Tag: Christmas

10 Things About Christmas Decorations (Part 2)

On By K. S. WattsIn 10 Things on the 10th, History/TriviaLeave a comment

I’m continuing last month’s topic because I friggin’ love Christmas and there was a lot I didn’t cover. I love Christmas, I love history, I love completely useless trivia. I’m really surprised you didn’t all see this coming. Buckle up, I went into hyperfocus mode and my ADHD won’t let me walk away from the topic yet. Don’t worry, I’m trying. I don’t want to get stuck on this forever, so I started an audiobook (Dial A for Aunties) and it’s kind of hilarious so far. It definitely has a chance to bring me back. Back to the land of the Neurotypical. Or at least the world of the masked neurodivergent.

But I digress.

Here are 10 MORE things you might not know about Christimas decorations.

  1. The reason we associate the colors red and green with Christmas is because of The Paradise Play from the 11th Century. The play is about creation, not the birth of Christ, but due to its religious themes it was quickly associated with Christian celebrations in general, and Christmas falls into that category. In the original play, there was a green tree with red fruit on it used as a central and iconic prop. The red/green motif eventually became associated with the Christian celebration of Christmas and today everyone is decking the halls with red and green regardless of whether they are celebrating on a religious basis or a cultural one.
  2. Tinsel was a way for Germans to flaunt their wealth. That’s right kids, long before the French peasantry got fed up and started forcing nobles to the guillotine and Russians went on a murderous rampage against all things Tsar, the Germans were stirring up ill feelings among the masses. This also led to more than one period of heavy peasantry exodus from Germany to places like the American colonies (just one example). But those who had money had no shame in their game. They literally decorated their trees with strands of silver. Originally, they claimed it was to “reflect the lights” of the candles and make the tree glow a bit more, but mostly it was a statement. It said, “I have so much money, I can literally decorate dying greenery in my home with strands of silver.” Or maybe even, “Oh, you have purebred racehorses and a mansion? That’s cute. I have a castle and with a tree dripping in precious metals inside it.” Anyway, eventually the masses began to copy the look using cheaper materials. Centuries later during World War I and II, when those materials became scarce, they changed again. First to aluminum, which is turns out was crazy flammable (keep in mind this was placed on a tree with lit candles on it), then to lead which is literally poison. These days it’s made of synthetics and is basically safe, though now most very affluent households have abandoned the idea of tinsel because it’s considered tacky or gaudy. I mean, if poor people can afford it, what is EVEN the point? **A lot of people who read this don’t know me in real life, so let me assure you that I’m completely joking.
  3. Mistletoe is actually a parasite. No, really. It’s spread by birds when they, ahem, defecate on tree branches. Then it grows on the tree and dries it out by leeching water and nutrients from it. To save the tree, the mistletoe must be removed before it spreads. In ancient times, once removed from trees, it was used medicinally. Romans as far back as the lifetime of Pliny the Elder are recorded using mistletoe to battle epilepsy, gastric distress, or other ailments. Due to its ability to flourish even in winter, Druids considered it a sign of fertility and used it to treat infertility in humans and animals. While the Norse have a myth that involves a mother’s love and Loki’s jackwagon nature that somehow ends in a kiss, most historians are still in debate about how kissing under the mistletoe came about. There are several different theories, but what we know for sure is that it was a practice among English servants by the 1700s.
  4. Gingerbread houses are another holiday tradition we can thank the Germans for. Though, theirs were first decorated with gold foil and were mostly used a table decorations among the affluent (seems to be a theme with German Christmas decor). Then came the story of Hansel and Gretel, a cautionary tale that seems to be somewhat allegorical now that I better understand its origin. As the tale spread across the region, so did the tradition of building houses (now big and small) of gingerbread.
  5. Poinsettias are named after a diplomat. The Aztecs called the flower Cuetlaxochitl (Flower That Grows in Residue) and used it both to make red dye and as a fever reducer. Eventually, the flower would be given the Spanish named Flor de Nochebuena (Christmas Eve Flower) due to its vibrant red and green color. It is still called by its Spanish name in most of Central America (to which it is native). However in the 1820 Joel Poinsett was the first U.S. Minister to Mexico and during his travels between Mexico and his home in South Carolina, he brought the plant back to his greenhouse, in love with its beauty. He showed it off to many of his friends, began cultivating it and sharing the flower and between 1828 and 1836 it was dubbed the Poinsettia after him.
  6. Snowglobes were an accident. In 1900 Erwin Perzy was trying to improve the brightness of electric bulbs. Over the course of his experiments he ended up pouring (or spilling, depending on which source you read) semolina into a small, round, glass bulb and he saw how it looked like snowfall. After that he created a small winter themed diorama and attached it. The snowglobe was born.
  7. The very first Nativity scene was staged by St. Francis of Assisi. He got approval from the Pope before staging the live scene in Grecio, Italy. Locals were used as actors and the scene was setup in a cave. The scene included the Holy Family, shepherds, and three wise men and as people came to see it, the saint preached a message about the Savior. Though, shepherds and wise men never actually appear together in the Biblical narrative (the wise men do not arrive until Jesus is two years old and we are told of three gifts, but not how many men come to him), the original scene still inspires those sold and displayed all over the world today.
  8. While Santa Claus is the Dutch rendering of Saint Klaus, the shortened form of Saint Nicholas (a real person), the white-bearded, red wool suit wearing image used to decorate many places for Christmas is actually the work of a commercial artist. Coca-Cola created a series of painted Christmas advertisements in 1931 that featured the image we’ve come to embrace. The artist’s inspiration was a poem from 1823 that described a red robe or cloak wearing Santa.
  9. Rudolph was born in 1939. He was featured in the storybook that Montgomery Ward gave out during the holiday season that year to customers visiting his department store. The song featuring the quickly beloved little red-nosed reindeer was written in the 1940s, and a couple of decades later his story was immortalized in claymation.
  10. The ringing of bells to call church patrons to mass and prayer dates back a long way. Many sources credit St. Patrick with the use of a handheld bell to call his parishioners to prayer, but the tradition was solidly in place for all major Christian holidays long before it became associated with Christmas. By the early 1800s, however, carolers in England would ring bells as they traveled through the streets singing to call the attention of the residents. It was then that the ringing bell became primarily associated with Christmas.

