A history of… Christmas trees
Baubles represent 'forbidden fruit'!
We have a short, extra, festive, post this week which I hope you enjoy before we share, on 27th December, our list of ten most surprising and/or interesting things we discovered while researching these pieces over the course of 2024.
Before delving in the history of the Christmas tree it makes sense to explore the history of Christmas itself a little first. One thing we can be pretty sure of is that 25th December wasn’t the date of Jesus’s birth (nor was he born in the year 0 – rather somewhere between 6 BCE and 4 BCE). The date is significant today in large part due to its proximity to the winter solstice (21st or 22nd December in the Northern Hemisphere), an event that has been celebrated by peoples far back into prehistory. The neolithic monument of Newgrange in Ireland was built more than 6,000 years ago and was aligned in such a way that the light of the rising sun on the day of the winter solstice would shine through the entry passage and illuminate the central tomb.
The Roman festival of Saturnalia long pre-dates Christianity and was held across the solstice, from 17th to 23rd December. It involved partying, feasting and gift-giving, and also role-reversals whereby masters would wait upon their slaves. This behaviour has been suggested to be the origins of the Lords of Misrule – generally low-status people in Tudor England put in charge of Christmastide festivities which also included traditional social hierarchies being reversed.
Early in the first millennium, 25th December was designated by both the Greeks and the Romans as the ‘birthday of the Sun’ and in 274 CE the emperor Aurelian instituted the festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (‘birthday of the Invincible Sun’) on that day. In 354 CE a wealthy Roman Christian named Valentinus commissioned a compilation of chronological and calendrical texts (today called ‘The Chronograph of 354’) and this is the earliest known reference to the celebration of Christmas, as the birth of Christ, on 25th December. It is believed that this date was officially set by Pope Julius I, bishop of Rome from 337 to 352, almost certainly piggy-backing upon the existing pagan festival.
Early pagan solstice celebrations involved the use of evergreens as decoration, as their vital persistence through the winter months would herald the light and spring to come. In a poem by Catullus (c.84–c.54 BCE) the gods are described as dressing a house with laurel and cyprus to celebrate Saturnalia. Early Christians copied these traditions and so the tradition of having something akin to a Christmas tree dates back more than 1,500 years.
In the medieval period it became traditional to perform mystery plays, enacting Biblical events, on 24th December. A popular choice was the story of the Garden of Eden and an essential prop for this was a ‘tree of paradise’ – the tree from which Adam and Eve ate and thus causing the fall of man. Such trees, decorated with red apples (representing the forbidden fruit)1 would come to be placed in peoples’ homes and much later those apples would be replaced by shiny, round, red baubles. Yes, those Christmas ornaments hung today are actually a reference to the Garden of Eden!
One of the earliest references to a Christmas tree comes from a 15th-century Portuguese Cistercian monastery:
Note on how to put the Christmas branch, scilicet: On the Christmas eve, you will look for a large Branch of green laurel, and you shall reap many red oranges, and place them on the branches that come of the laurel, specifically as you have seen, and in every orange you shall put a candle, and hang the Branch by a rope in the pole, which shall be by the candle of the high altar.
Modern Christmas trees originated in Central Europe in the 16th century and it is generally believed that the Protestant reformer Martin Luther was instrumental in their popularity. It is Luther who is said to be the first person to place lighted candles on a Christmas tree and there are records showing that one was placed in the cathedral of Strasbourg in 1539.
Christmas trees arrived relatively late to North America, and for good reason. The Puritan Pilgrim Fathers didn’t hold with celebrating Christmas, their rationale being if you singled out some days as being holy then it implicitly meant that others were not holy. ‘They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday’ was a popular saying and they applied this rule to everyone, Puritan on not. Governor William Bradford (1590–1657), who ruled the Plymouth Colony on and off for a period of 30 years, punished a group of non-Puritan workers for playing ‘stoole-ball’ (an early form of baseball) on Christmas day 1621 saying, “My conscience cannot let you play while everybody else is out working.”
Christmas was outright banned in New England well into the 1680s, with fines being levied against people who took the day off or celebrated and it wasn’t until 1836 that the first state, Alabama, declared it a public holiday, and only in 1870 was it declared a nationwide federal holiday. It is interesting to note, in a time when we hear about reports of ‘the war against Christmas’, that it hasn’t been a holiday in America for longer than it has been!
Christmas trees did arrive in North America somewhat earlier though. At Christmas in 1781, General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, a German officer fighting for the British in Quebec, held a party for his officers in the town of Sorel which featured a fir tree hung with fruits and lit with candles.
By the end of the 18th century the Christmas tree tradition was well established in central Europe, but it took a little bit longer for it to take a foothold in Britain. It is generally thought that the royal family was instrumental in this, and this is true! In 1800 the German-born Queen Charlotte had a Christmas tree at a party she held for the royal children and this soon became an annual occurrence. Queen Victoria in particular was very taken with Christmas trees – she would have her own one in her room every Christmas. In her journal for Christmas Eve, 1832, the 13-year-old future queen wrote:
After dinner… we then went into the drawing room near the dining room… There were two large round tables on which were placed two trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments. All the presents being placed round the trees…
It wasn’t until Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert in 1840 that Christmas trees really moved beyond royal palaces and into the homes of more common folk. The Queen and her consort were huge trend-setters and pictures of them with their Christmas trees started appearing in the press and inspiring others to ape their style. In 1848 the Illustrated London News had a picture of the royal family around their tree on its cover with a detailed report on the Christmas trees in Windsor Castle. This was picked up by outlets across the country and by the end of the 1850s trees were commonplace even in middle-class homes.
If you do celebrate Christmas and have a Christmas tree this year you might perhaps see it as something of a chore, what with getting it, dressing it, taking it down and vacuuming up the needles afterwards. Should your joy for a Christmas tree have declined with age I’d like to leave you with the words Prince Albert wrote in 1847:
I must now seek in the children an echo of what Ernest [his brother] and I were in the old time, of what we felt and thought; and their delight in the Christmas trees is not less than ours used to be.
Happy holidays.
Though in the original texts the Hebrew word pĕriy, which simply means ‘fruit’, is used – there is no actual indication of the type of fruit consumed by Adam and Eve. It is unclear why it is said to have been an apple (or sometimes a quince).
Thanks for this interesting article. Love things like this!
Nice column and beautiful reminder that it often is more important to think about how we see than what we see.