Xmas 1937

Join at the Yeatman family's Yuletide celebrations with this delightful home movie of their 1937 Christmas dinner.

Take a peek at the Yeatman family's Yuletide celebrations with this delightful home movie of their 1937 Christmas party preparations and dinner. The star of the show is the plump and glistening Christmas pudding brought out by the family's uniformed maid, and it's a real treat to see the joy and silliness it inspires in the paper-hatted diners.

Ronald Yeatman, who shot and composed this film, was a keen amateur filmmaker, and made a whole host of home movies documenting family occasions from the mid-1930s to the early-1950s. For this particular episode, he's made inventive use of what was known as 'pre-tinted' film stock - black and white film which was specially dyed a certain colour - as he cuts between the festive green of the intertitles and the rich red of the picture for a charming Christmassy tone.