A History of the Christmas Tree with Judith Flanders

In the Weeds

There are two things about Christmas that you can count on, says historian and author Judith Flanders: most of the origin stories you’ve heard are false and people have always thought ‘Christmas was better in the old days.’ Though it may not be true that Santa’s red suit came from Coca Cola, nor that Prince Albert brought the Christmas tree to Britain, the history of Christmas that Flanders relates in her 2017 book, Christmas: A Biography, is just as compelling.

In this episode, I talk to her about the history of the Christmas tree, a subject I first looked into a couple of years ago when dwelling on a simple question: what does it mean to bring a tree into our homes in the dead of winter?

Flanders, who has written numerous books on the Victorian period - including The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime and The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London - as well as her own crime fiction, is more reluctant to speculate on the larger meanings of certain historical connections - for instance, that the tree of knowledge was probably the earliest inspiration for the Christmas tree - than I might be, but she helps us set the record straight, telling us, for instance, about the impact of Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which was all the rage at the end of the eighteenth century and introduced many to the German tradition of the Christmas tree.

Revisiting this history of Christmas and of the Christmas tree in particular puts current customs and our own personal histories - for those of us who celebrate Christmas - into a broader perspective and reminds us that this celebration was originally - and still is - a chance to take a break and have a good time in what (for those of us in the Northern hemisphere) is the darkest time of the year.

Thanks to Dave Larzelere for his rendition of O Tannenbaum, to Sonia Fujimori for her recording of her family expedition to cut down their Christmas tree and to my Mom and Dad for all the great memories of Christmas trees past.