Johnson Brother's T'Was The Night Before Christmas Dish Set

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It began with the soup bowls. It was our second Christmas as a married couple and our first time hosting Christmas Eve. I was heartbroken over a family estrangement and the holidays were looking very different that year. Being my first time hosting, in our tiny studio apartment no less, I did not have all the tools needed to host a family dinner. I was missing soup bowls, among many other things.

I had no idea how healing this first Christmas Eve would be and how it would shape the holidays for me for years to come, when I saw these cute little bowls at our local TJ Maxx. They were a creamy white with a red print of a house cozy in snowy hills. Around the bowl was a passage from Andrew Clements Moore’s T’was The Night Before Christmas, a holiday poem my father used to read us every Christmas Eve. That year I purchased six to serve a homemade lobster bisque.

Melancholy and grieving, I started to piece together my holidays and it ended up being one of the happiest Christmas Eve’s I can remember. I realized that I did not lose anything by losing contact with abusive people in my life. Instead, I was surrounded only by people who love me and wish good things for me. Those little bowls were the beginning of a new tradition. Every year since I host a small family dinner for Christmas Eve and I now look forward to the day each and every year. A day that used to be filled with extreme stress and sadness is now a happy and loving day full of warmth, love, and gratitude.

It was not until after that first Christmas Eve that I learned the bowls that I had included in that first Christmas Eve meal were a part of a reproduction set of the Johnson Brothers 1880s Night Before Christmas set.

Johnson Brothers pottery was founded by two brothers, Alfred and Frederick Johnson in 1883 England. They were the grandsons of a famous English potter known as Alfred Meakin. They were an early adopter of transferware, which they used to mass produce their popular designs in red and blue prints. Their other brothers Henry and Robert later joined the business and it was Robert who took the franchise to the United States starting in New York. They had a big success through World War I to the 1950s and began to decline at the end of the twentieth century. By 2015 they were discontinued, but their reproductions live on and you can find several sets at Replacements.com.

I started collecting other parts of the set, starting with the dinner plates. Last year I completed my dinner set to include the dinner plates, salad plates, soup bowls, and tea cups with saucers, enough settings to serve eight guests. Normally my Christmas Eve is small and I only have about four to six guests, but I wanted a couple extras just in case we have more to dinner one year. One day when we have a house I would like to grow the collection to a set for twelve guests, and then up to sixteen. (My husband and I both have large families and we intend to host larger gathering when we have a home of our own one day.)

This is what our table setting looked like last Christmas Eve. I’m looking forward to pulling them out again for this holiday and already have four place settings displayed on our kitchen corner hutch.

The glasses seen here are the traditional Spode Christmas tree glasses. The little splash of gold and green goes well with our dinner set. Perhaps one day I will add some thrifted crystal glasses.

I set up the table in our living room in front of the Christmas tree.

This year I displayed our dinner set in our corner hutch and used the plates throughout December.

I was also gifted this lovely dinner serving platter that matches the set from my mother and a set of the bread plates.

I bought myself the matching milk jug and a serving tray for our Christmas Eve hot cocoa station. Next year I plan to complete the set with the mugs.

Over the years the Johnson Brothers have come out with numerous Christmas dinnerware collections including their Old Britain Pink Christmas set, Merry Christmas set, Victorian Christmas, Winter Holiday, Christmas in Canada, and 12 Days of Christmas sets, among others. The Night Before Christmas set is my personal favorite.

If you are looking for this set for yourself (or a gift for someone else) you can find thrifted ones online at Etsy or new reproductions at replacements.com.