Decorating the family Christmas tree is an enduring memory of my childhood. Dusty boxes pulled from the cellar, ornaments strung and restrung, and stories told of our most cherished yuletide heirlooms.
For many, the Christmas tree is a centerpiece of Advent, reflected not only in domestic tradition but also by the scale and scope of its commercial market:120 million Christmas trees are harvested each year worldwide. In the United States alone, an estimated 30 million freshly cut Christmas trees are sold annually.
It’s easy to take this tradition for granted, but the Christmas tree’s history as a celebrated custom is a more complicated and slowly germinated story.
Winter Solstice Traditions
Evergreens, which keep their green needles year-round, reminded ancient peoples of the calendrical turn when the sun would regain its strength. For ancient civilizations who related the sun to a god, the turn toward longer days also equated to the strength of their deities. The winter solstice, which falls on December 21 or 22 in the Northern Hemisphere, brings us the shortest day of the year. Communities for millennia have hung pine, spruce, and fir branches over their doors and windows at the winter solstice to hold off sickness and evil spirits — and to offer reassurance that longer and brighter days would return.
In about 2600 B.C., Egyptians began worshipping Ra, a sun deity portrayed with a hawk’s head and a blazing sun on his crown. They believed Ra started his recovery from sickness to health on the winter solstice and adorned their homes with green palms and papyrus stems to honor the event.
Early Romans, beginning in the fourth century B.C., celebrated the solstice with Saturnalia, a feast in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The festival signaled a transition, to when fields and farms would once again flourish. To mark the occasion, homes and temples were draped with evergreen boughs.
In Britain, Ireland, and France, as early as the third century B.C., the Druids — an ancient Celtic polytheistic class of priests, teachers, and judges — used evergreens to decorate their temples as a sign of everlasting life. So did their Scandinavian neighbors, the Vikings of the Middle Ages, who commemorated Balder, their god of light and beauty (who was killed by an arrow of mistletoe).
A promise of new life, protection, and divine appeasement, evergreens were central in many ancient polytheistic communities. Only later, for related but radically different reasons, did Christians adopt the practice.
The Evergreen Reborn
One legend says the Christmas tree emerged from an oak that the English Benedictine monk, Boniface, felled during his mission to the Germanic parts of Francia in the eighth century. As told, Boniface confronted Germans sacrificing to an oak tree in honor of the god Thor. Commandeering an axe, the saint chopped down the tree to avert pagan worship and, when not struck dead by lightning as the onlookers expected, converted and baptized the watching Germans to Christianity. As the story goes, a fir tree grew from the fallen oak and, because of its triangular shape, became a living symbol of the Trinity.
A more modern interpretation of the Christmas tree as a religious symbol is credited to the Germans beginning in the 16th century, when a fir tree hung with apples was brought into German homes on December 24, the religious feast day of Adam and Eve. Called “paradise trees,” these trees symbolized the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Some even believe Martin Luther was the first to add lighted candles to evergreen branches.
Though popular in Europe, early Americans largely rejected Christmas trees, considering them a pagan ritual. That began to change as German and Irish immigrants flooded the country in the mid-1800s. The scales tipped permanently in 1848 when the popular Queen Victoria of England, and her German prince, Albert, were pictured with their children decorating a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle in an engraving published by the Illustrated London News.
By the end of the 19th century, Christmas trees became widely accepted throughout America, solidified by President Benjamin Harrison in 1889 at the White House and celebrated in 1931 when construction workers erected a tree in the center of the multi-block building project at the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The Lesson of the Christmas tree
Sometime this month, in the solitude of your home, in the glow of a spruce, pine, or fir, I invite you to listen. When I listen, I hear about a flourishing life.
The Christmas tree reminds me that a flourishing life is an interdependent one. Grown on farms in all 50 states, across Canada, and worldwide, Christmas trees require diligent care — planting, watering, fertilizing, shearing, weeding, and time (a tree takes eight to 15 years to mature). They meet needs of ours by providing oxygen, wildlife habitation, windbreak, and beauty. By this they remind us that in our agency and vulnerability, we belong to God, the world, and one another.
E.E. Cummings’ 1923 poem “Little Tree,” a poem in the collection Tulips & Chimneys, captures this symbiosis, particularly in the following lines.
Little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
…
put up your little arms
and I’ll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won’t be a single place dark or unhappy
then when you’re quite dressed
you’ll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they’ll stare!
oh but you’ll be very proud
and my little sister and I will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we’ll dance and sing
“Noel Noel”
The Christmas tree also reminds me that a flourishing life is rooted in love, for our neighbor and our God. Jeremiah, a prophet in the southern kingdom of Judah just before Jerusalem was destroyed, warned Israel of its idolatry and impending peril at the hand of Babylon (Jer 10:3–5). To make his point, he decried:
For the customs of the peoples are false:
a tree from the forest is cut down
and worked with an ax by the hands of an artisan;
they deck it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammers and nails
so that it cannot move.
Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field,
and they cannot speak;
they have to be carried,
for they cannot walk.
With only a superficial glance at Jeremiah’s words, the Christmas tree might seem to deserve to be under indictment. It is not. What God detests are god substitutes, in all their forms. Rather than a condemnation, the Christmas tree, in its splendor, is an affirmation, pointing us to the light of the world and the light of life. For God himself is “like an evergreen cypress,” who bears good fruit (Hos 14:8). This Christmas, consider the evergreen and invite it to teach you.
