Christmas at Chatsworth House

These past few years I have been all about creating new traditions at Christmas, and this place is somewhere that I visited first last year and was so impressed with it, as soon as tickets became available, I had to buy one for this year before they sold out.

Fast forward to early December and I was on my way, with a must-have visit to the Derbyshire Gift Centre completed on what turned out to be a dry day, but with a slight haze in the air due to the low temperatures, which made the visit that bit more “Festive” feeling.

Entry to the house is always a timed thing, but as normal, I got there a good few hours early and had a wander around the (vast) estate linked to the house and even managed to see some new areas I had not previously seen (the Kitchen Garden being a particular highlight).

After several hours of external wandering, it was into the house and if I am honest, I felt a little let down this year with the theme.

Granted, the trees and the rooms were all very nicely decorated, but there is only so many times you can look at a tree, with accompanying fox and the piped in sound of an owl coming out of the tree.

Thinking about it, I think this is probably due to my first visit last year which happened to coincide with the “best of” Christmas, where every room had a different theme from previous years, so each room gave you something different.

After weighing it all up, I think I probably will return next year, just to give it one more go of every room being the same theme, then I can decide if it needs to be replaced as an annual tradition or not going forward.