History of the Christmas Tree





Choosing an Ashe County, NC Christmas Tree 




History of the Christmas tree dates far back, before our traditional concepts of Christmas. The Christmas tree and its evergreen boughs is one of the few symbols of hope and continued life that has carried on from the ancients.  It has a heritage that extends to the Pagans, the ancient Celts, even the earliest Romans all of whom used the sacred boughs as a sign to mark the winter solstice.

The winter solstice marks the longest night and the shortest day of year in the Northern Hemisphere and generally falls on the 21st or 22nd of December.  For the ancient Pagans, winter solstice marked the period when the sun god, weakened by the fall, would begin to get well with the promise of a return to spring and a strong summer.  For the ancient Celts, Druid Priests would mark their temples with boughs from evergreens as a sign of everlasting life.  Even Vikings regarded the trees as Balder, the sun god’s plant and would cut them down and plant them in boxes within their homes during the long months of winter.  Ancient Romans dating back as far as 27 B.C. marked Saturnalia, their solstice celebration to Saturn, the god of agriculture, by decorating their homes and temples with the evergreen boughs.

One of the early Catholic Church founders, Tertullian, actually condemned Christians for participating in winter festivals or decorating their homes with the boughs in light of Roman persecution. However, by the beginning of The Middle Ages, sometime around 500 AD, a legend had grown around Christ being born during the lament of winter wherein every tree miraculously bore new shoots of green and shook off their snows.

During The Middle Ages, Christian missionaries were spreading the world throughout the Germanic and Slavic lands to the north and converting not only the people but also the cultural practices.  In this way, the customary Pagan worship of the evergreen converted.  Fir trees, in particular, became associated with the love and mercy of God.

Open-air plays during The Middle Ages often celebrated the Biblical story of Creation, the feast day of Adam and Eve, on Christmas Eve thereby linking the Nativity Story to the symbol of the “Paradise Tree”, rich with fruit from the Garden of Eden.  “Paradise” (the original term used to describe Christmas trees or evergreen boughs) decorated inside their homes with pastry wafers used to symbolize the Eucharist.  The tradition eventually turned to using cookies as ornaments, still customary in many German households, today.

Through all of the symbolic association with evergreens, the trees themselves did not align with the celebration of Christ’s birth until the Renaissance (1330-1700 AD).  This period, marked as a cultural movement that began in Italy and quickly spread north throughout Europe, reveals the first clear records (1510 AD) of actual Christmas Trees in Latvia, a Baltic region in northern Europe.  Thereafter, reference to Christmas Trees spread throughout northeastern France in Strasbourg as early as 1521.

It took the next two hundred years for the tradition to gain in popularity.  Lutheran Churches began setting up Christmas Trees within the sanctuary beside which often stood a stack of wooden pyramid shelves holding candles to stand for members of the congregation or family.  Eventually our modern tree lights replaced the candles.

Early Puritan settlers in America once considered the many festive Christmas customs that are enjoyed today a heathen practice and celebration of Christmas other than a day of observance in church was a criminal offence and punishable by fines. However, in the early 1800’s as the immigrants from Germany and Ireland migrated to American, the festive Christmas customs were observed and the laws were changed. 

The Germans were the first recorded settlers to bring the tradition of the Christmas tree to the United States.  German settlements in Pennsylvania, just south of the rigid Puritan influence in New England, kept community Christmas trees as early as 1747.  Though the practice was still considered somewhat pagan elsewhere in the U.S., it was English Royalty that first popularized the modern Christmas tree tradition.

In 1846, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of German decent, were illustrated in the London News while gathered round a Christmas tree with their children.  The well-admired queen, Victoria’s actions set immediate trends for both her British subjects and East Coast American society.  By the end of the 1800’s, Christmas trees were all the seasonable fashion.

American authors and civic leaders promoted the practice to replace some of the rowdier Christmas practices such as wassailing.  (Wassailing, or the customary practice of caroling during the twelve nights of Christmas, had digressed into bands of men entering the homes of the wealthy and demanding food and drink.  If they denied, the men often cursed or vandalized the home.) Due to their efforts, a peaceful family celebration around the Christmas tree became the popularized image for the holiday.

Soon after, the Christmas tree was commonplace during the season.  Ornaments were handmade and in the German tradition, a mixture of apples, nuts, and cookies hung upon the tree boughs.  The advent of electricity replaced hazardous candles and brought about the glimmering shine of Christmas tree lights.

Across the globe, the U.S., Germany and Canada produce the most Christmas trees annually of any nations.

More than 20,000 North American Christmas tree growers farm over a million acres of land.   The Appalachian region of North Carolina is one of the three major growing regions on the continent alongside the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast Canada and U.S.  Increasingly, North American Christmas Tree Distributors have set up themselves as the global market leaders in quality and production.

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