Well, whaddya know? Christmas is just around the corner…

JCH Parlour with Christmas tree and decor. Photo credit Reed Perkins

Holiday Lights 2024

December 2 & 3, 2024, brought us the latest edition of our Holiday Lights gathering of Clark house friends old and new. There was good food, tasty beverages, lively conversation, and fine seasonal music, all dished up in the unique ambience of our historic Jonathan Clark House Museum.

As we do every year, the house was decorated with appropriate 1840s-style decorations, including the table-top Christmas tree and ornaments, and the evergreen bough decorations on the window sills, shown above.

JCH website updates

The museum is not the only JCH property to get a holiday makeover. We’ve recently updated and added new information and photos to our website, especially the HOME and NEWS & EVENTS pages. And there’s a new slideshow, featuring the recent 2024 Holiday Lights event on the GALLERY page.

More changes are coming to the website in early 2025, including a shift from our current “dot-com” web- and email-addresses, to a more non-profit-appropriate “dot-org” set of addresses. We will have much more to tell you about that as the changes roll out (“seamlessly,” we hope) in early 2025.

2024 Year-End Fund Drive

It’s still not too late to show your support for the Jonathan Clark House via the 2024 Year-End Fund Drive. If you’re feeling generous, please click over to our website’s DONATE page and follow the links to either donate online via our PayPal account, or by mail by downloading, printing and mailing our PDF form.

Donations made now make you a member of the Friends of the Jonathan Clark House for all of 2025. And, as we do each year, we invite all of our friends to join us at our…

2025 Annual Meeting

The Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Jonathan Clark House will be held on Tuesday, January 7, 2025, from 5:30-7:00. The meeting will be held at Spectrum Investment Advisors Cafe, 6329 W. Mequon Road, at the corner of Mequon Road and Weston Drive in Mequon. Free parking is available on the south side of the building. 

Please see the poster (below) for more information. Plan to bring a friend. Seating is limited, so please RSVP by January 2 to jchmuseum@gmail.com

Ho! Ho! Ho!

That’s all for today. I wish you the Happiest of Holidays. I hope life permits you to enjoy some time to relax and be with the people you love, celebrate the traditions that are meaningful to you, and maybe savor some tasty historic holiday foods, too.

I’ll be back with new material in a bit. But for the coming week, I’m going to re-post a few of my favorite Christmas-themed CHH blog posts. I hope you enjoy them and, as always, thank you for reading Clark House Historian.

Postscript…

As in all we do, our JCH “Holiday Lights” decorations strive to be true to the Clark family’s time in Mequon, between about 1840-1860. The American artist Winslow Homer drew a similar (if somewhat more posh) holiday celebration from that era, featuring a table-top Christmas tree that looks much like ours. This engraving of Homer’s original drawing was published in Harper’s Magazine, vol. II, on December 25, 1858. Thanks to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for making this engraving—and thousands of other works from its collection—available for all to view, enjoy, and share.