Glimpsing Christmases Past And Present

Holiday house tours needn't be all holly and lights and fancy table settings (although that's lovely).

This year, you can also see a mansion decorated for an elegant Christmas dinner party in the 1960s (minus the lava lights and psychedelic posters of a wasted St. Nick), and a Philadelphia neighborhood using the holidays to celebrate its tenacious diversity, as well as several structures that have never been dolled up and open for public viewing before. Here's what we've found.

PELHAM. A week from Sunday, Pelham - a section of West Mount Airy - will invite visitors into 11 homes to begin its 100th birthday celebration. In keeping with Pelham's history of tolerance and integration, the neighborhood's first holiday home tour will include mansions, carriage houses and twins that range from grand to modest. Some will be decorated for Christmas, others for Hanukah - and Kwanzaa will be acknowledged at the tour's welcome center.

SEPTA's R8 Chestnut Hill West line from Center City stops at the Carpenter Lane Station, a half-block away. "We want people to see Pelham and think that this type of community can happen in other places in Philadelphia," says co- chair Beau-Janette Feldman.

Start at the welcome center, Cecilian Academy, 144 Carpenter Lane, from noon to 3 p.m. Dec. 13. $15 includes Victorian tea from 3 to 5 p.m. Reservations suggested. Phone: 215-848-8998.

GERMANTOWN. Although many of the 12 sites on "A Winter Gathering in Historic Germantown," held this weekend and next, will be decorated in either a simple Quaker motif - with pine cones, dried fruits and flowers - or in a flashier Victorian style, the Cliveden mansion is cashing in on this year's fascination with the 1960s.

Cliveden, the 18th-century home of prominent Philadelphia jurist Benjamin Chew, will be bedecked as if the last Chews to live there - in the '60s - were throwing a holiday wingding, with brandy snifters filled with decorative gold- and-red balls, and mink stoles and pillbox hats laid out in the front parlor.

Purchase tickets for the self-guided and shuttle-bus tours of 12 historic houses - including Cliveden, Upsala, Wyck, Grumblethorpe and Loudoun - at any of the houses; Cliveden is at 6401 Germantown Ave. Tours run 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. this Saturday and next, and noon to 4 p.m. this Sunday and next. Tickets cost $15 and are good for one visit to each site all four days. Shuttle bus costs $3 and operates Saturdays only. Phone: 215-848-1777.