Bonus fact. Jingle Bells was originally written for a Thanksgiving celebration concert in the 1800s. It didn’t become associated with Christmas until years later.

Merry Christmas, y’all! Happy Holidays! I’ll be back in January, when I’ve taken all my wonderful Christmas decor back down after the Epiphany on the 6th.

10 Things About Christmas Decorations

On By K. S. WattsIn 10 Things on the 10th, History/TriviaLeave a comment

I love, love, love to decorate for Christmas. I enjoy it and look forward to it every year. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it makes me happy. And yes, I decorate for Christmas before Thanksgiving (the U.S. Thanksgiving, anyway, I do not decorate before Canadian Thanksgiving). If any of that bothers you, just don’t come over to my house during this time of the year. I’m not sorry and I won’t stop.

I realize that for many Christmas, a holiday that many people in Western society treat as a holiday of extravagance, can be difficult. And I don’t mean to be insensitive to that. It’s not about the money spent to me. I love digging through old boxes of ornaments each year and remembering where they came from, who made them (even the not-so-pretty ones), and why we have them. I like making small crafts with my kids to display around the house. One of the traditions I have with my boys is to help each other build a Christmas tree out of Lego to put in their room each year.

We don’t have an intricate Christmas Village display or a lot of moving parts, and we still shy away from anything particularly delicate, expensive, or irreplaceable (my kids are young and they play rough). But what we do have, I love. And I wait eagerly every year for Halloween to end so I can begin prepping for Christmas. Though, I do usually wait until the second week of November only because we have several family birthdays to celebrate first. My ADHD brain can only handle one event prep at a time.

