The Tradition of the Christmas Tree

Have you ever taken a step back and contemplated the strangeness of the tradition of the Christmas tree?  Many of us have heard the legend of Martin Luther being the first to bring a tree into his home and decorate it with candles, and we’ve heard about the symbolism of the evergreen tree in the midst of the death of winter.

The modern tradition, though, is particularly interesting.  I suppose I’m most fascinated by the kind of ornaments we put on trees.  If you go to any Hallmark store you can see ornaments of the nativity, Santa Claus, snowmen and angels alongside Star Trek characters and NBA superstars.

Then there are the ornaments we buy when we’re traveling.  We make a trip in the middle of the summer and buy an ornament of Santa Claus wrapped in the tentacles of an octopus that reads “Myrtle Beach” along the bottom (that’s one of our stranger ones).  We put up ornaments of our favorite sports teams or where we went to college or ornaments that represent our hobbies.  Some of them are made by children, getting more and more worn with each year of use.

It becomes this kind of temporary scrapbook of our lives, those moments we needed to commemorate somehow and wanted to remember, so we bought this small item to hang on a tree inside our home during December as we celebrate Christmas.

Now I can’t take credit for the theological turn I’m about to make here but have to give my mother credit for saying this.  When we were decorating their tree over the Thanksgiving holiday (on the first Sunday of Advent mind you…) last year, I mentioned how odd the Christmas tree is, and she agreed that many of the things we put on them are quite strange and have nothing to do with a religious or a secular celebration of the holiday.  But then she said, “But we still put the star on top.”

I was really struck by this statement, that our Christmas tree could actually be a symbol of our trust in God’s Providence.  We put up ornaments from all the places that have meaning to us, ornaments given to us  or made by those we love and then we put the star (or angel) on top as if to say, “All of life occurs within the light of God, the light that shone on Christmas night to declare to the world that God has come among us to sanctify all of life.”

So really the Christmas tree is an amazing image of faith, for by it we are declaring once again God’s beginning words, that the creation, that our lives, that our memories are “very good.”  What a gift to celebrate at this time of year when we remember God’s incarnational love that came in Bethlehem to remind us that all life is God’s and that God works in all times and places.