An Evergreen Tradition

Let me play Scrooge for a minute and remind my neighbors that the practice of hauling an evergreen into the living room, and decorating it, is a tradition of recent vintage in these parts.  After all, decorating a Christmas tree is something that began, depending upon who you believe, sometime in the 7th century when St. Boniface cut down the oak of the Norse god Thor, and let stand in it's place an evergreen fir, or much later when Estonian guildsmen erected a tree, decorated it and danced around it in the 16th century.

The connection with Christmas, the birth of Christ and Christianity is sketchy at best, and the practice of bringing green plants indoors and decorating them is very likely originated with "pagans" celebrating solstice, and using the magic of evergreen plants to demonstrate the resilience of life during the loss of daylight on the year's shortest day.   The Egyptians were known to bring palm branches inside during Winter solstice, and Romans honored Bacchus during Saturnalia, a fertility festival, decorating greenery with 12 candles and with bits of metal and likenesses of Bacchus himself.

In fact the exact day we celebrate Christmas, or Christ's birth, was debated frequently, as early as the 2nd century, with dates in April, May and November suggested as the real date.  Like many other Christian holidays, some scholars suggest that Christmas was used to supplant the pagan celebration of solstice with a new Christian tradition.

These pagan underpinnings have not often sat well with God-fearing members of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In the Bible, Jeremiah disdains the practice: (10:2-4) For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.  


The folks who settled New England were equally disdainful of the practice with (pardon the pun) pagan roots.  The Puritans forbade the celebration of Christmas with merrymaking and decoration of trees.   The Mayflower, which first made land in, ironically Provincetown, carried future Plymouth Colony Governor to Plymouth Rock where he railed against pagan merry-making at Christmas.

We owe much to the Germans for keeping the tradition alive, and elaborating upon it.  In fact, one story has the first Christmas tree in America erected by a  Hessian soldier in Windsor Locks in 1777.

As rainy and bleak a Sunday as today is, yesterday was a glorious, and unseasonably warm December day sending flocks of families to nearby tree farms to choose, tag and cut an evergreen for their own home.  At Oak Ridge Tree Farm I heard a woman talking to the owner.  She was on her second visit.

"I just came back to be sure I tagged the best tree," she said.  "I looked at all of them, and I got the best one."

"You looked at all 15,000 trees," the owner said, incredulous.

"If I don't pick the best one, my family will disown me," she laughed.

At Indian Hill Brook Tree Farm on Bow Lane, dozens of families either hiked to the stands of groomed trees, or rode behind the tractor to find the perfect spruce or fir.  Children debated with parents about the height of trees, while couples argued about the perfect conifer shape.

One family from Durham struggled happily with the saw.

"It's his first tree farm," the woman said, pointing to a young man trying to master the perfect saw stroke.

'I grew up in Durham, but I live in Manhattan," he confessed.  "You would think I'd know better."

Eventually their tree was felled, and they dragged their tree to the waiting trailer to haul a bit of green into their homes to protest the failing light as the days grow shorter.