How Christmas Trees Became a Holiday Tradition

Anyone who celebrates Christmas has already decked their own evergreens this year, but the demand for Christmas trees in 2020 takes on a new meaning. People are buying them to liven up their houses and encourage festive cheer in a year when it's especially required amid isolating lockdowns and COVID-19 worries, according to the New York Times.

In recent years, Christmas tree shortages and price increases have become something of a holiday ritual. Here's how real and artificial Christmas trees came to be such a popular holiday custom in the first place.

The Origins of Christmas tree

Greenery was used to celebrate the holidays long before the term "Christmas tree" became popular. In the 15th and 16th centuries, rural English church records show that holly and ivy were purchased in the winter, hence the British carol "The Holly and the Ivy." According to Judith Flanders' Christmas: A Biography, private houses, and streets were also decked with greenery at this time. Flanders claims that the pole that parishes would cover with holly and ivy, similar to a winter Maypole, was a predecessor to the Christmas tree; one version mentions a storm in London that toppled down a poll that was "for disport of Christmas to the people."

The origins of Christmas trees are shrouded in legend. According to mythology, Martin Luther, the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation, believed that pine trees symbolized God's benevolence. Another popular myth from the 15th century recalls the story of St. Boniface, who in the 8th century stopped a pagan human sacrifice by cutting down an oak tree and replacing it with a fir tree, whose branches symbolized Christ's eternal truth.

According to some versions of the St. Boniface narrative, he cut down a young fir tree and hung it upside down, which is thought to have started the tradition of hanging trees upside down to symbolize the Holy Trinity — sometimes with an apple inserted at the point instead of a star. All of these tales may have contributed to the growth of the Christmas celebration.

However, it appears that the true origins of Christmas trees may be traced back to the Middle Ages in modern-day Germany.

A guild in Freiburg decked a tree with apples, flour-paste wafers, tinsel, and gingerbread in 1419. A tree of knowledge was portrayed by an evergreen fir with apples strung to its branches in "Paradise Plays" staged to commemorate Adam and Eve's feast day, which fell on Christmas Eve. Documentation of trees decked with wool thread, straw, apples, nuts, and pretzels has been discovered in Flanders.

The oldest Christmas tree market is said to have been in Strasbourg, Alsace (which was part of the Rhineland at the time, and is now in present-day France), where unadorned Christmas trees were sold as Weihnachtsbaum, German for Christmas tree, during the 17th century. According to Flanders' study, the "first decorated interior tree" was recorded in 1605 in Strasbourg, decorated with roses, apples, wafers, and other goodies.

The demand for Christmas trees was so high in the 15th century that Strasbourg created regulations prohibiting individuals from chopping down pine branches. In the 1530s, Alsatian ordinances mandated that each home have only one tree.

How Christmas trees got popular in the U.S

In North America, references to Christmas trees in private homes or establishments occur from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1786, Flanders makes a reference to a pine tree in North Carolina. In 1805, students from a Moravian missionary school for American Indians were ordered “to fetch a tiny green tree for Christmas.” Similar instances can be found in the Midwest and further West in the first half of the nineteenth century, such as German immigrants in Texas who adorned trees with moss, cotton, nuts, red pepper swags, and popcorn.

The image of a decked Christmas tree with presents underneath, on the other hand, has a very specific origin: an illustration of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children gathered around a Christmas tree, eyeing the presents beneath, published in the Illustrated London News in 1848. Godey's Lady's Book, America's foremost women's magazine at the time, reproduced a variant of the image as "The Christmas Tree" a few years later.

“This single image cemented the Christmas tree in the popular consciousness, so much so that by 1861, the year of Albert’s death, it was firmly believed that this German prince had transplanted the custom to England with him when he married,” Flanders writes.

The practice of erecting massive Christmas trees in public places appears to be a late-nineteenth-century American tradition. As a PR ploy for the wonders of electricity, the energy lobby lobbied for the first "National Christmas Tree" at the White House: a nearly 60-foot-tall balsam fir tree decorated in 2,500 light bulbs. The first 20-foot-tall Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center went up in 1931, while the skyscraper was still being built; the tree became a symbol of optimism by re-hiring so many individuals who had been unemployed during the Great Depression.

The changing Christmas tree

TIME magazine predicted a new Christmas craze in December 1964: fake trees.

According to an article titled "And a Profit In A Polyvinyl Tree," the Polyvinyl versions appeared more realistic than ever before, and they accounted for around 35 percent of the $155 million Christmas tree business in the United States.

Artificial trees continue to dominate the Christmas tree industry fifty years later. According to a Nielsen survey, 82 percent of the 95 million American households with Christmas trees in 2018 had artificial trees and 18 percent had real trees. There are numerous causes for this ratio. Growing trees has become more challenging as a result of climate change. During the Great Recession, farmers planted fewer trees, and trees take 7 to 10 years to mature. Farmers who grow them are also in short supply as they retire from the industry. When the cost of transporting artificial trees to retail outlets is taken into account, artificial trees are also touted as having a lower environmental impact than real trees.

The National Christmas Tree Association, on the other hand, is appealing to the same environmentally conscious customers by claiming that real trees support local economies — they are grown in the United States and Canada, whereas many plastic trees are made in China — and that real trees are renewable resources and recyclable, whereas artificial trees may contain non-biodegradable parts.

"We live in an artificial environment," a professor in Montreal who was hard at work trying to build a longer-lasting genuine tree told TIME five decades ago, explaining the larger philosophical argument for retaining the custom of real Christmas trees: "We live in an artificial environment." "One of the few natural things left is the Christmas tree."

Read more: The History of Christmas