While dramatically reading The Berenstain Bears Christmas Tree for niece and nephew, I thought of a piece for the magazine about why one should consider erecting something sappy and coniferous in one’s parlor rather than dragging out a botchery of steel, PVC, and rayon flocking.
That insightful, if mortifyingly multiloquous, author writes:
There are about as many debates concerning Christmas trees (artificial vs. natural, multicolor strobe lights or soft yellow, stars vs. angels) as there are about how best to prepare a turkey for Thanksgiving (bake, broil, or the IED-adjacent deep fry). I will undoubtedly convince you of a fresh-cut fir’s or white pine’s superiority, but let us first appreciate the wonder of having a common tradition that makes the debates worth having. In an age of atomization and retreating social norms, a warm hearth to laze in front of as we exchange airtight arguments and good-natured ribbing should be all the more welcome.
The origin of Christmas trees is the first item of debate, one of religious parochialism. The pagan lot, unrelated to Big Lots, claims the modern Christmas tree is but Christian supplantation of the tree worship and winter-solstice observations that were common practice throughout Northern Europe, the Levant, and into China millennia ago. Rome’s Saturnalia employed evergreen branches in celebration. Christmas trees are therefore pagan, declares the secularist with that peculiar staccato nasal exhalation so common among people who know best.
Traipsing to a copse and telling the nearest tree how much a fellow appreciates the noble bratus for providing the year’s bounty, however, is hardly the same as whacking down a conifer, erecting it in one’s parlor, and then gussying it up in religious symbols. That custom comes from medieval Germany, with the creation of the “paradise tree.” A conifer festooned with apples, the tree starred in dramatic reenactments of the Fall of Man. In representing this biblical event, it rejected the pagan promises of eternity and served instead as a reminder of mortality’s introduction as sin took root. Celebrants decorated the trees on December 24, Adam and Eve’s feast day, and Protestant tradition suggests it was Martin Luther who, upon seeing the stars sing between the branches of trees one dark night, began placing candles on the tree.
You can read the rest here.
Merry Christmas!