One of the most popular elements of the Christmas celebration in the United States—and one of the most profitable—is the Christmas tree. It is one of the most enduring Christmas symbols. In fact, many families consider the holiday season incomplete without a tree. Most families have at least one in their homes; office buildings have them in their lobbies; and churches place them strategically throughout their naves. Children draw them in their classrooms. No other symbol is as closely associated with the holiday season as the Christmas tree.
Christmas trees populate the holiday landscape and feature prominently in the Christmas traditions celebrated by most American families. The tree stands as a symbol of a holiday once banned by colonial Puritans, but wide acceptance followed the appearance of large numbers of Christmas tree-bearing German and Dutch immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Subbotina/Dreamstime.com)
The exact origins of the Christmas tree are unknown, with many legends developing through the years on its exact origins. According to one, the English missionary St. Boniface began the custom one Christmas Eve in the sixth century when he came across some German-speaking pagans preparing a human sacrifice before an oak tree. He felled the tree with one blow of his axe. The people, impressed by what they considered a miracle, abandoned their ways for Christianity. Boniface pointed to a small fir tree lying among the ruins of the oak and admonished them to take it as a symbol of their new faith.
Another legend, dating back to tenth-century Europe, describes trees that mysteriously burst into bloom on Christmas Eve. A German legend elaborates on this theme. In this version a humble woodcutter and his wife find a shivering child at their door on a freezing night, who turns out to be Christ. After they offered him warm hospitality, the radiant child gives them the twig of a tree, declaring it will blossom year after year.
The first written record of a decorated Christmas tree appeared in 1510. In Riga, Latvia, men of the local merchants’ guild decorated a tree with artificial roses, danced around it in the marketplace, and then set fire to it. Twenty years later in Alsace, France (at the time a German territory), trees were sold in the marketplace, brought home, and left undecorated. However, a more persistent Christian legend attributes the first decorated Christmas tree to Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century German religious reformer, who brought home a small fir tree after discovering the beauty of the stars shining on it. Luther covered the tree with lit candles to represent the light and beauty of Christ.
This legend helped to increase the popularity of the Christmas tree, but the earliest known document describing a Christmas tree lit with candles was written about a century after Luther’s death. To add to the confusion, modern researchers now suggest that the earliest historical records of decorated Christmas trees actually come from the Middle Ages, centuries before the Latvian, Alsatian, and Luther references. Fir trees covered with apples served as a central prop for the paradise play, a folk religious drama often performed on Christmas Eve. Researchers believe that these props (paradise trees) were the forerunners of the Christmas tree.
Luminaria or Farolito?
Commonly known as luminarias, these Yuletide lights are a Christmas Eve tradition meant to welcome the coming of the Christ child. In their simplest form sand-filled paper bags enclosing lighted candles, rows of luminarias leading visitors up the walkways and driveways of homes at Christmastime are now common throughout the United States. There are even electric versions in plastic bags, just as there are artificial Christmas trees.
New Mexico is generally held to be the U.S. epicenter of this now widespread phenomenon, but in Santa Fe traditionalists insist that the proper name is farolito, while luminaria is a term more properly reserved for a celebratory holiday bonfire; luminaria is also the name given to the torch carried at the head of a Las Posadas procession.
Be that as it may, the concept of the luminaria—that of bright, welcoming light banishing the darkness at midwinter—lends itself to reinterpretation in contemporary American culture, and so, to cite one example, luminarias have become a significant symbolic part of Relay for Life, a major American Cancer Society overnight walk-a-thon fundraiser popular throughout the nation. As darkness falls, the track of the relay is illuminated with personalized bags adorned with the names of loved ones lost to cancer by participants. In addition, the name Luminaria has in recent years been appropriated for an arts festival in San Antonio, Texas.
C. Fee
By the seventeenth century, it was a popular German custom to decorate Christmas trees with fruit, especially apples, but in the eighteenth century evergreen tips were hung top down from the ceiling in both Germany and Austria, often decorated with apples, gilded nuts, and red paper strips, while in France, there are accounts of lighted candles being used as decorations on Christmas trees.
The earliest reference to a Christmas tree in the United States comes from the diaries of members of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which describe the custom of decorating wooden pyramids with evergreens. The Christmas Day entry for 1747 noted that it was a happy occasion for children with several small pyramids and one large pyramid of green brushwood, which was decorated with candles, apples, and verses. However, a more persistent tradition—having no evidentiary basis—is that the first Christmas trees in the United States came from the Hessian troops who fought against George Washington during the American Revolution. They brought the tree with them from Germany. German settlers are also believed to be among the first Americans to have Christmas trees in their homes, although the practice was not widely embraced by early nineteenth-century Americans because of its roots in paganism.
