"I've Been to a Marvelous Party"
This room is displayed as the living room on a flat in one of the new London mansion-blocks. It is Christmas Eve and resident couple are hosting an early-evening cocktail party for some of their friends and neighbors, and are hoping to impress them with their decorations and canapes.
They have used paper decorations and an artificial tree rather than a real one this year. During the early years of the twentieth century artificial decorations gradually began to replace evergreens, especially in urban homes as they were cleaner and it saved the expense of buying greenery from a market or florists. Christmas trees, whether real or artificial were, on the whole, now lit by electric lights. The paper lanterns reflect the fashion of the time for all things Japanese.
The couple are not planning to stay in town tomorrow, but are motoring down to Oxfordshire to have Christmas lunch with relatives. They are looking forward to hearing the King's Christmas broadcast to the Empire on the wireless tomorrow at 3.00pm. This tradition started in 1932 and became firmly established by the end of the 1930s. With the advent of the television, the Queen's Speech has been broadcast annually since 1956.