Is it time to put the tree up yet?

Ever After at Lower Grenofen: design by Amanda Randell Cox; Clare Kinchin Photography

The humble Christmas tree has become one of the mainstays of preparations for the festive season.

Choosing a tree of the right height and girth – not too thin, not too wide, but with an appropriately proportioned triangularity and a suitable arrangement of branches – can be a delightful, much-anticipated, family outing that everybody in your household looks forward to embracing as part of the Christmas routine. However if you find your Christmas ‘to do’ list only seems to be increasing amidst an ever-dwindling amount of free time, then tree purchasing can become an onerous but essential chore, clouded by anxiety that all the trees with the best vital statistics will already have been snapped up as a result of your purchasing negligence - or even the unthinkable, that there won’t be any trees left at all which is nearly on a par with forgetting to buy the turkey. For some people the subsequent decoration is a traditional pleasure as you unearth treasured ornaments, reviving fond memories of previous years. Or maybe it’s a struggle even to locate the decorations – you know you put them in a safe and logical place last year but just can’t remember where that might have been. However, when you stand back and survey the finished product in all its bedecked glory, and switch on the lights for the first time, it never ceases to enthral – unless of course there is that one rogue bulb that refuses to cooperate.

So what made us start bringing parts of the forest landscape into our homes? The ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Celts and the Vikings all used greenery of some description to decorate their dwellings and places of worship for special occasions. While later on, pagans in northern Europe marked the winter solstice with a celebration known as Yule, when it was customary for a very large log to be brought into the house and gradually burnt over several days. A popular theory is that the Christmas tree evolved from the ‘paradise tree’ which was a key element of mystery plays performed outside in the Middle Ages on Christmas Eve to celebrate Adam and Eve, by enacting the creation story - the paradise tree was

hung with fruit, portraying the Garden of Eden. Generally, it is thought that the custom of Christmas trees started in Germanic and Slavic countries, when in the 16th century some Christians started to bring evergreen trees into their homes at Christmas time, hanging fruit and other items on them as decorations. Over the centuries the Christmas tree tradition became more and more widespread in this area. Martin Luther, the 16thcentury religious reformer, is often credited with adding candles to decorate the Christmas tree: supposedly he was walking in a pine forest near his home in Wittenberg when he was struck by the beauty of the stars shining among the trees, inspiring him to set up a conifer tree in his house, wire candles to the branches and light them to symbolize the stars of heaven for his family.

King George III came to the British throne in 1760 and the following year married Sophia Charlotte of MecklenburgStrelitz, which was a small northern German duchy. Princess Charlotte was an educated, seventeen-year-old woman interested in music and also botany. She had grown up with the tradition of decorating a yew branch at Christmas and she initiated the custom in England, encouraging her ladies-in-waiting to decorate a bough at Kew Gardens and Windsor Castle, and then gathering the whole court around it to sing carols and exchange presents. In December 1800 she introduced the idea of a whole tree as a magnificent centrepiece for a royal Christmas party at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, celebrating the first year of the new century. The British aristocracy raced to copy the idea and by Charlotte’s death in 1818 the tradition was widely established in society, continuing through the 1820s and 30s.

Consequently Queen Victoria grew up with the tradition of decorating a tree at Christmas, but when she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840 he took it to a new level, getting involved personally and taking on responsibility for decorating the trees at Windsor Castle with candles and sweets. In December 1840, he imported several spruce firs from his native Coburg (present day Bavaria) - before this, all sorts of trees had been dug up and brought inside. Images of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their family gathered round the Christmas tree were published in the Illustrated London News in 1848. Subsequently other publications started including details about the royal Christmas trees, and the idea caught on with the general public, so that by 1860 the tradition had become so popular that most well-off families would have a Christmas tree.

Nowadays the Christmas tree is an essential ingredient and can be found in nearly every imaginable setting from homes to schools, offices and all manner of venues. It is estimated

that between 6 and 8 million real trees are sold in the UK at Christmas. Tree farms have become a business in their own right and customers can now be presented with several types of conifer to choose from, including Norway spruce, Fraser fir, blue spruce, noble fir and lodgepole pine, but the most popular by far is still the Nordman fir. In recent years, Christmas tree festivals have become increasingly popular, both with the community groups who create them and the general public who come to see the ingenious ways the trees have been decorated. They are also an excellent way of raising money for charity while spreading Christmas cheer. The usual tree festivals in St Eustachius’ and other local village churches have unfortunately had to be cancelled this year due to the pandemic. However if lockdown restrictions are lifted you can still enjoy the Alternative Tavistock Christmas Tree Festival, as St Eustachius’ and the BID have worked together to bring it into the town this year (see What’s On for details). While in Plymouth you can help to raise money for the NHS, subject to covid restrictions, by making a donation to hang a bauble with a Christmas message on a Wishing Tree.

Rosemary Best

Every year a huge Christmas tree is lit in Trafalgar Square; the city of Oslo has given a spruce tree to the people of London every Christmas since 1947 as a token of Norwegian gratitude for Britain’s support during the war years of 1940–1945.