By the 1840s, the Christmas tree was widely known in the United States, popularized in part by publication of the children’s book Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree: A Holiday Present for Boys and Girls (1845) with an illustration of Kris Kringle decorating a Christmas tree stamped in gilt on the cover. By 1851 Christmas trees began to be sold commercially in the United States, and by the second half of the nineteenth century, the Christmas tree was an accepted tradition in American homes.
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Every American child knows Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer from the eponymous Christmas special and ubiquitous Christmas decorations bearing his image, not to mention the immensely popular song of the same name. What most Americans do not know is that this popular icon was created for a department store chain as part of a Depression-era holiday promotion.
C. Fee
Franklin Pierce was the first president to bring a Christmas tree into the White House (1856), starting an American Christmas tradition. The origins of the national tree lighting ceremony, however, date much later to Christmas Eve, 1913, when the celebration was held at the U.S. Capitol. The ceremony moved closer to the White House in 1923.
Martin J. Manning
See also Christmas Gift; Santa Claus
Further Reading
Allen, Linda. 2000. Decking the Halls: The Folklore and Traditions of Christmas Plants. Minocqua, WI: Willow Creek Press.
Dues, Greg. 2000. Catholic Customs and Traditions: A Popular Guide. Rev. ed. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications.
Foley, Daniel J. 1999. The Christmas Tree: An Evergreen Garland Filled with History, Folklore, Symbolism, Traditions, Legends, and Stories. Detroit: Omnigraphics.
Gulevich, Tanya. 2003. Encyclopedia of Christmas and New Year’s Celebrations. Detroit: Omnigraphics.
Haidle, Helen. 2002. Christmas Legends to Remember. Tulsa, OK: Honor Books.
Marling, Karal A. 2000. Merry Christmas!: Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Christmas Tree—Primary Document
Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree (1847)
The integration of new traditions into America’s folkways has been an ongoing process since the first non-English immigrants arrived in the United States. While it may be difficult to imagine Christmas today without a Christmas tree, this German tradition did not became part of the cultural mainstream until the mid-nineteenth century. Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree is a fascinating illustration of how commercialism can promote the acceptance of new traditions within a society. The opening advertisement emphasizes that those who want to keep up with the latest trend ought to own a Christmas tree. The story itself presents the Christmas tree as a divine gift to a poor, lowly child. Through such religious imagery, a novel trend is given new legitimacy.
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Fashions change, and of late Christmas Trees are becoming more common than in former times. The practice of hanging up stockings in the chimney corner for Kriss Kringle to fill with toys, pretty books, bon-bons &c., for good children, and rods for naughty children, is being superseded by that of placing a Christmas Tree on the table to await, the annual visit of the worthy Santa Klaus. He has, with his usual good nature, accommodated himself to this change in the popular taste; and having desired a literary gentleman to prepare his favourite Christmas present in accordance with this state of things, the following volume is the result of the new arrangement, and all parents, guardians, uncles, aunts, and cousins, who are desirous to conform to the most approved fashion, will take to hang one, two, or a dozen copies of the book on their Christmas Tree for 1847.
THE CHRISTMAS TREE
Early on Christmas Eve, a poor little child, who had no parents, walked through the town. He saw in every window the customary illumination, and, looking through into the houses, he saw many and many a gaily decked Christmas tree.
The little child wept, and said every child has a Christmas tree, but I am poor and forsaken, and have none. I am alone in this strange land. Will no one let me in at any house, or that I, too, may enjoy some of the merriment?
And he knocked at gate and door, but no one heard him, for it was Christmas Eve—no one had any ears for the poor little child in a strange land.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” prayed the little child, “I have no mother nor father, and am alone in a strange land; and no one will open a door unto me, so that I may go in, and be merry.”
The little child rubbed his hands, for they were stiff with cold, and he stood still in the narrow street.
Lo, a shining light moved down the street, and the little child beheld another child in shining white clothes coming toward him.
“I am Christkinlein,” said the child, “and I will not forget you, when you are forgotten by every one else. You have no house to go to, but I will give you a beautiful Christmas tree, here, in the street.”
And Christkinlein held his hand up towards heaven, and a beautiful star-spangled Christmas tree shone in the sky—so far, and yet so near—and the stars glittered and the little child looked on his heavenly Christmas tree with great joy.
It was to him like a dream; for angels came down and carried him up to the tree.
The poor little child is now gone back to his native place, but he does not forget his heavenly Christmas tree.
Source: Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree: A Holiday Present for Boys and Girls. Philadelphia: Grigg and Eliot, 1847.