The Christmas Tree

Thinking about Christmas immediately brings Christmas trees to mind. As a matter of fact, Christmas trees are one of the most recognized images of the Christmas season and they are visible just about everywhere. Furthermore, many of the traditional Christmas activities revolve around Christmas trees. First there is the ritual of selecting a perfect tree, then setting it up in a prominent location in the home, then comes the decorating aspect, piling up the gifts under it, coming together around it to sing Christmas carols and drink eggnog. But how did it all begin?

The earliest story that was ever found that associates trees with Christmas dates back to the beginning of the 700s. This story talks about a British monk and missionary who was born in 680, was christened as Winfrid and was eventually canonized as St. Boniface. As the ancient story goes, St. Boniface delivered a sermon about the Nativity to a group of Germanic Druids on the outskirts of Geisma in Germany and attempted to convince them that the oak tree was not sacred or as inviolable as their pagan teachings have led them to believe. Often referred to as the Apostle of Germany, St. Boniface proved his point by chopping down an oak tree right then and there. As the mighty tree fell and crashed to the ground it left everything crushed in its wake — every shrub but a single little fir tree sapling. This surprising survival of the tender seedling was quickly interpreted by St. Boniface as a miracle and he concluded his sermon by calling it “the tree of the Christ Child.” From then on, planting of fir saplings was added to the ensuing Christmas celebrations in Germany.

Researchers, theologians and historians have found countless documents attesting to the fact that fir trees which remained outdoors as well as those which were brought inside homes were decorated with devotion and religious zeal by the sixteenth century in an attempt to commemorate the miraculous event with St. Boniface in Germany. In an insightful effort to save forests from complete destruction by religious Christian zealots, a decree was issued from Ammerschweier, Alsace in 1561 which proclaims that no one “shall have for Christmas more than one bush or more than eight shoes’ length.” The earliest accounts of decorations on Christmas trees describe “roses cut of many colored paper, apples, wafers, gilt and sugar.”

Many theologians and religious historians believe, and no evidence was ever found to contradict this belief, that it was Martin Luther, the sixteenth century Protestant reformer, who first added light to a Christmas tree by affixing lighted candles to its branches in order to emulate the twinkling of stars in a fir forest.

The Christbaum which means the “Christ tree” was a deeply rooted tradition that was permanently established and branched out to other parts of Western Europe by the 1700s. However, it failed to gain popularity in England until Prince Albert, the son of the duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (a duchy in central Germany), married Queen Victoria of England in 1840, and brought the custom of decorating Christmas trees from his childhood in Germany into his married life in England.

The Christmas tree and its customary decorations were most likely brought into the New World by the Pennsylvania Germans. This fact is strongly affirmed in a diary that belonged to Matthew Zahm of Lancaster, Pennsylvania and its entry which was dated December 20, 1821 where he speaks of the Christmas tree and its many decorations. Thus far, this is the earliest written record associated with Christmas trees that was ever found in America.

F. W. Woolworths Company was the original chain of five and dime stores based in the United States and in 1880 was first to sell manufactured Christmas tree ornaments which were extremely successful. In 1882 the first electrically lighted Christmas tree appeared and in 1923, President Calvin Coolidge flamboyantly lit the first outdoor tree on the front lawn of the White House.

Having state all that I had thus far about Christmas trees, it would be remiss of me not to mention that decorating of trees dates back to the pre-Christian Era in Egypt where evergreen trees were felled, mounted and adorned with offerings of food and precious gifts to their pagan gods. Evergreen trees were selected for remaining fresh and green through the four seasons, therefore symbolizing immortality and fertility. Egyptian priests went even further by teaching that evergreen trees grew out of the grave of their god Osiris who was resurrected by the energy of an evergreen tree after having been killed by another god.

Even the Bible, Jeremiah 10:2-6, speaks out about the pagan custom of the tree: "Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen . . . For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not."

Who Is Santa Claus?

Santa Claus is also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle or just plain old Santa and these are but a few of the names for the ghost of Saint Nicholas who, according to Western cultures, brings gifts on Christmas Eve (December 24) or on his Feast Day (December 6).

