![]() In 1846, the popular royals, Queen Victoria and her German Prince, Albert, were sketched in the Illustrated London News standing with their children around a Christmas tree. That stern solemnity continued until the 19th century, when the influx of German and Irish immigrants undermined the Puritan legacy.Īn illustration from a December 1848 edition of the Illustrated London News shows Queen Victoria and her family surrounding a Christmas tree. The influential Oliver Cromwell preached against “the heathen traditions” of Christmas carols, decorated trees, and any joyful expression that desecrated “that sacred event.” In 1659, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted a law making any observance of December 25 (other than a church service) a penal offense people were fined for hanging decorations. The pilgrims’s second governor, William Bradford, wrote that he tried hard to stamp out “pagan mockery” of the observance, penalizing any frivolity. To the New England Puritans, Christmas was sacred. It is not surprising that, like many other festive Christmas customs, the tree was adopted so late in America. But, as late as the 1840s Christmas trees were seen as pagan symbols and not accepted by most Americans. The Pennsylvania German settlements had community trees as early as 1747. ![]() The first record of one being on display was in the 1830s by the German settlers of Pennsylvania, although trees had been a tradition in many German homes much earlier. ![]() Most 19th-century Americans found Christmas trees an oddity. To recapture the scene for his family, he erected a tree in the main room and wired its branches with lighted candles.Ĭlick Here Who Brought Christmas Trees to America? Walking toward his home one winter evening, composing a sermon, he was awed by the brilliance of stars twinkling amidst evergreens. It is a widely held belief that Martin Luther, the 16th-century Protestant reformer, first added lighted candles to a tree. Some built Christmas pyramids of wood and decorated them with evergreens and candles if wood was scarce. Germany is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we now know it in the 16th century when devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes. The fierce Vikings in Scandinavia thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god, Balder. In Northern Europe the mysterious Druids, the priests of the ancient Celts, also decorated their temples with evergreen boughs as a symbol of everlasting life. To mark the occasion, they decorated their homes and temples with evergreen boughs. The Romans knew that the solstice meant that soon, farms and orchards would be green and fruitful. ![]() At the solstice, when Ra began to recover from his illness, the Egyptians filled their homes with green palm rushes, which symbolized for them the triumph of life over death.ĭid you know? Christmas trees are grown in all 50 states including Hawaii and Alaska.Įarly Romans marked the solstice with a feast called Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The ancient Egyptians worshipped a god called Ra, who had the head of a hawk and wore the sun as a blazing disk in his crown. Evergreen boughs reminded them of all the green plants that would grow again when the sun god was strong and summer would return. They celebrated the solstice because it meant that at last the sun god would begin to get well. Many ancient people believed that the sun was a god and that winter came every year because the sun god had become sick and weak. In the Northern hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year falls on December 21 or December 22 and is called the winter solstice.
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