Painting by Viggo Johansen (1891)

A Christmas tree is a decorated tree, usually an evergreen conifer such as pine or fir, traditionally associated with the celebration of Christmas. An artificial Christmas tree is an object made to resemble such a tree, usually made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

The tree was traditionally decorated with edibles such as apples, nuts or dates. In the 18th century, it began to be illuminated by candles, which with electrification could also be replaced by Christmas lights. Today, there is a wide variety of traditional ornaments, such as garland, tinsel, and candy canes. An angel or star may be placed at the top of the tree, to represent the host of angels or the Star of Bethlehem from the Nativity.

The custom of the Christmas tree developed in early modern Germany with predecessors that can be traced to the 16th and possibly the 15th century. It acquired popularity beyond Germany during the second half of the 19th century.^[1] The Christmas tree has also been known as the "Yule-tree", especially in discussions of its folkloristic origins.^[2][3]

History[link]

Possible predecessors[link]

While it is clear that the Christmas tree originates in Renaissance and early modern Germany, there are a number of speculative theories as to its ultimate origin. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with Martin Luther.^[4][5]

It is frequently traced to the symbolism of evergreen trees in supposed "pre-Christian winter rites", especially with the story of the Donar Oak and Saint Boniface.^[6]

Alternatively, it is identified with the "tree of Paradise" of medieval mystery plays that were given on 24 December, the commemoration and name day of Adam and Eve in various countries. In such plays, a tree decorated with apples (to represent the forbidden fruit) and wafers (to represent the Eucharist and redemption) was used as a setting for the play. Like the Christmas crib, the Paradise tree was later placed in homes. The apples were replaced by round objects such as shiny red balls.^[3]

Early evidence[link]

Customs of erecting decorated trees in wintertime can be traced to Christmas celebrations in Renaissance-era guilds in Northern Germany and Livonia.

The first evidence of decorated trees associated with Christmas Day are trees in guild halls decorated with sweets to be enjoyed by the apprentices and children. In Livonia (Present day Latvia and Estonia), in 1441, 1442, 1510 and 1514,^{[citation needed]} the Brotherhood of Blackheads erected a tree for the holidays^{[clarification needed]} in their guild houses in Reval (now Tallinn) and Riga. On the last night of the celebrations leading up to the holidays,^{[clarification needed]} the tree was taken to the Town Hall Square where the members of the brotherhood danced around it.^[7] A Bremen guild chronicle of 1570 reports that a small tree decorated with "apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers" was erected in the guild-house for the benefit of the guild members' children, who collected the dainties on Christmas Day.^[1] In 1584, the pastor and chronicler Balthasar Russow in his Chronica der Provinz Lyfflandt (1584) wrote of an established tradition of setting up a decorated spruce at the market square where the young men "went with a flock of maidens and women, first sang and danced there and then set the tree aflame".^{[clarification needed]}

After the Reformation, such trees are seen in the houses of upper-class Protestant families as a counterpart to the Catholic Christmas cribs. This transition from the guild hall to the bourgeois family homes in the Protestant parts of Germany ultimately gives rise to the modern tradition as it developed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

18th to early 20th centuries[link]

Germany[link]

Die Gartenlaube (1871) showing "the German Christmas tree" (Der deutsche Weihnachtsbaum) in a field hospital in Versailles after the Franco-Prussian War.

"A German Christmas" (deutsche Christnacht) in Cameroon, ca. 1900 (German Federal Archives)

By the early 18th century, the custom had become common in towns of the upper Rhineland, but it had not yet spread to rural areas. Wax candles are attested^{[clarification needed]} from the late 18th century, at the time expensive items.

The Christmas tree remained confined to the upper Rhineland for a relatively long time. It was regarded as a Protestant custom by the Roman Catholic majority along the lower Rhine, and was spread there only by Prussian officials who were moved there in the wake of the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

In the 19th century, the Christmas tree was taken to be an expression of German culture and of Gemütlichkeit, especially among emigrants overseas.^[8]

A decisive factor in winning general popularity was the German army's decision to place Christmas trees in its barracks and military hospitals during the 1870-1871 war. Only at the turn of the century did Christmas trees appear inside churches, this time in a new brightly lit form.^[9]

Adoption by European nobility[link]

