Published: December 14, 2007 09:50 pm         

Historical Treasure: Christmas tree legends and treasures

Legends of the “first” Christmas tree abound. One legend has it that as far back as the Middle Ages in the northern countries, evergreens became a symbol of immortality. While the “evil spirits” of fall killed plants and trees, evergreens survived through the harshness of winter. Because of their ability to ward off evil spirits, holly and pine branches were brought into peoples’ homes and draped over fireplace mantles, stair rails, doorways and windows.

Another legend is that Martin Luther brought the first Christmas tree into his home and decorated it with candles, which symbolized the starry sky from where Christ came forth. In later Christian tradition, candles represented Christ as the light of the world, but have in more recent history been replaced by the safer electrical lights. One legend recounts that a woodcutter had helped a hungry child. The next day, the child returned to the woodcutter and his wife and snapped a branch from a fig tree and said that the tree would bear fruit at Christmastime. Legend claims the child was the Christ child and that at Christmastime the tree bore silver nuts and golden apples.

Because it was illegal to cut down evergreen trees as part of Christmas tradition in early Germany, holly trees were the first trees brought in and decorated with apples. Apples represented knowledge and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. As evergreens became the earliest German and central European traditional trees brought into homes at Christmastime, they were set upon tables and were decorated with apples, figs, berries, pears and onions to represent a bountiful harvest. To symbolize the night of Christ’s birth, they made paper roses and added cookies shaped like bells, flowers, hearts, stars, bells, nuts, lace, ribbons, dolls and candy. After Christmas was over, children stripped the trees of their delectable treats.

Blown-glass ornaments made in Lauscha, Germany began to replace the edible decorations in the 1800’s. Manufacturing of these ornaments was completed by family industries where men did the glassblowing, women silvered and children painted them. From Germany, glass-blown ornaments migrated to England with Prince Albert; and further migration to North America occurred in the 1840s as people and their traditions immigrated to North America.

By 1890, F.W. Woolworth, the first American retailer to sell blown-glass Christmas ornaments, was selling $25 million worth in his dime stores. After World War II, the German glass-blowing industry declined and Czechoslovakia and Japan produced and exported the ornaments to North America.

Few of the vintage glass-blown ornaments have survived. Many have been tossed out or broken over time. If you have the good fortune of owning the near-extinct Victorian-era ornaments, you have in your possession a historical treasure connected to legends and traditions dependent on your safekeeping.