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Icon of the month: Christmas Tree
This article was first published in Third Way in December 2002.
St Boniface, the eighth-century missionary to Germany, found it hard to wean his converts from their adoration of the rather splendid Thor’s Oak on a green hill in Hesse. He tried to tell them about the cross of Jesus being a much better tree, but they just kept going on about how good their tree was. So he hacked it down. The natives were so amazed that he didn’t get hacked down himself by a hacked off Thor, they became, we are told, good Christians ever after.
Ironically, tradition credits Boniface with thus inventing the Christmas tree. To be fair to him, it is hard to see how destroying an oaken idol is supposed to inspire people to bring fir trees in at Christmas; but if true, his attack on syncretism helped keep paganism at the heart of the Christian festivities.
The tree, centrepiece of every merry yuletide, is a survival of the ubiquitous pagan practice of bringing a bit of evergreenery indoors in winter. Even in these days of central heating, electric light and imported satsumas, when we have little interest in the mystic powers of conifers, we are cheered by the sight of winter greenery, so we can imagine its power over our cold and hungry ancestors. The felled tree - used now to decorate rather than placate the winter - celebrates humanity’s victory over nature.
It is not without specifically Christian resonance. It points the onlooker heavenwards, to where the star or angel looks down: a Christmas marriage of heaven and earth. Then there’s Christianity’s thing about trees in general: from Eden to the New Jerusalem the path of creation, fall, atonement and glory has a tree at every station, so it would be a shame for Bethlehem to be missed out. Boniface is - improbably - said to have used the pine’s providentially triangular shape as another one of those illustrations of the Trinity that don’t quite work. And, to clinch it, one of the tree’s early advocates found a verse towards the back of Isaiah about the pine ‘beautifying the place of my sanctuary’, and you can’t argue with that.
And yet its presents and decorations are inherited from Saturn, its 12-day duration comes from the burning of the Celtic yule log, and even the anniversary it celebrates is shared rather suspiciously with the Romans’ Birth of the Sun. That the tree’s roots are so thoroughly pagan illustrates not so much that Christians betray their principles at Christmas; rather it shows how successfully our forebears overcame the opposition not by proving their religion wrong but by doing it better than them.
The coming of the tree to Britain in 1840, imported by Prince Albert, was just in time for it to be incorporated into the creation of the Dickensian Christmas of snow, stodgy puddings and sentiment. This Victorian vision of Christmas has survived thanks to Hallmark and Hollywood. Pretty good PR for a season that is dark, rainy, and characterised more by self-indulgence than good will.
These days we have the aluminium and plastic option too. (The first one was made in the 1930s by Addis Brush Co. using the latest toilet brush technology.) As with so much else, what for our forebears was a matter of survival and superstition has become a matter of consumer choice: cheap or dear, convenient or laborious, authentic or simulated, aesthetics or the environment.
A favourite Christian gripe about Christmas is that it is becoming dechristianised, but the tree reminds us that if we nicked Christmas off the pagans in the first place we can hardly complain when they want it back. The only fair solution is to split it up, Solomon-like, between the claimants. Christians get custody of the name, carols, services, Bible stories and nativity play. Pagans get the decorations, presents and shopping, the waste and greed, Only Fools and Horses, ‘A Spaceman Came Travelling’ and the tree. And the date, but they have to call it Xday. Until we’re willing to do that, we might as well gather round the tree and enjoy our paganism.
a favourite Christian gripe
about Christmas
is that it is becoming dechristianised,
but the tree reminds us that if we nicked Christmas off the pagans in the first place
we can hardly complain when they want it back