But, as late as the 1840s, Christmas trees were seen as pagan symbols and not accepted by most Americans. As early as 1747, Moravian Germans in Pennsylvania had a community tree in the form of a wooden pyramid decorated with candles. The first records of Christmas trees being cut for display comes from the 1820s in Pennsylvania’s German community, although trees may have been a tradition there even earlier. Most 19th-century Americans found Christmas trees an oddity. To recapture the scene for his family, he erected a tree in the main room and wired its branches with lighted candles. According to a common version of the story, walking home one winter evening, Luther was awed by the stars twinkling amidst evergreens. It is a widely held belief that Martin Luther, the 16th-century Protestant reformer, first added lighted candles to a tree. Some built Christmas pyramids of wood and decorated them with evergreens and candles if wood was scarce. Germany is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition-as we now know it-by the 16th century when sources record devout Christians bringing decorated trees into their homes. The Vikings in Scandinavia honored the evergreen mistletoe for its role in the death of the Balder, a god of light. In Northern Europe the Druids, the priests of the ancient Celts, also decorated their temples with evergreen boughs as a symbol of everlasting life. To mark the occasion, they decorated their homes and temples with evergreen boughs. The Romans knew that the solstice meant that soon, farms and orchards would be green and fruitful.

At the solstice, when Ra began to recover from his illness, the Egyptians filled their homes with green palms and papyrus reeds, which symbolized for them the triumph of life over death.ĭid you know? Christmas trees are grown in all 50 states including Hawaii and Alaska.Įarly Romans marked the solstice with a feast called Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped a god called Ra, who had the head of a hawk and wore the sun as a blazing disk in his crown. Evergreen boughs reminded them of all the green plants that would grow again when the sun god was strong and summer would return. They celebrated the solstice because it meant that at last the sun god would begin to get well. Many ancient people believed that the sun was a god and that winter came every year because the sun god had become sick and weak. In the Northern hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year falls on December 21 or December 22 and is called the winter solstice.

Queen victoria european family tree