Historically, the original Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas was a Christian named Nicholas who was born in a southeastern Turkish town called Lycia in the early years of the fourth century. To prove his extraordinary piety he began fasting twice a week from the time he was a very young child and when both his parents died, he entered a seminary in order to dedicate his entire life to worshiping Christ.

Nicholas is credited with many miracles but his first one occurred during a journey to the Holy Land. The boat he sailed met with a stormy sea and when Nicholas extended his arms, the turbulent waters came to a standstill. Due to this first miracle Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of sailors.

Nicholas was appointed as the bishop of Myra in the Asia Minor. His triumphant record at winning converts and his altruistic generosity toward the poor and the needy infuriated the Romans during their persecution of Christians and Christianity and under the orders of the tyrannical Roman emperor Gaius Diocletianus, Nicholas was imprisoned. Fortunately for him however, this despot abdicated his thrown to Constantine who freed the bishop of Myra. In his later years, Constantine converted to Christianity and when he assembled the first Church council in Nicaea in 325, Nicholas was invited as a prominent member. Although none of the evidence is concrete, it is believed that Nicholas died on December 6, 342 and was soon taken on as the patron saint of Russia, Greece and Sicily.

There were two very pivotal characteristics about the life of St. Nicholas that were the decisive factors in his becoming Santa Claus. The first was his legendary kindness and generosity and the second was his love for children which also made him the patron saint of children.

For centuries, Saint Nicholas was believed to make his rounds wearing his red and white bishop’s outfit and his long white beard as he distributed gifts of candy and sugar to children while pulling along an indolent donkey. During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, however, many Europeans replace Saint Nicholas with more secular figures such as Father Christmas in Britain and papa Noel in France. The Dutch managed to keep Saint Nicholas alive, though, and brought him along with them to the New World where he was called Sint Nikolass and later Sinterklass. When the English captured New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, Sinterklass was Anglicized to Santa Claus.

Most of what we attribute to Santa Claus today originated in America and the credit goes to Dr. Clement Clarke Moore, a New York theology professor who composed “The Night before Christmas” in 1822 to read to his own children. The poem quickly gained popularity throughout the New World when a friend of Dr. Moore submitted it anonymously to a well known magazine of that time. Dr. Moore was greatly embarrassed and did not admit authorship of the “frivolous” children’s poem until 1838 when just about every child in America could already recite it by heart.

Whereas the original Saint Nicholas was slender and tall, thanks to the highly regarded nineteenth century cartoonist Thomas Nast the American Santa Claus took on the rosy-cheeked and roly-poly characteristics. Nast worked for Harper’s Weekly between 1863 and 1886 and created an extensive series of Christmas drawings that depicted a dramatic change in Santa as he evolved from the pudgy elf-like character acquired from Dr. Moore’s undying poem to the bearded, potbellied, life-size bell ringer Santa familiar to everyone in America today. Nast’s Christmas drawings also depicted Santa’s life during the entire year and his designing of toys, checking on children’s behavior and reading their letters. Nast’s depictions became tightly integrated into the Santa Claus lore.

Christmas Cards

We have all become so accustomed to sending and receiving beautifully decorated and eloquently phrased store-bought Christmas cards that we take it for granted that past generations have done the same as will future generations. However, the fact is that sending commercially printed Christmas cards is a relatively recent phenomenon taking us back to 1843 London, England.

Prior to then, people were exchanging Christmas greetings on handwritten notes that were either delivered in person or they were sent via postal services. Eventually, the postal services became the favorite means by which to dispatch Christmas greetings and its popularity grew to burdensome proportions. In 1822, the Superintendent of Mails in Washington D.C. requested that sixteen more postmen be hired during the holiday season and, fearing that the overload will create an unmanageable bottleneck, he further petitioned Congress to limit the exchange of cards by post. To his chagrin, not only did Congress ignore his petition, but the postal burden worsened far beyond his worst fears.