In the early 19th century, the custom 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 in the following years. In France, the first Christmas tree was introduced in 1840 by the duchesse d'Orléans. In Denmark a Danish newspaper claims that the first attested Christmas tree was lit in 1808 by countess Wilhemine of Holsteinborg. It was the aging countess who told the story of the first Danish Christmas tree to the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen in 1865. He had published a fairy-tale called The Fir-Tree in 1844, recounting the fate of a fir-tree being used as a Christmas tree.^[10]

In Britain, the Christmas tree was introduced in the time of the personal union with Hanover, by George III's Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in early 19th century, but the custom hadn't yet spread much beyond the royal family. Queen Victoria as a child was familiar with the custom and a tree was placed in her room every Christmas. In her journal for Christmas Eve 1832, the delighted 13-year-old princess wrote, "After dinner… we then went into the drawing-room near the dining-room… There were two large round tables on which were placed two trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments. All the presents being placed round the trees…"^[11] After her marriage to her German cousin Prince Albert, by 1841 the custom became even more widespread throughout Britain.^[12] In 1847, Prince Albert wrote: "I must now seek in the children an echo of what Ernest [his brother] and I were in the old time, of what we felt and thought; and their delight in the Christmas-trees is not less than ours used to be".^[13]

North America[link]

Illustration for Harper's Bazaar, published 1 January 1870.

The tradition was introduced to Canada in the winter of 1781 by Brunswick soldiers stationed in the Province of Quebec to garrison the colony against American attack. General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel and his wife, the Baroness von Riedesel, held a Christmas party at Sorel, delighting their guests with a fir tree decorated with candles and fruits.^[14]

A woodcut of the British Royal family with their Christmas tree at Windsor Castle, initially published in the Illustrated London News December 1848, was copied in the United States at Christmas 1850, in Godey's Lady's Book. Godey's copied it exactly, except for the removal of the Queen's tiara and Prince Albert's mustache, to remake the engraving into an American scene.^[15] The republished Godey's image became the first widely circulated picture of a decorated evergreen Christmas tree in America. Art historian Karal Ann Marling called Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, shorn of their royal trappings, "the first influential American Christmas tree".^[16] Folk-culture historian Alfred Lewis Shoemaker states, "In all of America there was no more important medium in spreading the Christmas tree in the decade 1850-60 than Godey's Lady's Book". The image was reprinted in 1860, and by the 1870s, putting up a Christmas tree had become common in America.^[15]

Several cities in the United States with German connections lay claim to that country's first Christmas tree: Windsor Locks, Connecticut, claims that a Hessian soldier put up a Christmas tree in 1777 while imprisoned at the Noden-Reed House, while the "First Christmas Tree in America" is also claimed by Easton, Pennsylvania, where German settlers purportedly erected a Christmas tree in 1816. In his diary, Matthew Zahm of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, recorded the use of a Christmas tree in 1821, leading Lancaster to also lay claim to the first Christmas tree in America.^[17] Other accounts credit Charles Follen, a German immigrant to Boston, for being the first to introduce to America the custom of decorating a Christmas tree.^[18] August Imgard, a German immigrant living in Wooster, Ohio, is the first to popularise the practice of decorating 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 National Confectioners Association officially recognises Imgard as the first ever to put candy canes on a Christmas tree; the canes were all-white, with no red stripes. Imgard is buried in the Wooster Cemetery, and every year, a large pine tree above his grave is lit with Christmas lights. German immigrant Charles Minnegerode accepted a position as a professor of humanities at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg in 1842, where he taught Latin and Greek. Entering into the social life of the Virginia Tidewater, Minnigerode introduced the German custom of decorating an evergreen tree at Christmas at the home of law professor St. George Tucker, thereby becoming another of many influences that prompted Americans to adopt the practice at about that time.^[19]

The lyrics sung in the United States to the German tune O Tannenbaum begin "O Christmas tree", giving rise to the mistaken idea that the German word "Tannenbaum" (fir tree) means "Christmas tree", the German word for which is instead "Weihnachtsbaum".

Vera Komissarzhevskaya as Nora in Ibsen's A Dolls House (c. 1904).

1918 to present[link]

This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this section if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (January 2012)

In Russia, the Christmas tree was banned shortly after the October Revolution but then reinstated as a New-year fir-tree (Новогодняя ёлка) in 1935. It became a fully secular icon of the New Year holiday, for example, the crowning star was regarded not as a symbol of Bethlehem Star, but as the Red Star. Decorations, such as figurines of airplanes, bicycles, space rockets, cosmonauts, and characters of Russian fairy tales, were produced. This tradition persists after the fall of the USSR, with the New Year holiday outweighing the Christmas (7 January) for a wide majority of Russian people^{[citation needed]}.

The TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) was influential on the pop culture surrounding the Christmas tree. Aluminum Christmas trees were popular during the early 1960s in the US. They were satirized in the Charlie Brown show and came to be seen as symbolizing the commercialization of Christmas. The term Charlie Brown Christmas tree, describing any poor-looking or malformed little tree, also derives from the 1965 TV special, based on the appearance of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.

• 

  An Italian American family on Christmas 1924

• Xmas1951.jpg

  An unsheared Christmas tree from 1951, in a home in New York State.

• 

  A Soviet-era (1960s) New Year tree decoration depicting a cosmonaut

• 

  A makeshift cardboard Christmas tree in Kabul, Afghanistan (2010)

• 

  A "globalized" Christmas tree in Hong Kong (Kelly Chen 2010)

Public Christmas trees[link]

Since the early 20th century, it has become common in many cities, towns, and department stores to put up public Christmas trees outdoors, such as the Rich's Great Tree in Atlanta (since 1948), the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in New York City, and the large Christmas tree at Victoria Square in Adelaide.

The United States' National Christmas Tree has been lit each year since 1923 on the South Lawn of the White House. Today,^{[clarification needed]} the lighting of the National Christmas Tree is part of what has become a major holiday event at the White House. President Jimmy Carter lit only the crowning star atop the tree in 1979 in honour of the Americans being held hostage in Iran.^[20] The same was true in 1980, except that the tree was fully lit for 417 seconds, one second for each day the hostages had been in captivity.^[20]

During most of the 1970s and 1980s, the largest decorated Christmas tree in the world was put up every year on the property of The National Enquirer in Lantana, Florida. This tradition grew into one of the most spectacular and celebrated events in the history of southern Florida, but was discontinued on the death of the paper's founder in the late 1980s.^[21]

In some cities, a Festival of Trees is organized around the decoration and display of multiple trees as charity events. In some cases the trees represent special commemorative gifts, such as in Trafalgar Square in London, where the City of Oslo, Norway presents a tree to the people of London as a token of appreciation for the British support of Norwegian resistance during the Second World War; in Boston, where the tree is a gift from the province of Nova Scotia, in thanks for rapid deployment of supplies and rescuers to the 1917 ammunition ship explosion that levelled the city of Halifax; and in Newcastle upon Tyne, where the main civic Christmas tree is an annual gift from the city of Bergen, Norway, in thanks for the part played by soldiers from Newcastle in liberating Bergen from Nazi occupation.^[22] Norway also annually gifts a Christmas tree to Washington D.C. as a symbol of friendship between Norway and the US and as an expression of gratitude from Norway for the help received from the US during World War II.^[23]

Customs and traditions[link]

Setting up and taking down[link]

A candle on a Christmas tree

Both setting up and taking down a Christmas tree are associated with specific dates. Traditionally, Christmas trees were not brought in and decorated until Christmas Eve (24 December)^{[citation needed]} or, in the traditions celebrating Christmas Eve rather than on the first of day of Christmas, 23 December, and then removed the day after twelfth night (5 January); to have a tree up before or after these dates was even considered bad luck.^{[citation needed]}

Many families in the U.S. and Canada will put up a Christmas tree soon after Thanksgiving (the 4th Thursday of November in the U.S.), and Christmas decorations can show up even earlier in retail stores, often the day after Halloween (31 October). Some households do not put up the tree until the second week of December, and leave it up until 6 January (Epiphany). In Germany, traditionally the tree is put up on 24 December and taken down on 7 January, though many start one or two weeks earlier, and in Roman Catholic homes the tree may be kept until late January.

In Italy the Christmas tree is put up on 8 December (Immaculate Conception day) and left up until 6 January. In Australia, the Christmas tree is usually put up on 1 December^{[citation needed]}, which occurs about a week before the school summer holidays; except for South Australia, where most people put up their tree after the Adelaide Christmas Pageant in late November^{[citation needed]}. Some traditions suggest that Christmas trees may be kept up until no later than 2 February, the feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (Candlemas), when the Christmas season effectively closes.^[24] Superstitions say that it is a bad sign if Christmas greenery is not removed by Candlemas Eve.^[25]

Decoration[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

A bauble decorating a Christmas tree