific set of windows and a location. Arteria has two windows so I split my design across both windows, and placed my artwork in areas where my drawings would complement and not obscure their Christmas window displays.

I kept coherence and visual balance across both windows by placing my drawings in the lower portion of the windows.

Once I had a specific site, I could really go to town on firming up all the details of my design. My idea of a scene of plenty and generosity went well with a gift shop.

Top drawing: Left hand window

Bottom drawing: Right hand window

The main inspiration for the final designs came from Dickens’ novella itself. Throughout the book, the imagery is so rich and Dickens’ writing so descriptive and evocative that it was a joy to keep re-visiting the text for inspiration. These two passages about the Ghost of Christmas Present were key, for me:

The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney…

Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see…

Such a scene of generosity and warmth!

To plan the detail of the design I went to a variety of sources; illustrations from early publications of ‘A Christmas Carol’; traditional Victorian Christmas food; depictions of holly and other living greenery; etchings of Victorian candelabras and tableware; domestic Christmas illustrations from the Victorian period and at Victorian formal dress. I looked also at the many, different book covers that have been created for ‘A Christmas Carol’.

I really enjoyed putting this Christmas window together. Lots of reading, thinking and image research gave me a chance to get stuck into a creative project and I was really happy with the finished windows.

Christmas window art across the city was made possible by Lancaster BID (Business Improvement District) and featured the work of several artists.