The first Christmas card that was intended for commercial sale was created by John Calcott Horsley in the summer of 1843. Horsley was a well known and respected artist and illustrator in London who was commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, a wealthy British businessman, to design a Christmas card that he could proudly send to his family, friends and business associates. Being the prominent innovator who modernized the British postal system, managed the construction of the Albert Hall, organized the Great Exhibition of 1851 and oversaw the opening ceremony of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Sir Henry Cole also ran an art shop on Bond Street that specialized in decorative objects for the home and that is where he sold the first commercial Christmas cards.

The first commercially Christmas card portrayed two good deeds — feeding the hungry and clothing the naked — on each side panel. Its centerpiece depicted a large celebration of adults and children with an abundance of food and drink. This depiction, by the way, received must criticism from the ardent British Temperance Movement. The inscription of this first Christmas card read: “Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you.” At the time, “merry” meant “blessed” as in “merry old England.”

One thousand cards were printed of that first Christmas card designed by John Calcott Horsley for Sir Henry Cole and twelve of these still exist today in private collections. And, surprisingly or not, this card proved to be a trendsetter of a lasting kind because printed cards very soon became hot commodities throughout England and soon after that in Germany.

It took another thirty years for commercially designed and printed Christmas cards to gain popularity in America and it began in 1875 when Louis Prang, a German born lithographer in Boston, started designing and publishing Christmas cards. Thus, Louis Prang is considered to be the “father of the American Christmas card.” However, Prang’s Christmas cards were high quality and therefore very costly and they depicted non-Christmas-like scenes such as floral arrangements of roses, daisies, gardenias, geraniums and apple blossoms which failed to generate enough sales and he was forced out of business in 1890. The American public finally bought into the idea of commercially produced Christmas cards but they preferred the cheap penny Christmas postcards which were imported from Germany and these remained in high demand until the end of World War I, when America established its own greeting card industry.

Today’s Christmas card industry is booming with annual revenues of billions of dollars and the cards come in myriads of styles, sizes and costs — there are Christmas cards to suite anyone’s taste. The traditional greeting that said “wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” has evolved into countless variations on this greeting and many contemporary Christmas cards express more sentiment, more religious intonations that may include biblical verses, more humor or more poetry. To make selection of Christmas cards easier and more recipient-appropriate, one can find Christmas cards especially designed for moms, dads, sisters, brothers, bosses, lovers, friends, and so on and on and on.

Explaining Mistletoe

Native to the forests of Northern Europe, the mistletoe (Viscum album) is a parasitical plant on deciduous and evergreen trees, and it produces yellowish flowers and waxy white berries. Its closest relative in Northern America which has very similar yellowish flowers and waxy white berries is also commonly known as mistletoe (Phoradendron serotinum) and it is the official floral emblem of the State of Oklahoma.

The name mistletoe came about from two Anglo-Saxon words: mistel which means “dung” and tan which means “twig.” And so, mistletoe quite literally means “dung on a twig.” Mistletoe infers that life can spring up from dung as this leeching plant grows and thrives on the dung of birds on the branches of trees. As a result, mistletoe became the symbol of life and fertility.

The Christmas and New Year tradition of embracing for the bashful and kissing for the more brazen under a branch of mistletoe dates back to ancient Britain at around the second century B.C. And it was most prevalent among the Druids who were the elite learned class of the Celts.

The Druids celebrated the beginning of winter (winter solstice) by collecting mistletoe and burning it as a sacrifice to their pagan gods. And to ensure a year of good fortune, peace, prosperity and familial harmony, they hung sprigs of mistletoe around their homes. Twigs of the evergreen displayed visibly outside their homes welcomed relatives, friends, neighbors and weary travelers and the mistletoe within encouraged them to embrace shamelessly. Feuding parties or foes which happened to meet under trees that bore mistletoe were required to lay down their weapons and set their differences aside for the duration of that day.

The Druids believed that the mistletoe had healing properties and named it appropriately omnia sanitatem, meaning “all heal.” It was often prescribed for female infertility and as an antidote for poisons of all kinds. The gathering of mistletoe was a ceremonial ritual and sprigs that grew on their sacred oak trees were collected by their highest priests using gold knives. Such a festive rite of harvesting mistletoe is, by the way, dramatically portrayed in Bellini’s opera Norma.

