The tree at the heart of Christmas

I can’t remember when it was, but one year, walking on a bitterly cold night through College Green in Dublin, I turned a corner to see the Christmas tree at the Bank of Ireland building. It hadn’t been decorated yet, but the alcove was illuminated, and the green tree, standing out against the whiteness of stone, looking bravely alive at the dead of winter, was one of the most beautiful things I had seen.

This year, an evergreen has returned to O’Connell Street, after a few years’ interlude with a blinging glassy confection that will now spend the festivities in Smithfield.

The distance between these two trees seems to sum up that question: what should a Christmas tree look like? Travel around the world, and you’ll see this symbol of the Christmas spirit reflected in everything from Smithfield’s glass balls, to a vertigo-inducing 45m-high construction in Dortmund, Germany, to the light-strung evergreens that most of us grew up with.

We all carry our own idea of what Christmas is, created from layers of belief, myth and memory. It’s a construction of Christmas that is just like Christmas itself: those immemorial and, to us, immutable customs are vastly different in other countries and other cultures. Moving away from tradition and belief, and against the tide of commercialism and secularism, the struggle for the soul of Christmas is reflected, more than anywhere else, in the changing style, if not shape, of Christmas trees.

The bringing in of the green has been a winter solstice custom across the centuries, faiths and traditions. The ancient Egyptians brought green palm leaves into their homes to welcome the return of Ra, the sun god; early Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a feast for the god of agriculture, with evergreen boughs; and druids used evergreens, as symbols of everlasting life, brought indoors at this time of year.

Trees come into Christianity through a German story of the Christ child gifting a family with a tree as a thank you for shelter one midwinter night. The decorated Christmas tree, as we know it, is also a German institution, dating to the 16th century, and Martin Luther is credited with illuminating it with candles to celebrate God’s glory, reflected in the stars. But it took a while to catch on abroad. Oliver Cromwell, unsurprisingly, preached against the tree as a “heathen tradition”, while in 1659, the governor of Massachusetts made having decorated trees a criminal offence as they sullied the spirituality of the season.

Queen Victoria, with her German husband prince Albert, popularised the tree in 19th-century Britain and, at that time, all the glass tree-baubles in the world were made in just one place – Lauscha in Germany. Nevertheless, it took a while to catch on; the first official public Christmas tree didn’t appear in the US until 1913, when president Woodrow Wilson instituted the tradition at the Capitol building.

Decorative touch

Decorations on trees in public places are a bit tricky – after all, too pretty and delicious and they’re at risk of being “borrowed” as souvenirs. Most municipal trees are simply hung with ropes of lights, although the one at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, hung with 30,000 lights, is also topped with a Swarovski crystal star. The tree in Moscow’s Red Square is created from cones of evergreen, wrapped round a scaffold, in which the decorations are an integral part. You’ll see something similar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Seoul, South Korea.

At home, it’s the smell of a real tree that I love most; that and the beautiful sense of nature indoors, which seems to be the perfect antidote to the gaudy brightness, and occasional avarice of Christmas. Something similar seemed to be going on when Northern Irish designer Shane Connolly decorated Westminster Abbey with growing trees for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton earlier this year. Nature outclasses bling every time.

Not everyone agrees, however, and if it’s extreme vulgarity you’re after, shopping malls are the places to go. After all, they make safer places to site trees that better reflect their own reason for being at this time of year: the commercial side of Christmas. Two years ago, Emirates Palace, an Abu Dhabi hotel, unveiled what it called the world’s most expensive Christmas tree, a 13m fake evergreen, decorated with silver and gold bows and baubles, and hung with necklaces, earrings and rings containing 181 diamonds, pearls, emeralds, sapphires and other gemstones. The value of the tree was estimated at $11 million (€8.3m). A sparkling Swarovski-sponsored specimen sits at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll find a tree with another layer of meaning in London’s Trafalgar Square. Since 1947, this has been an annual gift from the City of Oslo, Norway, to the people of London, in thanks for British support of the Norwegian resistance during the second World War (a tree is also gifted by Norway to Washington DC). The tree is typically a 50- to 60-year-old spruce, and is usually more than 20m tall. Since 2009, the Poetry Society has commissioned a new poem each year, displayed on banners at the base of the tree.

So, if the battle for the soul of Christmas can be lost and won with the tree, is it a festival of renewed life? The return of light after months of dark? A purely Christian celebration? A family time, or an excuse to splurge and spend? In Ireland, we’re still struggling with those questions. That glass tree, now sited in Smithfield, first appeared on O’Connell Street in 2008, symbolising the stuttering failure of the boom. Touted as an environmentally friendly solution, it nevertheless begged the question of how a €300,000, 18m, five-tonne glass tree, illuminated by 100,000 bulbs could be more eco-friendly than a soft wood evergreen, grown in a sustainable plantation.

Those in love with the artificial side of the season may also get a kick out of a blue and white porcelain-vase style Christmas tree in Nanjing, China; or the 21m artificial tree erected annually in Martin Place, Sydney. It takes 12 people eight days to set it up, is decorated with 58,000 lights, and topped with a star measuring a metre and a half. But if size really matters to you, it has to be Dortmund, Germany, which is, after all, the spiritual home of the Christmas tree. Its 45m tree is made up of 1,700 smaller trees put together. A 4m angel sways on top.

Like Christmas trees themselves, Christmas adverts can be on a knife-edge between inspiring the Christmas spirit, and being a total turn off. One of the worst offenders this season is the ad for Jack Daniels, in which those happy and wholesome, youthful yet grown-up people who populate alcohol advertising gather round a tree made from Whiskey barrels, lit up with fairy lights, and with a glowing star on top. “It’s not what’s under the tree that matters, it’s who’s around it,” pronounces the saccharine voiceover. Enough to drive you to drink? Or maybe it’s all too true. Give me something real, every time.