The History of Christmas Trees

Podcast Transcript

Perhaps the preeminent symbol of Christmas is the Christmas tree.

Christmas trees aren’t just a symbol of Christmas; the act of setting up a tree is an event, and the adornment of a tree often uses ornaments that have been passed down for generations.

But why is cutting down an evergreen tree and draping it with doodads a Christmas tradition?

Learn more about the history of Christmas trees and how they came to represent the Christmas season on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

As with so many traditions in the modern world, the origins of the Christmas tree go back a very long time. We can trace its roots, pun intended, back to well before the advent of Christmas.

In particular, the pre-Christian pagan period in Northern Europe.

Ancient peoples who lived in regions with harsh, dark winters held evergreen plants in special regard. While deciduous trees lost their leaves and appeared to die during winter months, evergreens remained vibrant and green, seeming to possess an eternal life force.

The ancient Germans, Romans, and Celts all incorporated evergreen boughs into their winter celebrations. Romans decorated their homes with evergreen branches during Saturnalia, their festival honoring Saturn. The Druids used evergreens to decorate their homes and temples during the winter solstice as symbols of everlasting life.

Germanic peoples held particular reverence for evergreen trees during winter festivals. They believed that evergreens had special protective powers and could ward off witches, ghosts, and evil spirits.

Some historians believe that Germanic tribes may have decorated trees with candles during winter celebrations, though solid documentation of this practice is difficult to find from this early period.

The transition from these pagan practices to a specifically Christian tradition is murky and debated among historians. One popular legend attributes the Christmas tree to Saint Boniface, an eighth-century English monk who worked to convert Germanic tribes to Christianity.

According to the story, Boniface came upon a group of pagans worshipping an oak tree and, to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity, cut it down. A fir tree supposedly grew from the roots of the fallen oak, and Boniface declared this a miracle and a symbol of Christianity, with its triangular shape representing the Holy Trinity.

The more documented history of the Christmas tree as we know it begins in medieval and Renaissance Germany. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, devout Christians in Germany were bringing evergreen trees into their homes.

The word tannenbaum, which you might have heard from the Christmas carol “O Tannenbaum”, literally just means fir tree in Germany, but it is often associated with Christmas trees.

Early records are sparse, but a document from 1419 mentions a tree decorated with apples, wafers, gingerbread, and tinsel set up in Freiburg by the town’s guild of bakers. The tree remained there until New Year’s Day, when the children were allowed to take the edible decorations.

Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, is sometimes credited with adding lighted candles to Christmas trees, though this attribution is likely apocryphal.

The story goes that while walking through a forest one winter evening, Luther was struck by the beauty of starlight shining through the branches of evergreen trees. To recreate this scene for his family, he supposedly brought a tree indoors and decorated it with lit candles.

Whether or not this specific story is true, the practice of decorating trees with candles did become common in Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Christmas tree tradition remained largely confined to German-speaking regions for several hundred years. It was viewed with suspicion in other parts of Europe, particularly in England, where Puritans considered such decorations to be pagan practices.

The Puritans who settled in New England carried this suspicion with them, and Christmas trees were actually banned in Boston in the early colonial period.

The transformation of the Christmas tree into a widespread European and eventually global tradition began in earnest in the nineteenth century. German immigrants brought the tradition to other countries, but it gained mainstream acceptance largely through royal endorsement.

Queen Victoria of Britain married the German Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, and Albert brought his beloved Christmas tree tradition to Windsor Castle. In 1848, the Illustrated London News published a drawing of the royal family gathered around their decorated Christmas tree.

This image was widely reproduced and helped make Christmas trees fashionable among the British upper classes. When the image was published in American magazines, the royal figures were often removed to make it more palatable to American sensibilities, but the effect was the same: Christmas trees became associated with proper Victorian households and family values.

In the United States, German settlers had been setting up Christmas trees since the colonial period, particularly in Pennsylvania. However, the practice didn’t become widespread until the mid-nineteenth century.

As German immigration increased and Victoria and Albert’s influence spread across the Atlantic, American families of all backgrounds began adopting the tradition. By the 1870s and 1880s, Christmas trees were becoming common in American homes, and the commercial Christmas tree industry was beginning to develop.

The commercialization of Christmas trees accelerated rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What had once been a family activity of going into the forest to cut a tree increasingly became a matter of purchasing one from a merchant.

The first commercial Christmas tree lot in the United States is often credited to Mark Carr, who in 1851 hauled two ox-sled loads of trees from the Catskill Mountains to New York City and sold them on the streets. The practice caught on quickly, and by the 1900s, Christmas tree farms were being established to meet growing demand.

Decorations also became increasingly commercialized. German craftsmen had been producing glass ornaments since the 1860s, with the town of Lauscha becoming particularly famous for its glass ball ornaments.

F.W. Woolworth discovered these ornaments during a trip to Germany and began importing them to the United States in the 1880s, selling millions of dollars’ worth over the following decades.

Electric Christmas lights, invented by Thomas Edison’s associate Edward Johnson in 1882, began to replace dangerous candles, though they didn’t become widely affordable until the 1920s and 1930s.

The twentieth century saw the Christmas tree become firmly established as both a domestic and public symbol. The tradition of erecting large public Christmas trees in town squares and prominent locations spread across the Western world.

