The back-in-time street in York which transports visitors to a real Charles Dickens Christmas

The museum is once again welcoming thousands of visitors to mark the festive season as it has been trussed up with garlands and authentic decorations to create the air of a true Dickensian Christmas.

Kirkgate is the main attraction of the museum and features real shop fronts from Victorian York – but it isn’t the only element given a Christmas makeover, with period rooms from the 17th century onwards also decorated with trinkets and adornments of their respective times.

For staff at the museum, planning for how to dress the street for the festive season begins in the summer.

Helen Thornton, curator of social history at the Castle Museum, spends hours carefully choosing which artefacts will go on display in which shop front, using adverts and magazines from the Victorian era to inform her decisions.

She said: “When we decorate the shops in particular, we do a lot of research to establish how shops in York advertised Christmas.

"The signs in the windows are from newspaper advert at the time.

"For example, we have a shop called Leak & Thorp which ran an 1899 Christmas advert in the Yorkshire Evening Press advertising a bazaar with Japanese lanterns and pampas grass.

"We’ve decorated the store with these items. For our stationers’ we put Christmas cards on display.

"And in the cocoa rooms – which historically had links to Quakers and provided alternatives to pubs – we have presents wrapped up to show the Victorian ideals of charity and giving.”

The Victorian image of Christmas is widely attributed to the work of Charles Dickens, whose book A Christmas Carol is still wildly popular to this day.

And Ms Thornton explained how Dickens’ legacy still has an impact nearly 200 years on from the book’s original publication.

"We think of Dickens as someone who effectively invented Christmas,” she said. “But I think he was responding more to an idea that we were losing our sense of what Christmas was.

"And we’ve hung on to that notion of a Victorian Christmas. Kirkgate epitomises that, with the traditional Christmas imagery that we’re all familiar with.”

In the museum's period rooms - which include a 17th century manor, a moorland cottage, and a 1980s kitchen, care has been taken not just to replicate decorations but the foodstuff of festive past too.

"In the 17th century room, we have a yule log on display and evergreens,” said Ms Thornton. “We’ve got a boar’s head – boar was a nice treat, but they did become extinct later on in that century.

"A lot of our visitors have been coming since they were little, and it becomes a generational thing. That’s why people like coming to see the street at Christmas – it’s somewhere they have a real connection with.”