But why do we decorate the way we do for Christmas? Why a large tree? Why all the lights? The answer is mostly Germany, but I’ll get into that in a minute. Here are 10 Things You Might Not Know About Christmas Decorations.

  1. Being that the birth of Jesus (yes, I am a Christian) has been argued to be in March, April, September, and several other months based on different points of reference, the old rumor that Christmas is celebrated in December to make it easier for Roman pagan converts to accept it is true. Why Romans? Because Christmas was not actually celebrated until about 300 years after the death of Jesus. It was during the final years of the reign of Emperor Constantine, who famously converted to Christianity himself. Romans had long celebrated the Winter Solstice as a time when Saturn (Roman God of Agriculture) would begin to return to full strength and bring the warmth and growth of spring with him. Evergreen boughs and branches were often used for Saturnalia decorations and transitioned somewhat easily into Christmas decor.
  2. Boughs and branches are great, but how did we get around to having a whole tree indoors? Remember when I said the answer was mostly Germany? This is where that begins. Sometime in the 1500-1600s, Germans began melding the formerly Pagan use of evergreens with the blossoming (no pun intended) Christian tradition of the “Tree of Light”. The Tree of Light is not an actual tree. It was more of a wooden pyramid that stood over an empty manger and held a candle on top. They began to decorate it with branches, pine cones, nuts, etc. And while there are still places where a wooden “Tree of Light” is more common than an actual tree, eventually the Germans moved on to just bringing an entire tree into the house. Though it should be noted that since the beginning of the tradition, it was more common to see trees about four feet in height, whereas once the tradition made its way to America it immediately became a floor-to-ceiling, bigger is better kind of thing.
  3. Martin Luther is credited with putting lights on the tree. The legend has it that while walking home one winter night the stars shining through the evergreen branches struck him as so beautiful and ethereal, he wanted to take the vision home to his family. He placed candles on their “artificial tree” (wooden pyramid decorated with evergreen boughs and branches) and voila the tradition of lighting the tree was born. I have no idea if this is in any way true, but several sources mention it so I’m rolling with it.
  4. German immigrants brought the tradition of a Christmas Tree with them to the United States. Actually, to be more accurate, they began bringing the tradition to the “New World” that was still divvied up among Western Europe despite having a thriving and sophisticated network of Native civilizations. But I digress. The best I can find (read: It’s okay to correct me if I am wrong here), most Indigenous tribes basically looked at the Christmas tree as one more weird thing White people did. And let’s be real, it really would have been just a drop in the bucket at that point. English settlers took great offense in the early days though. They decried the Christmas tree as being a “mockery” of the “sacred event”. They also thought Christmas Carols, any other kind of decoration, or “frivolity” was offensive. Basically, the English were sticks in the mud. It took a while, but by the mid 1700s, the Christmas tree began to take a foothold in the British colonies, though still mostly among German families.
  5. Enter Queen Victoria. The colonies are now their own country, it’s the mid 1800s and Queen Victoria (who was from a German line of English monarchs herself) and her German born husband are painted celebrating with their young children around a Christmas tree in the palace. Whatever Victoria did at this point in time immediately became fashionable, not only in England but throughout Western Europe. It also became so among the wealthy elite along the East Coast of the United States who desperately wanted to seem as trendy as their English counterparts. Suddenly, the Christmas tree and its growing list of appropriate decorations was not only something for poor or recent immigrant families, but also for those looking to keep up with the Saxe-Coburg-Gothes. What a mouthful. Methinks the change to “Windsor” wasn’t just a PR move during the First World War, but an opportunity to simply the House name. But again, I digress.
  6. By the end of the 1800s, Woolworth’s Department Store was selling about $25 million worth of German style Christmas tree “baubles” such as blown glass balls in a variety of colors. Other stores followed suit to try to get a piece of the burgeoning market. Mass production and a flood of supply suddenly made commercial Christmas decorations affordable to those outside the upper class. Christmas tree decorations as a business venture spread like wildfire (again, no pun intended). Today, there are Christmas Tree Farms in every U.S. State including Hawaii. I live in Mississippi and there are several within a half hour drive from my house.
