German Christmas Trees
First Tree In American Church
Customs and Traditions
A Christmas Tree In Cleveland, Ohio
Customs and Traditions
Henry Schwan might have thought he was giving his church a gift when he set up the first Christmas tree in Cleveland, Ohio in 1851. But the gesture met with outrage instead. Newly emigrated from Germany, the Reverend Mr. Schwan did not realize that dragging a tree into the holiday would be regarded as sheer paganism. For while Chirstmas trees were by then part of the festivities in some households, Schwan's was the first tree ever to appear in an American church. Even as late as 1883 The New York Times was railing against "the German Christmas tree," calling tree "a rootless and lifeless corpse, never worthy of the day."
It was, in fact, Germans who brought the custom of trimming trees to America, beginning in Pennsylvania in the 18th century. By 1747 the Moravians, a religious sect, were decorating their holiday tables with pyramids of greens. And by 1825 the Christmas season in Philadephia was not complete without a walk about town to view the elaborately decorated Christmas tree.
Although still far from common in the early decades of the 1800's, the tradition of decorating trees began to spread as German settlers moved west. Not every community, however, offered a choice of evergreens. A sassafras sapling decorated with candles, hickory nuts, and hawthorn berries brightened on family's Christmas in St. Clair County, Illinois, in 1833. In frontier Kansas, dried sunflowers served as makeshift "trees," and on the high plains of Colorado, families made do with cottonwoods.
While some people would rather have decorated a tumbleweed than have no tree at all, general acceptance was slow. Articles that appeared in Godey's Lady's Book and other magazines helped to popularize the custom. And at Christmastime in 1850 the Charleston Courier proudly reported that the ladies of the city decorated a special tree to greet the arrival of soprano Jenny Lind.
By the turn of the century, the demand for Christmas trees was such that the state of Maine alone was harvesting some 1.5 million balsam firs every year. All those trees were collected from the wild, a fact that prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to urge a ban on Christmas trees. He ended his boycott only after discovering that his own sons had snuck a tree into the White House, and the head of the Forest Service, in the boys' defense, persuaded him that thinning the forest could be not only safe but beneficial. In any event the day of the collected tree was ending for in 1901 a New Jersey farmer discovered that the ever-growing demand for Christmas trees made them a highly profitable seasonal crop.
- Reader's Digest
Christmas is a strange season.
We sing songs in front of dead trees
and eat candy out of our socks.
- John Wagner
The perfect Christmas tree?
All Christmas trees are perfect!"
- Christmas Quote by
Charles N. Barnard
ROMANTIC
