December 2002 - Nr. 13
A German Legacy
- The Christmas Tree -
A Tale of Ancient Customs and Modern Times
It’s high season on Canadian tree farms, and it won’t be long before truckloads of evergreens will be rolling into towns and cities to brighten up millions of Canadian homes. Tree farming has developed into a multimillion-dollar business in Canada ever since putting up a Christmas tree became as much a tradition here as in Germany. It all started in 1781 in Sorel, Quebec, with a certain German Major-General, Baron Adolph von Riedesel, who had come with his regiment from Braunschweig to fight for George III in the American Revolution. According to their letters to Germany, the baron and his wife, Frederike Charlotte, celebrated the first Christmas in their new home, now the historic ‘Maison des Gouverneurs’, with a German-style Christmas tree - a moment honoured 200 years later with Canada Post’s 1981 launch of a series of Christmas tree stamps in the former von Riedesel residence.
According to The Beaver, published by Canada’ s National History Society, Halifax businessman and entrepreneur William Pryor set the trend for English Canada 65 years later, when he put up a decorated tree for the holidays to please his German wife, Barbara. It must have been a beautiful tree. Halifax society loved it and quickly adopted the idea as a new Yuletide fashion.
Most likely Mrs. Pryor had grown up in a middle-class German family in the early 1800s, when the beginnings of modern-day technology had made it possible for Christmas trees to appear in more and more individual households. In the 18th century, they had only been in noble homes such as the von Riedesels’, and prior to that only in the public realm, in the halls of 16th-century professional guilds and similar associations in Germany.
The origins of the Christmas tree, however, date from far earlier than the oldest of the powerful trade guilds. The Romans, whose empire extended into large parts of today’s Germany, celebrated "Saturnalia" for seven days every winter, starting December 17, to honour Saturn, a god of agriculture. There was general feasting and unrestrained merrymaking, and villas and casas were decked out with evergreens mistle, ivy and laurel - along with flowers and fruit. Emperor Marcus Aurelius declared December 25 "dies invicti solis", the day of the invincible god of the sun, a winter solstice tradition observed until 336 A.D., say most books, when Roman culture declined with the rise of Christianity in Germany and other parts of Europe. Only 14 years later, Pope Julius declared the same day the official anniversary date of the birth of Christ.
Meanwhile, neighbouring German tribes had observed their own rites to stave off the evil and disease associated with winter’s darkness and cold. They, too, pinned evergreen boughs and twigs over the doors of houses and stables to keep hostile spirits at bay. Inside their pagan homes, they hung greenery from ceilings and in corners, where bad things were believed to lurk. Homes not protected by the prickly needles of spruce and pine were considered doomed for disaster.
Decorating the house over the winter solstice remained a tradition long after Christianity took hold north of the Alps, existing alongside Pope Julius’s celebration day for the birth of Jesus. Often, fruits and nuts adorned the branches to symbolize the rebirth of nature in spring and the harvest of the coming season. But communal festivities in German lands tended to use felled and decorated whole trees - as they still do in May Day celebrations, for example, or when the structural part of a building is finished, before roofing and interior finishing begin. So it was only natural that decorative boughs turned into trees when, in the 16th century, guild members and their families got together in their great halls to celebrate both Christmas and the winter solstice. Gingerbread, nuts, fruits and paper ornaments hung from these trees’ branches, and around New Year’s, all was shaken off, a harvest for the children to gather.
Trees in those days had no lights - not yet - as most celebrations took place during the day. Wax candles were a luxury before the development of stearine and paraffin in the earlier 1800s, and therefore mainly used in courts and churches.
Decorated whole trees didn’t make their way into private
homes at Christmas until after the Thirty Years War that ravaged Europe from
1618 to 1648, when the old social structures, and their festive customs,
were largely destroyed.
And
then it was only the wealthy noble class that could afford the luxury of
their own trees, presumably cut from their own wood lots. Published letters
tell us that they had candles on their trees now, and that they looked
lovely. As a 13-year-old in 1832, Queen Victoria wrote in her diary that
standing on two round tables, there were Christmas trees decorated with
candles and candies - a fancy that her husband, Prince Albert of German
Saxe-Coburg, would later support and enrich. By 1848, the Illustrated London
News dedicated an entire page showing the decorated royal tree.
Industrialization and the rise of Germany’s middle class finally brought the trees into family homes. Trains carried loads of them into the cities, their arrival publicly announced in the papers as early as 1851 in Berlin. And the burghers had the money to buy them. At first, the trees were quite often hung upside-down from the ceiling. like the earlier boughs, but the decorations slipped off the branches too easily. As stucco moved into bourgeois homes and concealed the ceiling beams from which they were hung, the trees landed on their feet for good - at first standing on table tops surrounded by gifts before coming down to today’s floor level and full floor-to-ceiling height.
Tree
decorations tell their own stories of time passing. While themes haven’t
changed dramatically over the centuries, their execution materials and
techniques have. Gilded apples first became gilded clay balls, then heavy,
hand-blown glass, later thin-walled industrially-made glass balls dipped in
metallic, coloured coatings. The same process replaced nuts and still
produces delicate miniature musical instruments, silver bells and
lightweight glass birds. Metal foil for ornaments replaced highly flammable
shiny paper. Sugar candy decorations joined gingerbread cookies on the tree
once the cane from New World plantations and industrial refining of local
sugar beets made sugar an affordable commodity.
High-speed
lathes made the production of wooden ornaments more feasible. To this day
these remain German favourites, especially when turned, hand-carved and
painted by artisans from the Ore Mountains, in eastern Germany. Today’s
lightweight mylar tinsel replaces that made until just a few decades ago
from metal foil. And electricity has brought artificial lights to illuminate
our trees for hours, though most trees in Germany still sport real candles,
creating that extra-special festive atmosphere.
When businessman and entrepreneur William Pryor of Halifax, one of the eight founders of the Halifax Banking Company, put up that Christmas tree to make his wife feel at home, he probably had no idea of the potential size of the Christmas tree market in North America. If he were living today, though, he might well be smiling all the way to the bank.
Would he possibly invest in a collapsible, fully decorated artificial tree, you ask? Not if his German wife had anything to say about it. And the Baroness von Riedesel would most certainly agree.