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in New York City, first erected in 1931, became one of the most famous public Christmas tree in the world. Communities large and small adopted the practice of holding tree-lighting ceremonies that brought people together during the holiday season.

Different countries and cultures adapted the Christmas tree tradition to their own contexts. In some predominantly Catholic countries, Christmas trees were initially viewed with suspicion as Protestant innovations, but they eventually gained acceptance.

The tradition spread beyond Christian countries as well, becoming a secular symbol of the winter holiday season in many places. In Japan, for instance, Christmas trees and decorations became popular despite Christianity being a minority religion. It was seen as part of the broader Western commercial culture.

Many communities developed Christmas tree recycling programs, turning old trees into mulch. The debate continues today, with proponents of real trees arguing that they’re renewable and biodegradable, while advocates for artificial trees point to their reusability over many years.

Where I live, there is a tradition of using old Christmas trees to mark ice roads across frozen lakes.

However, not all Christmas trees are real trees.

Artificial Christmas trees originated in Germany in the nineteenth century, appearing for practical and environmental reasons rather than as a decorative innovation.

As the Christmas tree tradition spread, forests around German cities were strained by seasonal demand, and conservation concerns eventually led authorities to discourage the cutting of young firs. In response, German craftsmen created substitutes that preserved the look of an evergreen without removing a tree from the forest.

The earliest versions were made from goose feathers dyed green and attached to wire branches, which were then wrapped around a central wooden dowel to form a cone-shaped tree. These feather trees were often designed with widely spaced branches to better hold candles and ornaments.

By the early twentieth century, artificial trees were spreading through Europe and North America, helped by catalog companies and department stores. The invention of new materials accelerated their adoption.

In the 1930s and 1940s, factories that made bottle brushes for household cleaning adapted their production lines to create “brush trees,” which used bristly dyed fibers to mimic pine needles. These trees offered a more realistic shape and density than feather trees and required very little maintenance.

After World War II, the growth of the plastics industry and consumer culture led to mass-produced PVC trees, which were lightweight, reusable, and increasingly lifelike. In the 1950s and 1960s, aluminum Christmas trees became a brief stylistic trend in the United States, reflecting midcentury design and the fascination with space-age aesthetics.

I’ll close by covering the tree that might compete with the Rockefeller Center tree for the most famous in the world: the White House Christmas Tree.

The custom began informally in the nineteenth century, when President ?Benjamin Harrison introduced the first documented indoor Christmas tree to the White House in 1889.

That tree, placed in the family living quarters rather than a public space, was decorated with candles, toys, and gifts for Harrison’s grandchildren. Other presidents followed suit sporadically.

Grover Cleveland, who had young children during his second administration, displayed trees in the 1890s, and Theodore Roosevelt’s sons famously smuggled a tree into the White House in 1902 after Roosevelt had discouraged the practice due to conservation concerns.

For the first several decades, there was no uniform tradition. Trees might appear or not, depending on the president’s religious preferences, personal tastes, or family situation.

By the early twentieth century, Christmas celebrations in the White House were becoming more public. The key turning point came in 1923, when President Calvin Coolidge presided over the first National Christmas Tree lighting on the White House lawn.

This outdoor tree was not technically the White House Christmas Tree, but it marked the first time the presidency tied the Christmas holiday to a national ritual.

A crowd gathered as Coolidge threw the switch on a sixty-foot balsam fir donated by Vermont. The event established an annual tradition of public tree lighting that continues today and is distinct from, but connected to, the indoor tree inside the mansion.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt made the holiday an important part of the White House social calendar, decorating trees while also using Christmas addresses to rally morale during the Great Depression and World War II.

The modern White House Christmas Tree tradition, in the sense of a central ceremonial tree inside the building, took shape during the presidency of Harry Truman and solidified under John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy.

The Kennedys introduced themed decorations in 1961, inaugurating the idea that each year’s tree would have a distinctive artistic or cultural theme. Jacqueline Kennedy’s first themed tree used decorations inspired by Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.

The Blue Room became the standard location for the main tree, chosen for its height and symmetry, and a towering fir is now installed there each year after the ceiling chandelier is temporarily removed.

For many people, Christmas trees are Christmas. When I was really little, I would sit in front of our Christmas tree, fixated on the colorful lights. On Christmas morning, all of the presents would be under the Christmas tree.

This symbol of the holiday season is all due to ancient pagan Germans who were trying to ward away evil spirits.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

As I mentioned in the previous episode, we are quickly approaching the third millennium of the podcast with episode 2001.

In celebration of this milestone, I’m going to be turning the episode over to you. I’ve set up a tool that allows you to leave a short message that can be played on the show.

Just go to everything-everywhere.com, and you will see a link right at the top of the page to click on to leave your audio message.

Let me know who you are, where you are from, maybe how you discovered the podcast, or if you are in the completionist club.

Do try to keep it short, given the time limits of the show.

I have also published links on the Discord Server, the Facebook Group, and on Patreon.

This episode will be recorded on December 27th, so you have to get your submission in by then.

Once again, that is everything-everywhere.com, and click on the big link at the top of the front page. There is also a link to the website in the show notes for every episode.