DECK THEM HALLS

ED. CONDON

I have been looking forward to breaking out the Christmas decorations this year, despite the inevitable fight it occasions with my wife about how to rearrange the living room to accommodate them.

We’ve both always been big into holiday decorating. At first, like any newly married couple, we were excited to acquire the festive kitsch which would become part of our new family’s seasonal memories, adding to the collection year by year. Later, it was just a thing we did together, and we do it damn well, I don’t mind telling you.

But, I’m not going to lie, the enthusiasm had lessened in recent years: seeing your favourite childhood ornaments on the tree becomes a little bittersweet when you’ve started to believe that you won’t have kids of your own to hand them on to. But this year, after nearly fifteen years of waiting, we have our daughter with us. She’s brought the nostalgia factor roaring back to the Condon Christmas.

Our tree went up last night - I always get it midweek and late at night to avoid the crowds. This year, the plan worked like a treat: the place was empty apart from a hipster couple agonising over some paltry little three-footers as they discussed boba tea and cultural appropriation (I’m just guessing).

Speaking of cultural appropriation, it’s also the time of year when tedious amateur atheists pipe up all over the place to whine, “Akshually, Christmas trees are appropriated pagan symbols, it’s nothing to do with Christmas at all, so there.”

Other internet experts like to make much of the fact that, for all its Dickensian nostalgia, Christmas trees came into the Anglosphere thanks to Albert, royal consort to Queen Victoria.

Now, I’m not here to defend Prince Albert - or any of his many mad ideas, but let’s just get some things clear:

Christmas trees are not pagan, and they are not German. They are English, and Christian.

I can google as well as the next person. And you don’t have to actually work very hard to find out that the real story of the first Christmas tree dates back - so far as I can tell - to the eighth century.

Legend has it that St Boniface, an Englishman born in the blessed county of Devon and sent to evangelise the barbarian hordes of northern Germany, heard tell of a mighty oak tree in the area of Hesse. The locals revered it as a kind of living altar to Thor, whom they honoured with sacrifices.

Boniface wasn’t having any of that on his turf. The saint arrived in the town on Christmas Eve (at least according to some versions of the story), seized an axe, and proceeded to chop down the supposedly divinely protected tree.

When Thor’s hammer failed to fall on the saint, the locals found themselves suddenly open to new ideas about God. Legend has it that Boniface catechised them on the spot, pointing to a small evergreen fir tree behind the fallen oak as a sign of eternal life, rather like St Patrick is supposed to have used the shamrock to talk about the Trinity.

Now, maybe this is all just legend. But as far as I can tell, it stands up as well as any of the other nonsense I have read about the supposed pagan origins of cutting down trees at Christmas. So the next time someone starts in about the “pagan” origins of Christmas, grab your axe (for trees, for trees) and set them straight.

Originally published on pillarcatholic.com and reprinted here with kind permission.