The Santa and sleigh were from my Grandma St.John's tree.
I love this time of year, especially because I love Christmas trees and all the decorations. I’ve been working on thinning out my storage room, since I had enough ornaments to decorate trees with six different themes. I used to put up four trees, but we’ve downsized and I have to get my mind around the fact that I need less.
Every year since our children were small,
we’ve spent an evening driving around and enjoying the lights. The houses are
so lovely. Some people are extreme in their decorating, but my favorite part is
still seeing that lighted tree in the front window. Over the holidays I usually
have a chance to see several of our friends’ homes and trees, and I never get
tired of the experience.
Late in the Middle Ages, Germans and
Scandinavians placed evergreen trees inside their homes or just outside their
doors to show their hope in the forthcoming spring. Records
have it that the first Christmas tree or Tannenbaum can be traced to
France in 1521, though the Germans are most often credited with its origin. The
first trees were decorated with apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers
for the pleasure of the wealthy people’s children.
George Washington didn’t have a Christmas
tree. Many colonial religions banned celebrations, claiming that they were tied
to pagan traditions. The New England Puritans passed a law that punished anyone
who observed the holiday with a five-shilling fine. The Quakers treated
Christmas Day as any other day of the year. The Presbyterians didn’t have
formal services until they noticed that their members were heading to the
English church to attend theirs! This sparked the Presbyterian Church to start
their own. It was the Anglicans, Roman
Catholics and Lutherans who introduced Christmas celebrations to colonial America.
December 25th actually began a season of festivities that lasted until January
6th--the Twelve days of Christmas. January 6th was called Twelfth Day, and
colonists found it was the perfect occasion for balls, parties and other
festivals.
Some historians trace the lighted Christmas
tree to Martin Luther. He attached candles to a small evergreen tree to
simulate the reflections of the starlit heavens--the heaven that looked down
over Bethlehem on the first Christmas Eve.
In the early 19th century, decorating a tree
became popular among the nobility and spread to royal courts as far as Russia.
Princess Henrietta of Nassau-Weilburg introduced the Christmas tree to Vienna
in 1816, and the custom spread across Austria.
A German immigrant living in Ohio was the
first to decorate a tree with candy canes. In 1847, Imgard cut a blue spruce
tree from a woods outside town, had the Wooster village tinsmith construct a
star, and placed the tree in his house, decorating it with paper ornaments and
candy canes. The canes were all white with no red stripes.
Ornaments were made by hand during those
early years. Young ladies spent hours quilting snowflakes and stars, sewing
little pouches for secret gifts and paper baskets with sugared almonds in them.
Popcorn and cranberries were strung on thread and draped as garland. Tin was
pierced to create lights and lanterns to hold candles, which glowed through the
holes. People hunted the general stores for old magazines with pictures, rolls
of cotton wool and tinsel, which was occasionally sent from Germany or brought
in from the eastern states. Small toys were placed on the branches. Most of the
trees at this time were small at sat on a tabletop. They weren’t the six and seven
foot trees we think of today when we think of Christmas trees.
A F.W. Woolworth
brought the glass ornament tradition from Germany to the United States in 1890.
The Christmas tree market was born in 1851 when a Catskill farmer by the name
of Mark Carr hauled two ox sleds of evergreens into New York City and sold them
all. By 1900 one in five American families had a Christmas tree, and twenty
years later the custom was nearly universal.
In 1880 England,
Christmas trees became a glorious hotchpotch of everything one could cram on
and grew to floor-standing trees. They were still a status symbol, the more
affluent the family, the larger the tree.
Do you have
memories of Christmas trees from your youth? Remember tinsel trees, those
aluminum lovelies with the turning color wheel light that made it change colors? My
grandma had one of those. I inherited a few of her decorations: A set of
cardboard houses crusted with glitter that have tissue paper windows and a set
of Santa and reindeer that were among the first products made from plastic.
Is your tree up
yet?
