Holiday Events at Monticello
Make your plans to celebrate the holidays with Monticello! Take a special Holiday Evening Tours, craft your own holiday wreath, or join us for special holiday sales.
Winter holidays impacted Monticello’s free and enslaved communities quite differently, but it was a season marked by family, food, and music. Join us on Tuesday, December 14, at 1:00 p.m. ET for a live Q&A with Bill Barker, first-person interpreter of Thomas Jefferson, and Associate Curator Emilie Johnson. Barker and Johnson will discuss how families at Monticello, enslaved and free, celebrated the holidays and the (sometimes surprising) customs and traditions found on the mountaintop.
Blog post: Holidays at Monticello
In Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime, the holidays at Monticello were a season for family gatherings, visiting friends, settling accounts, and planning for the new year. For Monticello’s enslaved community, the holiday season was a time for reunion and a possible respite from labor on the plantation.
