Walking through midtown Manhattan yesterday, we tried to pass the great tree at Rockefeller Center –just to get a glimpse. As always, it was drawing a big crowd, the streets were packed and we gave up.
And as always, this enormous and dazzling display of lights makes me pose an old question: There weren’t any evergreen trees in Bethlehem. Why do people decorate Christmas trees in honor of the birth of Jesus?
Once again, we have the pagans to thank, as I’ve been describing in this series about Christmas and its mythic roots. In writing about the Roman Saturnalia in my post about December 25th, I mentioned Attis, an agricultural god worshiped in Rome, whose celebration date was December 25th and his symbol — a pine tree.
From pre-Christian times, evergreen boughs and other evergreen vegetation represented life in the midst of the dead of winter. While it was true in both ancient Greece and Rome where houses were decorated with evergreens as symbols of life, it was especially true in the Nordic and Germanic countries. The evergreen or fir tree was significant to the Norse, who burned a Yule log, and celebrated trees as sacred.
In medieval times, after Christianity arrived in the Norse and German world, that idea took hold in a German tradition called the miracle or Paradise Play, in which an evergreen was brought inside and represented the tree in the Garden of Eden and was decorated with apples— eventually hanging shiny red balls on the tree went together. The German Tannenbaum is really the source of the familiar Christmas tree. By the way “Tannenbaum” is translated as “Christmas tree” but its literal meaning is “fir tree.”
As for the lights, legend has it that Protestant Reformer Martin Luther was in the woods on a winter evening and looked up to see the stars shining through the trees and was inspired to put lights in the Christmas tree. Of course, he used candles which is not a good idea.
So who brought the Christmas tree to America?
The first Christmas trees in America were used in the early 1800’s by German settlers in Pennsylvania. Although the German soldiers, or Hessians, who were in Trenton, New Jersey back during the Revolution may have been sleeping around their Tannenbaum when George Washington crossed the Delaware to attack them on Christmas morning. King George III of England was German and had Christmas trees in England but it was not a widely popular Christmas tradition in America until the mid-19th century, as the great influx of immigrants to America began to bring the many Christmas traditions that had been suppressed by the Puritans of Massachusetts.
So whether you call it a Christmas tree or a “holiday tree,” when you admire that great big evergreen, it’s just one more way we all bring out our inner Viking!
And about that Rockefeller Center tree– The first of these now iconic trees was set up by construction workers who were building Rockefeller Center during the Great Depression. Then, as now and as it was for the Norse, it was a symbol of hope!
Don't Know Much About the Bible
