A Colonial Christmas for America's 250th
This weekend's 55th annual Candlelight Tour hosted by the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation features sites and stories of the Revolutionary War-era city.
By Hailey Zeller
CORRESPONDENT
Every December, Fredericksburg glows, not just with the glitter of LED lights or inflatable snowmen, but with something much older, softer, and profoundly more human—candlelight.
This year, as the country prepares for its 250th birthday, the annual Candlelight Tour sponsored by the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation isn’t just a holiday tradition, but a lens that allows us to look closer at how our nation formed—not only through grand speeches or marble monuments, but through kitchens, workrooms, parish shops, and places where history was lived long before it was written.
The 2025 tour, which takes place this weekend, highlights “the sites and stories of 18th-century Fredericksburg,” according to the event website. It features the Mary Washington House, Fielding Lewis’s 1749 store, the James Monroe Museum, St. George’s Episcopal Church and cemetery, the 1785 silversmith’s house—now home to the Fredericksburg Center for the Creative Arts—and the circa-1770 Richard Johnston Inn.
America at 250 isn’t merely a milestone, but a mirror, and Fredericksburg is holding it up. Walk into the Mary Washington House and you don’t just see a preserved colonial home; you step into the domestic world that shaped a young George Washington’s ideas of responsibility and discipline.
Enter Fielding Lewis’s store, and you’re inside early American economy in motion.
Stand in St. George’s Churchyard, and the Revolutionary War becomes something other than a chapter in a textbook, but a collection of decisions, sacrifices, contradictions, and hopes made by people who lived within five blocks of where you’re standing.
When you visit a silversmith’s home, you’re reminded that craftsmanship, not mass production, once built the backbone of local economies.
When you step into the James Monroe Museum, you’re reminded that leadership isn’t a mythic trait, but a mantle we hand to ordinary people who rise to extraordinary moments.
When you wander through the Richard Johnston Inn, you recognize how tightly intertwined public history and private life really are.
America is in a moment of deep questioning about identity, belonging, justice, and memory.
Anniversaries can be empty celebrations or opportunities to reckon with our inheritance, and this year’s Candlelight Tour chooses the latter.
Here, the past isn’t a “once upon a time.” It is an unfinished story that the present is still accountable for.
There’s something symbolic about using candlelight, a fragile flame that still manages to illuminate. It suggests that history isn’t blinding and must be approached slowly.
It asks us to pay attention, and it reveals what electric bulbs can overpower—details, textures, shadows, and imperfections.
Candlelight forces us to see the past the way the past saw itself, and in a world of instant answers and accelerated everything, that alone is revolutionary.
This year’s tour is an invitation to walk through a town that helped build a country, to acknowledge both the people celebrated and the people forgotten, and to ask what it means to commemorate a nation when that nation is still growing and still becoming.
Fredericksburg’s Candlelight Tour asks visitors to hold that question gently, like a flame cupped in their hands.
Event Details
Saturday, December 13, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday, December 14, from noon to 4 p.m.
Tickets are $35 for HFFI members and $40 for non-members. Children under 12 are free. Special $75 ticket includes the Saturday evening cocktail party with entertainment, at Historic Smithfield/Fredericksburg Country Club, from 6 to 8 p.m.
More information and tickets here.
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Wow Hailey Zeller! Beautiful piece of writing about this weekend's Historic Fredericksburg Foundation's Candlelight Tour. I appreciate you using the various aspects of human experience that a candle's glow might symbolize. Candlelight, ever 'the fragile flame', creates kinship and connection. A shared spirit among us.
In offering the Candlelight Tour, HFFI does more than light up history. HFFI creates moments, including for children, that give us a vital sense of communal belonging and kindle a spirit of togetherness.