December 19, 2006

• Christmas Trees

  Updated from an entry
  originally posted Dec. 19, 2004:
  
  Let’s have a
  WOODY
  Christmas.
  (six days to Xmas, and counting…)

  I have never been an “old fashioned girl.”  Now that I’m in my cronehood, I’m no girl of any sort or fashion.  And woe betide anyone who refers to me as an “old girl” in my hearing, if he’s within reach.  But I am getting old.  I’m so old that to me, “wood” is something that grows on trees and burns in my stove to keep me warm.

  Wood, and trees and woody plants are parts of “Christmas” tradition.  Of course most of those traditions predate the birth of Christ Jesus and were borrowed from pagan cultures, but they are indelibly part of Christmas for us now.  Here is some of the wood that Google.com helped me find today:

  

  The fir tree has a long association with Christianity, it began in Germany almost a 1000 years ago when St Boniface, who converted the German people to Christianity, was said to have come across a group of pagans worshipping an oak tree. In anger, St Boniface is said to have cut down the oak tree and to his amazement a young fir tree sprung up from the roots of the oak tree. St Boniface took this as a sign of the Christian faith. But it was not until the 16th century that fir trees were brought indoors at Christmas time.
  

  Captain Jack’s Christmas Tree Farm
  

  

  Legend has it that Martin Luther began the tradition of decorating trees to celebrate Christmas. One crisp Christmas Eve, about the year 1500, he was walking through snow-covered woods and was struck by the beauty of a group of small evergreens. Their branches, dusted with snow, shimmered in the moonlight. When he got home, he set up a little fir tree indoors so he could share this story with his children. He decorated it with candles, which he lighted in honor of Christ’s birth.

  Some people trace the origin of the Christmas tree to an earlier period. Even before the Christian era, trees and boughs were used for ceremonials. Egyptians, in celebrating the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year — brought green date palms into their homes as a symbol of “life triumphant over death”. When the Romans observed the feast of saturn, part of the ceremony was the raising of an evergreen bough. The early Scandinavians were said to have paid homage to the fir tree.

  To the Druids, sprigs of evergreen holly in the house meant eternal life; while to the Norsemen, they symbolized the revival of the sun god Balder. To those inclined toward superstition, branches of evergreens placed over the door kept out witches, ghosts, evil spirits and the like.

  Until about 1700, the use of Christmas trees appears to have been confined to the Rhine River District. From 1700 on, when candles were accepted as part of the decorations, the Christmas tree was well on its way to becoming a tradition in Germany.  The Christmas tree tradition most likely came to the United States with Hessian troops during the American Revolution, or with German immigrants to Pennsylvania and Ohio.

  But the custom spread slowly. The Puritans banned Christmas in New England.  Even as late as 1851.  A Cleveland minister nearly lost his job because he allowed a tree in his church.  Schools in Boston stayed open on Christmas Day through 1870, and sometimes expelled students who stayed home.

  Did a celebration around a Christmas tree on a bitter cold Christmas Eve at Trenton, New Jersey, turn the tide for Colonial forces in 1776?  According to legend, Hessian mercenaries were so reminded of home by a candlelit evergreen tree that they abandoned their guardposts to eat, drink and be merry. Washington attacked that night and defeated them.

  The Christmas tree market was born in 1851 when Catskill farmer Mark Carr hauled two ox sleds of evergreens into New York City and sold them all. By 1900, one in five American families had a Christmas tree, and 20 years later, the custom was nearly universal.

  Christmas tree farms sprang up during the depression. Nurserymen couldn’t sell their evergreens for landscaping, so they cut them for Christmas trees. Cultivated trees were preferred because they have a more symmetrical shape than wild ones.

  Six species account for about 90 percent of the nation’s Christmas tree trade. Scotch pine ranks first, comprising about 40 percent of the market, followed by Douglas fir which accounts for about 35 percent. The other big sellers are noble fir, white pine, balsam fir and white spruce.

  Information from David Robson, Extension Educator, Horticulture
  University of Illinois Springfield Extension Center
  (edited for grammar, punctuation, length and relevance)

  

  The Christmas tree is a mandala, a bundle of symbols showing what creation has to offer: light and the movement of angels, the gifts of orchard and field, forest and sea, all topped off by the star that pointed to the end of the journey, the place of peace.

