How did the tradition of the Christmas tree emerge?

Here is a look at how the Christmas tree became an inextricable part of Christmas.

The origin

There is no dearth of legends about the emergence of the Christmas tree. One of the most popular ones is that Martin Luther, the 16th-century Protestant reformer, was the first person to decorate a pine tree for the holiday. However, this isn’t true as there is no mention of such a thing in his letters or biographical accounts by his contemporaries.

The Christmas tree originated in the 17th Century just over the southwestern German border in Strasbourg in Alsace, which was at the time part of the Rhineland, now in present-day France.

James AT Lancaster, lecturer at the University of Queensland, wrote in an article in The Conversation: “German citizens of Strasbourg included a tree as part of a judgement tradition on Christmas day. Children would be judged by their parents. If good, bonbons would be left under a tree. If bad, there would be no bonbons – a hint of what was to come on Judgement Day.”

The ritual gradually spread to other parts of Germany in the 1770s. But it wasn’t widely adopted in the country until the 1830s, around the same time it reached the United Kingdom and began to gain popularity in the United States, Lancaster added.

The proliferation

The Christmas tree came to the UK because of German merchants in Manchester. Not only this, according to Lancaster, around the same time the courts of George III and William IV, who were of German descent, introduced the tradition to the British aristocracy.

The ritual was made widely popular in the UK by Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 until 1901, and her husband Prince Albert. The latter set up a Christmas tree for the first time at the House of Windsor in 1840.

The BBC in a report said: “At first, people used to put their trees on tables, as they were smaller. But when it became possible to get bigger trees from Norway, people began to put their trees on the floor, with presents underneath.”

In the US, Christmas trees arrived in the early 19th Century. The reason behind its introduction was not just about celebrating the festival. It had to do with curbing the rowdiness that used to take place during Christmas.

Lancaster wrote that during the 1800s, people in America celebrated Christmas as a carnival that involved drunkenness, vandalism, and lewd acts. To tackle this, “the indoor, child-friendly Christmas tree” tradition was propagated.

The commercialisation

The concept of putting wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree began in the 1840s in the US. It idea didn’t come from German immigrants but rather from book publishers, who saw the giving of gifts as a marketing strategy.

“Booksellers published collections of short stories and poems, such as Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree (1845), in which children received presents of books, but also swords, drums or dolls,” according to Lancaster. Giving gifts to children was projected as a way to give them indoors and away from the hooliganism taking place outside.

These books also made parents believe that placing gifts under the Christmas tree was a biblical ritual and an essential part of Christmas celebrations.