A History of Legends, Families and Capitalism: A Candid History of the Christmas Tree – The Conversation
James AT Lancaster, The University of Queensland
The Christmas tree is a modern invention. It is a largely secular symbol, having no basis in the Bible. There are many trees in the Bible, from the Tree of Knowledge to the Tree of Life in Genesis to the reference to the cross of Christ as a “tree” in Acts. But there is no Christmas tree.
The same is right from ancient pagan sources. Although it may be tempting to draw links between the Christmas tree and pagan gods and festivals, such as the Egyptian god Ra and the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the Christmas tree as we know it does not has no relation.
It is the same the legend of Saint-Boniface and the Germans, which is just that: a legend. Almost all religions, ancient and modern, have used trees in their rituals, but not Christmas trees.
Even when we get to the 16th century, the Christmas tree we know is still 350 years in the future.
Martin Luther’s Story, to whom the origins of the tree have been popularly attributed, is not supported by scholarship. As sane as it sounds, Luther was not overwhelmed by the beauty of a snowy tree while beholding the Christ child.
The truth is that the Christmas tree is a relatively new tradition. It was born from a minor tradition and localized in the seventeenth century in one place: the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg.
A German tradition
German citizens of Strasbourg included a tree as part of a Christmas Day judging tradition. Children would be judged by their parents. If good, the candies would be left under a tree. If it was bad, there would be no candy – a hint of what was to come on Judgment Day.
The ritual spread to other parts of Germany in the 1770s. German Romantic writer Goethe offered the first story of the Christmas tree to reach a wide audience in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). But it wasn’t widely adopted in Germany until the 1830s, after the Christmas tree began to gain popularity in America.
The tradition came to Britain in the 1830sintroduced by German merchants into Manchester about the same time that the courts of George III and William IVthemselves of German origin, introduced him to the British aristocracy.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularized the tradition in Britain, when Albert put up a Christmas tree in Windsor in 1840.
The scene was immortalized in The Illustrated London News in 1848, when an engraving was printed showing Victoria, Albert and their children around a candle-lit tree with glass ornaments.
Avoid excess
The Christmas tree with gifts hidden under its branches is derived from America, first introduced in Pennsylvania from 1812.
The Christmas tree was adopted into American culture as an attempt to remove the gross debauchery of the season.
Prior to the mid-19th century, Christmas was celebrated like a carnival, in which revelers – usually the poor and working classes – paraded through the cities, knocking on the doors of the wealthy and demanding to be feasted or given a drink. This practice, “sailed‘, evolved to involve drunkenness, vandalism and lewd acts.
The hustle and bustle of the Christmas season was to be mitigated by the indoor, child-friendly Christmas tree around which the middle-class family gathered.
Children would no longer be allowed out to revel in the season. The outdoors would be brought indoors: a tree cut down and brought indoors so that Christmas could take place in the safety and comfort of home.
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Adopted to mitigate the excesses of the season, American merchants and manufacturers popularized Christmas Tree. Gifts weren’t placed under the tree until savvy makers recognized the potential of new indoor festivities.
The gross excess of Christmases past – drinking, feasting and sex – has made a comeback in a new, bourgeois way with the giving of gifts.
The wrapped Christmas gift is an American invention of the 1840s that took the world by storm. Wrapped gifts began to be placed under trees by parents in response to book publishers’ marketing strategies.
American families learned the new tradition not from German immigrants, but from these exact books: books in which the Christmas tree was depicted as a way to keep children happy indoors with what essentially amounted to a bribe. What better way to convince your kids to stay indoors, away from the fun and the troubles, than to leave gifts under the tree?
Booksellers published collections of short stories and poems, such as Kriss Kringle’s Christmas tree (1845), in which children received books as gifts, but also swords, drums or dolls.
The genius of the book publishers was to present the new system of buying gifts for children as an old “folk tradition”. Parents were led to believe that placing presents under the Christmas tree was a ritual as old as the biblical Magi, with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Despite its name, the modern Christmas tree has little connection to an imagined Christian past.
Since the 1830s, when it became a widespread bourgeois ritual to bring a tree indoors and decorate it with lights, ornaments, angels and stars, the Christmas tree has been a largely secular symbol. of the season, whose success remains linked to the forces of a consumer economy.
James AT Lancasterlecturer in studies of Western religious traditions, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The conversation under Creative Commons license. Read it original article.