  During Advent in the eleventh century, scenes called mysteries, including one about Paradise, were very popular. A tree decorated with red apples symbolized the tree of Paradise. During the fifteenth century, the faithful began to put up trees in their own houses on December 24, the feast day of Adam and Eve.

  However, the first Christmas tree as we know it, but without lights still, appeared in Alsace in 1521. It was introduced in France by the Princess Hélène de Mecklembourg who brought one to Paris after her marriage to the Duke of Orleans. In the eighteenth century, the custom of decorating a Christmas tree was well established in Germany, France and Austria.

  Using small candles to light up the Christmas tree dates back to the middle of the seventeenth century. The custom was only really firmly established, however, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany and soon after in the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe.

  The first candles were glued with wax or pinned to the end of the tree branches. Little lanterns and small candleholders then appeared to make putting up the tapers easier. Candleholders with clips appeared around 1890. Glass balls and lanterns were created between 1902 and 1914.

  The first time a Christmas tree was lit by electricity was in 1882 in New York. Edward Johnson, a colleague of Thomas Edison, lit a Christmas tree with a string of 80 small electric light bulbs which he had made himself. These strings of lights began to be produced commercially around 1890. One of the first electrically lit Christmas trees was erected in Westmount, Quebec in 1896. In 1900, some large stores put up large illuminated trees to attract customers.

  Once begun, the custom spread in Canada wherever electricity came to towns and the countryside. Because of the risk of fire, trees lit with candles had not usually been put up until December 24. This technical innovation altered the custom since it was now possible to put the tree up earlier and leave it up longer, until the day before Epiphany.

  Edited from an article at christmas-tree.com
  

  

  Photo below:  The Blue Room, White House, Washington, DC, 2005

  The Norse pagans and Celtic Druids revered evergreens as manifestations of deity because they did not “die” from year to year but stayed green and alive when other plants appeared dead and bare. The trees represented everlasting life and hope for the return of spring.

  The druids decorated their trees with symbols of prosperity — a fruitful harvest, coins for wealth and various charms such as those for love or fertility.  Scandinavian Pagans are thought to be the first to bring their decorated trees indoors as this provided a warm and welcoming environment for the native fairy folk and tree elementals to join in the festivities. The Saxons, a Germanic pagan tribe, were the first to place lights on the their trees in the form of candles. Ancient Romans decorated their homes with greens at the Festival of Saturnalia, their New Year, and exchanged evergreen branches with friends as a sign of good luck.

   The first Christian use of the Christmas tree symbol is credited to 16th century when devout Christians also brought decorated trees into their homes. German born Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, is credited with starting the trend in England in 1841 when he brought the first Christmas Tree to Windsor Castle.

  While Europe had already been celebrating Christmas for some time, the first recorded sighting of a Christmas tree in America came in 1830′s Pennsylvania. It seems a local church erected the tree as a fundraising effort. Christmas trees were generally not thought kindly of in early America, as many people saw them as Pagan symbols, which is in fact, their origin. By the 1890′s, however, Christmas ornaments were being imported from Germany and Christmas trees were in high fashion.

  While Europeans generally favored smaller trees about three to four feet in height, Americans, as usual, liked to do things big. Their trees proudly stretched from floor to ceiling. Popular ornaments with the German-Americans were natural items like apples, nuts, berries, marzipan and cookies. Popcorn, an American addition, eventually was added to the mix.

  With the advent of electricity, Christmas trees began to appear in town squares across America and the traditional “lighting of the tree” quickly became the official symbols of the beginning of the holiday season.
  

  from fabulousfoods.com
  The photo at right above is from a mall in Houston, TX.

  [Dec. 19, 2006]  Greyfox and I were talking about Christmas tree lights a few days ago.  Both of us remember fondly the old “bubble candle” lights that had glass tubes filled with alcohol which would boil and bubble from the heat of the light below.   As you can see in the photos below, I favor old-fashioned decorations.  Last year, as I was researching this series online, I found a site with info about some of the more popular early electric ornaments including, from the turn of the century a century or so ago, bells that worked with an intermittent electromagnetic field.  If I find that site again, I may have some more Xmas tree input later on.