The Celtic Druids were not the only people who ascribed so many wonderful attributes to the mistletoe, the Scandinavians, who called it mistilteinn; also believe that it was the plant of peace, the plant of hope and the plant of harmony. The Scandinavian lore claims that the mistletoe belonged to Frigga, the Scandinavian goddess of love, and the embracing and kissing custom is thought to have been drawn from this romantic notion.

Mistletoe was also used as a decorative green in the ancient world of the Roman Empire and their feasts of Natalis Solis Invicti and Saturnalia. Due to its original ties to idolatrous festivities, the Church banned the use of mistletoe when Christmas on December 25 was officially recognized as the birth of Christ in the beginning years of the fourth century. As a viable alternative to the mistletoe, the holly was ironically proposed in spite of the fact that it too had strong associations with pagan rituals. Nevertheless, the holly’s white flowers were to signify the purity of Christ, the sharp leaves were to symbolize the thorns in Christ’s crown and the red berries embodied drops of His blood. Thus the Holly became a Nativity tradition, but, surprisingly enough, the church’s ban on mistletoe which was in effect throughout the Middle Ages still persists today in some churches in England.

What is Christmas and How Did It Get Its Name?

Whether you view Christmas as a holiday and time for vacating or as a holy day of worship, Christmas is in fact a mixture of various cultures from around the world which has been accumulating for hundreds of years. Turkey dinners with cranberry sauce, decorated evergreen trees and the colorfully wrapped gifts at their bases, Christmas cards and their heartfelt greetings, jolly old Santa Claus and his reindeer, yule logs and chestnuts roasting on open fires, mistletoes and granted kisses, chiming bells and carols are all many aspects of Christmas which we have come to consider as inherently inseparable and at the heart of December 25, all came in bits and pieces from different peoples.

Today’s Christmas is a celebration of Christ’s birthday but in reality, no one knows when Christ was born and until the early part of the fourth century no one cared. Birthdays were no reason to celebrate or commemorate but deaths were. Theologians, researchers and historians through the ages have attempted to pinpoint the Nativity to a specific date but came up with a profusion of unrelated dates such as January 1, January 6, March 25 and May 20, but none found the slightest evidence that would even remotely point to December 25. May 20 became the most often agreed upon date of the Nativity because the Gospel of Luke maintains that the shepherds who received the news of Christ’s birth were watching their sheep by night and it is known that sheep where watched around the clock only at lambing time which was in the spring.

In an attempt to cast a shadow on an ancient pagan religion, Mithraism, whose December 25 festivities threatened to attract more Christians than the church could afford to lose, clever church elders suggested celebrations of the Nativity on the same day. Although they encountered much opposition from the more conservative sector of the church which claimed that it is sinful to even as much as contemplate observing the birth of Christ “as though He were a King Pharaoh” and not a divine son of God, the renegade fathers ultimately prevailed.

The church thereafter legitimized December 25 as the birth date of Christ and its observance would be characterized in meditative prayer, in giving thanks and in pensive rejoicing — a mass, Christ’s mass. One Christian theologian wrote in his journal in the latter part of the 320s: “We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of Him who made it.”

Thanks to the psychological power of group celebrations, the unification and equalization of ranks and social classes, the solidification and affirmation of collective identity and the reinforcement of a common belief system and its objectives, the celebration of Christ’s mass or Christmas on December 25 took hold in the Western world. However, Christmas did not become permanently rooted until the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized in 337, an event which for the first time united the Roman emperorship with the Christian church and made Christianity the official religion of the state. And when in 354, Bishop Liberius of Rome reiterated the importance of celebrating not only Christ’s death but also His birth; those few who still remained aloof from the church were finally convinced.

The word Christmas stems from the abbreviation of “Christ’s mass” which is a derivative from Middle English Christemasssee and Old English Cristes maesse. The earliest found evidence of this phrase was recorded in 1038 which was also an amalgamated derivative of the Greek Christos and the Latin missa. In the Greek translations of the New Testament, the letter X (chi) is the first letter of Christ. By the mid-16th century, X was used as an acronym for Christ and Xmas became the abbreviate form of Christmas.