Decorating for the holidays: The Christmas tree wars
I was barreling through new holiday emails today and ran across a startling piece of news: a private daycare center was accused of omitting their traditional annual Christmas tree.
The Stürm und Drang fallout was predictably nasty – social media overflowed with hateful, often profane outbursts from people awash in self-righteous wrath – proclaiming the ruination of the season by Christmas haters and the “godless.”
The report turned out to be false, and the folks who run the center also noted that the place was overflowing with Christmas décor including “[a]dvent wreaths, baubles and fairy lights.” The fury subsided.
While we’ve put up with a certain amount of this business here in the U.S., including an inordinate amount of silliness about a “War on Christmas,” this story actually originated in Hamburg, Germany, not here. I’ve spent a good amount of time in Germany over the years, and cannot remember any lack of Christmas trees, Christmas lights and candles, or Christmas cheer generally, so the reaction seemed odd.
We might never have had Christmas trees in the U.S. at all, had it not been for the Germans – and they were not accepted here much until pretty late in the celebratory game. Christmas trees were at the center of religio-political tantrums of a very different sort around the time of the early colonial period. According to The History Channel the Puritans of New England (suspicious of fun, generally) thought that any celebration of Christmas was “unholy”: “[t]he pilgrims’ second governor, William Bradford” they inform us, “wrote that he tried hard to stamp out ‘pagan mockery’ of the observance, penalizing any frivolity” and that the General Court of Massachusetts, in 1659, passed into statute a fine for decorations of any sort. No trees. But an influx of Irish and German immigrants soon put paid to the Puritan blue-nosery, and the tree tradition began to flourish in the U.S. By the 1890s, trees were everywhere.
Apparently, Germans preferred natural ornamentation – cookies and apples and whatnot (and candles, which strike me as requiring an especial amount of positive faith in an era of limited fire control) – but the Americanized version soon began to bloom with all sorts of home-made ornaments, often passed down for generations. Soon, a booming industry in Christmas ornaments and embellishments of all sorts began to explode. As Americans, we tend to over-do, and I have to wonder what Governor Bradford would have made of the giant three-story blow-up Santas, life-sized reindeer, and martial detonations of lights that adorn some of the houses in my neighborhood.
As I was growing up, we prepared to decorate the tree by threading together popcorn and cranberries in long strings that would be wrapped around the tree. It was the kids’ job to create the popcorn cables and with four of us under 10 years old, candles were verboten – we went with commercial lights. The controversy goes on, of course, over how big is the tree to be? How long should it dominate the living space? When does it go up?
We all have our own traditions for this season, and I refuse to enter the fray. My own current tradition is minimal. My last Christmas tree was tiny, but live, and is now about 5 ½ feet tall, growing in my front yard.
My favorite Christmas tree tale from this year is an odd one, though: People Magazine reports that a “lifestyle influencer” from Florida (of course), created a Christmas tree of an entirely new variety. Julia Moore tells us that they “created a Christmas tree with chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A.” It appears that influencer wrapped a Styrofoam cone in parchment paper then covered it with kale, using toothpicks to secure the greens. The nuggets served as ornaments.
Merry Christmas. But maybe the Governor was right.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. endowed chair in American history, government and civics and Miller distinguished professor of political science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Decorating for the holidays: The Christmas tree wars