  

  Doug and I made plans to have a tree in 2004.  It was to have been our first Christmas tree since Greyfox moved up here in 1991.  The Old Fart had always discouraged Christmas decorations, and we never fought it.  After old Scrooge McGreyfox moved out, being on the power grid at last, we were going to decorate.  In the summer of 2004, the vandals at Elvenhurst, our old home across the highway, dragged out and scattered some of our Christmas decorations, and I picked them up and brought them over here.   Before snow fell, Doug scouted out some nice young spruce trees and made note of their locations so he could go back and cut one later.

  As the time for cutting the tree grew nearer, the snow grew deeper in the cul de sac where the best of the trees are located.  When Greyfox asked us to bring in our only string of white lights for him to decorate his porch, that threw a small kink in the plan.  When I realized that we didn’t have a stand for the tree, and that we’d had no experience of how these cats might interact with one, and that Koji has never been around an indoor tree….  Well, Doug and I talked it over and decided the tree would be risky and more trouble than it’s worth.

  That was 2004.  It’s now 2005, and our Christmas tree discussion this year was brief and conclusive.  There are now eight cats in the house, half of them rambunctious kittens.  I am contenting myself this year with these photos of my tree and ornament collection, taken in 1979, before Doug was born and before his father Charley and I moved off the power grid.

  [UPDATE 2006:    If I were to put up a tree now, it would look much like that, with many of the same ornaments and some new additions from Greyfox’s collection and from dumpster finds over the past two and a half decades or so.  A tree this year would be more absurd than in ’04 and ’05.  The cat population is up around a dozen now, and three of them are high-climbing rambunctious kittens.

  Doug and I did a water run today.  Neither of us really felt physically up to it, so we fortified ourselves with NADH, centrophenoxine, and ephedrine.  For myself, I added some ibuprofen as well.  The phrase that crossed my mind as I handed the pills over to Doug was, “better living through chemistry.”

   Greyfox would have considered our ephedrine doses laughable.  We have a supply of some little “mini-ephedrine” pills with guaifenesin that he stockpiled before the ban went into effect.  Greyfox takes them more frequently than I do and in larger doses.  I usually take half a tablet at a time.  Today, I broke my half in half and shared it with Doug.  It got us through the chore.

  I had a momentary flash of anger when I got to the turnout.  The highway department had plowed the snow out of the big turnout on the opposite side of the highway, but hadn’t touched the area where we locals park for access to the spring.  Momentary flashes of anger are about all that’s left of this redhead’s temper, though.  Like fear, I’ve not totally transcended it.  I let it wash through me and fade away.  I realized almost immediately that it was likely the plow had come by when someone was parked there getting water, and was unable to clear it for that reason.  There is almost always a vehicle or two at that turnout when I go by.

  Since we’re both somewhat under the weather, with little energy to spare, I decided not to take the camera to the spring.  It just seemed more prudent and practical to get the job done and get home without expending energy on frivolous photography.  I was sorry I didn’t have it when Doug made his first trip down the trail with empty buckets.

  I had gone down first with the Mutt® tool to chip some steps in the ice.  He grabbed three buckets in each hand and half-flew down the path, doing a classic face-plant in the snowbank at the bottom.  After that, he got serious and helped me chip steps, then he scattered the wood ashes we had taken with us for extra traction. 

  The temperature was about twenty degrees above zero, so the ice wasn’t super-frozen.  My gloves got wet, but it wasn’t cold enough that I needed to change into one of the spare pairs I took with me.  I filled jugs and buckets, Doug schlepped them up the path, and we were almost finished when the next car pulled in.  It was a neighbor I hadn’t met before, in a little Nissan with two five-gallon jugs tucked into the back seat footwells.  He had his jugs filled and was long gone before we had all our buckets and jugs loaded into the Subaru’s hatch.  With seventy gallons on hand, we’ve got a few weeks before we need to do it all again.

  Tomorrow, mistletoe….
  

   

  • 9:41 pm
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