  7. In the 1880s, the VP from the Edison Electric Light Company (started by Thomas Edison and now known simply as General Electric or GE) had the grand idea to design a special string of bulbs encased in glass to string around his Christmas Tree. He used Red, White, and Blue glass and used the lights to replace the “fire prone” candles that people still used to decorate the tree. He placed the tree in front of his parlor window. The window faced the street in his trendy, expensive New York neighborhood and passersby talked so much about it seemed to glow through the street that newspapers across the nation picked up the story and photographs circulated with the write ups. Soon anybody who could afford them (and had access to electricity) wanted electric lights on their tree. In 1895 then President Grover Cleveland would put up the first lit Christmas tree in the White House (the first tree without electric lights was brought in by Franklin Pierce before the Civil War).
  8. In 1923 then President Calvin Coolidge lit the first National Christmas Tree in Washington, D.C. During the Great Depression, construction workers building what would eventually be Rockefeller Center put up a small, plain Christmas tree to boost morale at the work site. In 1933, just two years after the workers put up the first tree, the publicist for Rockefeller decided it should be an annual event, complete with electric lights and fancy decorations. The lighting of the Rockefeller tree began to broadcast on NBC in the 1950s and remains a holiday tradition in the US today. This year’s Rockefeller tree will be brought in from Maryland, is the usual Norway Spruce, and is 79 feet tall. It will be lit (and broadcast) on December 1st. The National Christmas Tree Lighting in D.C. will not have a live audience and music show this year due to COVID concerns. However, the tree will still go up. This year’s tree hails from Six Rivers National Park in California.
  9. With all these beautiful spruces, firs, etc going up to great fanfare you might be wondering how and why modern artificial trees became prevalent. The answer is Boomers. No, really. After WWII suburbs were on the rise, Christmas decorations were somewhat affordable, and parents who grew up in the Great Depression were eager to share seemingly lavish Christmas traditions with their young children. However, now they more and more people were living in towns or even apartments without quick and easy (or cheap) access to trees to cut down for such a thing, the market for artificial, easily transported, trees opened up. They became so common and popular that for a time artificial trees were considered far more trendy than real ones. Especially when they became available in a variety of colors. My grandmother, who indeed grew up in the Depression and had Boomer children, loved her artificial tree. The rest of us not so much, but we loved her and so we helped her get it out of the attic and put it up each year without fail, while all having a real tree in our own homes. After her passing, the memory of that tree is something that makes us all smile. I now have an artificial tree so I can put it up so early. Thankfully, mine is at least meant to look natural, something my grandmother’s color changing tree did not even attempt.
  10. It was also during the childhood of Boomers that tinsel flooded the market. But about the time Gen Xers were joining their Boomer parents in decorating the family tree, tinsel was temporarily outlawed. Back then it was made of lead. Not that it was the first toxic decoration though. Ladies’ magazines had been suggesting ways to decorate for Christmas that included toxic substances since the late 1800s. Luckily, they all fell out of favor pretty quickly (turns out asthma attacks don’t exactly scream Christmas Spirit). Tinsel eventually re-entered the market as a plastic made item, for better or for worse.

That was a quick 10 things, and there is so much I didn’t cover! I didn’t even make it to poinsettias! Hmm. Maybe I should continue this discussion next month.

What holidays do your characters celebrate? Do they decorate? Where do those traditions come from and what do they represent? Are they toxic? Beautiful? Odd? We have some strange ways of celebrating different holidays, so having something that your characters celebrate makes them feel more relatable, more real.

In the real world, what holiday (not just Christmas) tradition represents this time of year to you and your family? My knowledge of anything related to Diwali is practically non-existent, Kwanzaa is not much better. I am very familiar with Hanukkah because I celebrated it with my Jewish friends growing up (we went to their house for one of the nights of Hanukkah and they came to our house on Christmas Eve), but I’d love to know how different people celebrate!