A Brief History of Christmas Trees
As the subject of numerous carols, a featured attraction for both cavernous department stores and cozy mom-and-pop businesses, and an object of purchase for some 35 million to 50 million American consumers every year, Christmas trees are undoubtedly a focal point of annual Yuletide celebrations. Older than the carols in which they’re celebrated but not nearly as old as the pagan origins of the holiday they support, Christmas trees have been a familiar, comforting sight since childhood for countless people dating back many generations.
But these evergreen conifers didn’t simply emerge as part of holiday celebrations like a fully assembled toy right out of the box. Here’s a look back at how Christmas trees became part of, and then inextricable from, the end-of-year festivities in which they have a starring role.
Early Evergreen Symbolism
The Christmas tree tradition has its roots in the long, multicultural history of evergreen plants being used to mark the arrival of the winter solstice. From the palm branches that featured in celebrations of the sun god Ra in ancient Egypt to the wreaths that were incorporated into the Roman festivities of Saturnalia, evergreens symbolized the rebirth of life during the cold, dark winter months.
According to Judith Flanders’ Christmas, A Biography, the emergence of trees to commemorate the season were in part inspired by the “paradise plays” that were popular in Europe during the Middle Ages. Staged in observance of the Christian feast day of Adam and Eve on December 24, the plays typically featured an evergreen fir, festooned with apples, as the stand-in for the symbolic tree of life.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of certain legends in 15th-century Germany further strengthened the association of trees with the Christian celebrations of the winter holiday. Among the most popular was the story of St. Boniface, who supposedly chopped down an oak that was towering above the remains of human sacrifice meant for the pagan god Thor, and replaced it with a fir tree that symbolized the eternal truth of Christ.
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Christmas Trees Appear in Germany
As described in Christmas, A Biography, the first documented Christmas tree dates back to at least 1419, when a guild in Freiburg, Germany, decorated an outdoor tree with apples, gingerbread, wafers, and tinsel.
By the 1530s, the first known market for Christmas trees had surfaced in Strasbourg, then part of southwest Germany. With demand apparently threatening the livelihood of local forests, ordinances enacted in the Alsace region first limited households to one small tree at Christmas, before the city of Freiburg attempted to ban the practice altogether. Nevertheless, the popularity of Christmas trees continued to grow in Germany, as illustrated by the appearance of another guild-sponsored tree in the northern city of Brennen in 1570.
Although popular legend holds that the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther was the first to decorate an indoor tree with candles after being inspired by the nighttime stars, researchers nowadays largely believe that story to be apocryphal. Instead, the first decorated indoor tree, its branches filled with wafers, paper roses, apples, and sugar ornaments, was documented in Strasbourg in 1605.
The Christmas tree tradition took on different forms as it spread across the country: Some celebrants followed the custom of impaling an apple on the sharpened tip; others suspended the trees upside-down from the ceiling; and still others erected a wooden pyramid as a symbolic tree.
Distinct names for these seasonal markers also emerged among the differing religious communities that were doing the celebrating. Protestants referred to their tree as Weihnachtsbaum, Tannenbaum, or Lutherbäume, while Catholics had names such as Christbaum, Lichterbaum, and Lebensbaum.
The Tradition Branches Out
Thanks in part to the marriage of German and English royals, the Christmas tree tradition began spreading to the British Isles by the late 18th century. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of England’s King George III, is credited with introducing the ritual to her adopted home country by having a decorated tree at Windsor Castle in 1800.
Around this same time, the Christmas tree was beginning to find a home in the United States. While some of the nation's earliest tree activity was recorded in Georgia, it was the German-immigrant-populated regions of Pennsylvania that served as the epicenter of this growing custom.
Beyond becoming a seasonal fixture in individual households, trees served as a drawing point for communal markets and fundraisers, such as the one advertised for the 1830 Christmas bazaar of the Dorcas Society of York, Pennsylvania. By the 1840s, records noted the migration of holiday trees to the Midwest and Texas.
An 1848 Illustrated London News engraving, featuring Queen Victoria and the German-born Prince Albert celebrating Christmas with their children in front of a large tree, is believed to have boosted the popularity of the Christmas tree among the queen's subjects. Two years later, a nearly identical illustration appeared in the popular American magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, albeit with the ostentatious display of presents and royal wealth tamped down from the original.
The U.S. Embraces Christmas Trees
As told in Phillip V. Snyder's The Christmas Tree Book, the idea for a tree market was first carried out in the U.S. by upstate New Yorker Mark Carr, who quickly sold out his stock of young firs and spruces from a small strip of sidewalk in Lower Manhattan's Washington Market in 1851. Carr returned with another supply the following year, the brisk sales soon instigating a legion of copycats. By 1880, some 200,000 trees were annually being shipped to merchants at the Washington Market.
As demand began to outweigh supplies and conservation concerns emerged by the turn of the 20th century, a new commercial development helped keep the Christmas tree industry in good health. In 1901, W.V. McGalliard planted 25,000 Norway spruce on his south New Jersey lot to start the nation's first Christmas tree farm. Within six to seven years, the first crop was ready for customers to select on site, with other batches shipped to the nearby state capital of Trenton.
Meanwhile, the first instances of the mammoth tree as a public spectacle were beginning to appear. One of the earliest examples was the 45-foot hemlock that stole the show at the 1884 World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In 1912, the cities of Boston, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut, narrowly beat out the Big Apple by a half-hour for the co-honors of lighting the nation's first public tree on December 24, 1912. Eleven years later, President Calvin Coolidge lit the first National Christmas Tree on the Ellipse, just south of the White House. And in 1931, the workers building Rockefeller Center in New York City pooled their earnings to buy the first Christmas tree to go up at the location, although the annual tree-lighting ceremony didn’t begin until 1933.
The Artificial Revolution
Artificial Christmas trees have been available in the United States for nearly as long as the first real trees sold at the Washington Market. In 1882, a New York man named August Wengenroth received a patent for his tree with detachable wire branches. Around that time, Germans began producing trees made from dyed green goose feathers.
By the 1950s, industrial brush-making companies such as American Brush Machinery began adapting their products to the artificial tree industry. That decade also saw the rise of aluminum trees, a popular if somewhat dangerous product due to their incompatibility with electric lights, until the denigration of the aluminum variety in 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas special hastened the end of that fad.
With the addition of the compound polyvinyl chloride (PVC), sturdy plastic brush trees were able to dominate the artificial market in the wake of aluminum's demise. Nowadays, the ease of maintaining an artificial tree outweighs the nostalgic yearning for a traditional live specimen for many celebrants: According to a fall 2023 survey conducted by the American Christmas Tree Association, a whopping 77% of Christmas tree customers planned to display an artificial version in their home that holiday season.
