Tag Archives: Mitfords

“A Ghost or Two Will Prove Invaluable”: Nancy Mitford’s Fabulously Unhinged Guide to Hosting a Country House Christmas

Never marry a Mitford, as the saying goes, but some of the sisters’ party advice? Golden. In the ’20s and ’30s, long before she published The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford contributed to British Vogue on a number of occasions—hardly surprising, given her close friendship with Cecil Beaton—but never more successfully than at Christmas, when she shared her thoughts on hosting a harmonious gathering at a country pile. Read her hilariously tongue-in-cheek guide to pulling off an acrimony-free party, below.


Christmas is so essentially a time (or should I say, Yule is so essentially a tide?) which ought to be spent in the country, and is so proverbially horrible in London, that the lucky owners of large country houses feel, and rightly, that it is incumbent on them to fill said…


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