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Christmas Evergreens
In pre-Christian times, Romans used evergreens, symbols of fertility and regeneration, to trim their houses at the [first] of January. Eventually, Christians appropriated the use of evergreens for their Christmas celebration. To remove the taint of paganism, they associated it with new beginnings and man's second chance with God.1
Later, folk traditions of the pagan German and Scandinavian peoples provided a second and separate overlay of evergreen trees and wreaths to celebrate the Winter Solstice and the birth of Jesus. In the 16th century, German Christians began bringing trees into their homes, and in the 17th century they began to decorate them.2
By the 1830s, Christmas trees had been introduced to Scandinavia, and by the 1840s to France, England, and America.3 Apparently, the first royal Christmas tree was introduced in England when Prince Albert gave one to Victoria in 1840. The innovation was so new, however, that the most famous English language Christmas story ever published, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in 1843, makes no reference to Christmas trees, Santa Claus, or Christmas stockings.
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>> Christmas' Origins
>> Christmas Law
>> Santa Claus
>> Christmas Evergreens
>> A Weighin' the Mangers
>> The Origin of Crèches
>> Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"
>> Puritans & Christmas
>> Celebrating Christmas in America
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1 Restad, Christmas in America, 57.
3 Ibid., 58. "At least some Christians had been bringing trees into their homes since the Reformation. However, not until the seventeenth century is there any record of trimming the Christmas evergreens. A diarist in Strasbourg wrote about Christmas in 1605: 'they set up fir-trees in the parlours ... and hang thereon roses cut out of many-coloured paper, apples, wafers, gold foil, sweets, &c.' By the first decades of the nineteenth century, German Protestants had taken the tree as an emblem of their faith. German Catholics, inspired by Francis of Assisi, had already adopted the Krippe, or holy manger, as an icon distinctly theirs." Ibid. The Christmas tree was introduced to America in the early 19th century by German immigrants to Pennsylvania (wrongly called "Dutch" rather than "Deutsch"). Ibid. But during these early years non-German Americans associated the tree with the German ethnic group more than with the holiday itself. Ibid., 59. The notion of a Christmas tree began to spread throughout the country after the 1830s and 40s. Ibid., 59-60. But it was not universally accepted as a neutral symbol. Calvinists, for example, objected to them. Ibid., 61. One of the earliest tree-selling ventures was in 1840 when a farmer's wife from Monmouth County, New Jersey, packed a bundle of pine greens along hogs and chickens to sell in New York City. The New York Tribune carried advertisements for Christmas trees and decorations as early as 1843. Ibid., 63.
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