Who Started the Christmas Tree Tradition?

Long before there was a Christmas tree, people across Europe brought evergreen branches indoors in midwinter. In a world where most trees were bare and most days were dark, holly, ivy, pine and fir branches were practical proof that life continued. Romans hung greenery during Saturnalia. Northern European households decorated doorways with boughs during the solstice. Early medieval Christians kept the custom and gradually attached new meaning to it: evergreens stayed green, which felt like a quiet symbol of eternal life.

None of this was yet a Christmas tree. It was greenery on walls and mantels, not a decorated tree standing in the middle of a room.

The first reliable records of decorated indoor Christmas trees come from the upper Rhine region of Germany in the early 16th century. Guild halls and merchant houses in cities like Strasbourg and Bremen put up fir trees decorated with apples, nuts, paper roses, gingerbread and small wafers. The apples represented the Garden of Eden, the wafers represented the Eucharist, and the whole tree often appeared in connection with mystery plays performed on December 24, the feast day of Adam and Eve in the old church calendar.

Within a hundred years, the tradition had moved from guilds into family homes. By the 1700s, decorated Christmas trees were common in middle-class German households, lit for the first time with small wax candles clipped to the branches. The candles were the dangerous, beautiful detail that made the tree feel like a moment of pure light in the darkest week of the year.

For most of the 1700s and early 1800s, the Christmas tree stayed a mostly German custom. It spread to royal households through German-born queens: Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, set up a decorated yew tree at Windsor in 1800 for a children's party.

The real turning point came in December 1848, when the Illustrated London News published an engraving of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their children gathered around a decorated Christmas tree at Windsor Castle. The image was reprinted across Britain and, with the family removed and the dresses changed, in Godey's Lady's Book in the United States in 1850. Within a generation, the Christmas tree had moved from a curious foreign import to a respectable middle-class tradition on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, German Lutheran immigrants had been putting up Christmas trees in Pennsylvania since the early 1800s. For decades the custom was viewed by many English- speaking Protestants as a foreign or pagan oddity. The Victorian magazine illustrations of the 1850s changed that. By the 1870s and 1880s, the Christmas tree had become a standard American living-room scene, and Woolworth's began importing German glass ornaments by the millions.

The arrival of electric Christmas lights in the 1880s, first demonstrated at the home of Edward Johnson, a colleague of Thomas Edison, finally replaced the candles. By the 1930s, electrically lit decorated trees were standard in most American homes that celebrated Christmas.

• In France, the Christmas tree spread from Alsace, a region with strong German cultural ties, to Paris during the 19th century.
• In Scandinavia, decorated trees were widely adopted in the middle 1800s, and the Norwegian tradition of gifting a tree to Trafalgar Square in London every year since 1947 made the Norwegian spruce a global Christmas symbol.
• In Russia, decorated New Year trees survived the Soviet period as a secular winter tradition and still play that role today.
• In Japan, China and many South-East Asian cities, the Christmas tree is now common in shopping streets and hotels as a winter design element rather than a religious symbol.

The Christmas tree survived 500 years because it does something practical and emotional at the same time: it brings light and greenery indoors during the darkest week of the year, and it gives a family a shared object to gather around. Whether yours is a real fir, a small potted spruce or an artificial tree your grandparents bought in 1982, it sits in the same tradition that started in a guild hall in the Rhine. For more on the customs that surround it, read our Christmas traditions around the world guide or browse the country-by-country Christmas in hub.