The house on West Main Street where the Townsend family lived through the Revolution is going back to candlelight for the holidays. Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay holds its Holiday Candlelight Tour on December 5, from 5 to 6:30 p.m., timed to follow the Oyster Bay tree lighting.

What the tour covers

The evening opens with a performance by the Holy Roamin' Carolers. Then a guide in holiday dress leads a candlelight tour of the house, roughly an hour and a half long, through the ways the Townsends, their neighbors and the people who worked in the household marked the winter holidays across nearly 250 years. The story runs from the plain observances of the Revolutionary era to the more elaborate celebrations of the Victorian era.

Hot spiced cider and other seasonal treats are served. Tickets are $25 for museum members and $35 for the general public, sold online through the museum's event page.

A house with a Revolutionary story

Raynham Hall was the Townsend family's home in Oyster Bay. Robert Townsend, a son of the family, was a member of George Washington's Culper Spy Ring during the Revolution, and the museum tells that story year-round alongside the history of the house before the war, the enslaved people who lived and worked there, and the house's life after 1850. The holiday tour is a chance to see the rooms by candlelight.

Before December: a talk on art in hard times

Earlier in the season, the museum's Townsend Talk series turns to the 1930s. On Thursday, November 19, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., the dance historian Celia Ipiotis presents When America Went Broke, Art Went Big, about how the Works Progress Administration put artists to work during the Great Depression. The talk includes footage from Ipiotis's EYE ON DANCE program in which the choreographers Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow describe their own experiences of that period. Tickets are sold through the museum's site.

An evening in the hamlet

Because the candlelight tour follows the tree lighting, it fits into a single December evening on West Main Street and Audrey Avenue, with the hamlet's shops and restaurants a short walk away.

If you go

Raynham Hall Museum is at 30 West Main Street, Oyster Bay. Buy tickets for the Holiday Candlelight Tour and the November 19 Townsend Talk on the museum's site, or call 516-922-6808.

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