by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: December 19, 2008

Tree worship has been a major part of the culture of many different peoples around the world for millennia. To trace the specific origins of what we now know as the Christmas Tree, however, it is to what is now Germany in the 7th Century AD that we have to look.

During this time, the Germanic peoples worshipped the oak tree. So it was that a visiting English monk, in an attempt to relate their beliefs to his own, used a fig tree and its approximate triangular shape to illustrate to the people the concept of the Holy Trinity - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. By so doing, he succeeded in the short term only in persuading the people to worship the fir tree as opposed to the oak, having convinced them that it was holy.

A few centuries on and a tradition had developed in much of central Europe whereby a fig tree was hung - upside down - at Christmas to symbolise what had been preached by the long gone monk. It is believed that it was in Riga, the capital of Latvia, that the concept of decorating the tree originated in 1510.

One night, when Martin Luther - the great Religious Reformer - was making his way home to his family, again in Germany, he saw the stars shining brightly and beautifully through the branches of a tree. When he got home, he placed lighted candles on the Christmas Tree to illustrate to his children what he had seen. So was born the concept of putting lights on the tree. It was also around this time in Germany that tinsel was invented, actually being spun from real silver. It was consequently very heavy, however, and often caused the limbs of the tree to break.

For several centuries thereafter, people attached candles to their Christmas Trees either with melted wax, pins or by tying them in place. Subsequently, different types of holders for the candles were developed to make the practice more safe.

The concept of the Christmas Tree was introduced to Great Britain by the German aristocracy when they became the Royal Family and to the United States by German immigrants. The German kings and queens did not capture the hearts of the British people, however, so the practise was not widely emulated. It was only when a representation appeared in a London newspaper of the beloved Queen Victoria and her family gathered around a brightly decorated Christmas Tree in the mid 19th Century that the British fully embraced the idea and the fashion spread West.

Electric Christmas Tree lights were invented by an employee of Thomas Edison's, Edward Johnson, in 1882. They appeared on the trees in several large department stores but following a tragic fire in the early part of the 20th Century, a fifteen year old boy named Albert Sadacca came up with his own version of safety lights. When he introduced them in different colours, his business really took off.

The Christmas Trees of modern times are of course becoming ever larger and more elaborate, the synthetics from which they are more and more commonly being made ever more lifelike. LED (light emitting diode) lights are frequently pre-installed and even the tinsel is woven in to the fabric of the tree. All we have to do is take them out of the box and plug them in.

Sometimes, however, don't you hanker for the simplicity of earlier times, when trees were cut and decorated from scratch by all the family? Technology is of course a great benefit to us in everyday life...but it has certainly taken much of the magic out of Christmas.

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