The history of the Christmas tree, from Germany to your phone

Evergreens in the darkest time of year

Long before Christmas, people in many parts of Europe brought green branches inside in winter. When everything else looked dead, an evergreen was a sign that life and light would come back. Romans decorated with greenery during the winter festival of Saturnalia, and people in the north hung branches over doors and windows.

The paradise tree

In the Middle Ages, December 24 was the feast day of Adam and Eve in the church calendar, and towns performed “paradise plays” about them. The Garden of Eden was shown with a single fir tree hung with apples, the “paradise tree”. Families began to put up their own, and over time wafers, sweets and paper decorations joined the apples.

The first decorated trees in town

Some of the earliest records of decorated trees come from merchants’ guilds around the Baltic and in German-speaking towns. Tallinn in Estonia and Riga in Latvia both claim the first public tree, from the 1400s and early 1500s. A description from Strasbourg in 1605 mentions fir trees set up in homes and decorated with paper roses, apples, wafers and sugar.

A popular legend says the reformer Martin Luther added candles after seeing stars shine through the trees on a winter night. It’s a lovely story, but there is no record that it happened.

Glass, tinsel and candles

• Tinsel was first made from thin strips of real silver, which looked wonderful in candlelight but darkened over time.
• Glass ornaments came from the glassblowers of Lauscha in Germany, who began making them in the mid-1800s.
• Candles were clipped to the branches and lit for short moments, with a bucket of water nearby. They were beautiful and very dangerous.

A royal tree goes viral

German-born Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, set up trees in England around 1800, but it was the next generation that made them fashionable. In 1848 the Illustrated London News printed an engraving of Queen Victoria, her German husband Prince Albert and their children around a decorated tree at Windsor Castle. Everyone wanted one.

Two years later an American magazine reprinted the picture, and the tree, already known among German families in places like Pennsylvania, spread across the United States.

Electric lights

In 1882 Edward H. Johnson, who worked with Thomas Edison, lit his tree in New York with 80 hand-wired red, white and blue electric bulbs. Electric lights were expensive at first, but they slowly replaced candles and made trees much safer.

In 1931 workers building Rockefeller Center in New York put up a small tree on the site. The official tree and its lighting followed in 1933, and it has been a city tradition ever since.

Trees as gifts

Some of the most famous trees are presents. Every year since 1947, the city of Oslo has sent a Norwegian spruce to London as a thank-you for Britain’s support during the Second World War. It stands in Trafalgar Square, decorated the Norwegian way, with simple white lights hung in vertical strings.

In the United States, President Benjamin Harrison is usually credited with the first indoor White House Christmas tree, in 1889, and in 1923 Calvin Coolidge lit the first National Christmas Tree outside it. Since 1982, St Peter’s Square in Rome has had a tall tree every Christmas too, donated by a different region each year.

Artificial trees

Artificial trees are older than you might think. Germans made trees from dyed goose feathers in the 1800s. In the 20th century came bristle trees made by a brush company, shiny aluminium trees in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the realistic plastic trees most homes use today.

A New Year tree

In some countries the tree moved to another holiday. In the Soviet Union, Christmas trees were discouraged in the late 1920s, then brought back at the end of 1935 as a New Year tree, the “yolka”, with Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) bringing gifts on New Year’s Eve. In Russia and many neighbouring countries it is still a New Year tree today.

Türkiye has a New Year tree as well: decorated trees go up for Yılbaşı, the night of December 31, and families exchange gifts then. Here is how New Year’s Eve is celebrated in Türkiye.

And now, a tree on your phone

The newest chapter is a tree you never have to water. In recent years, online trees that friends fill with messages have become a December ritual on social media: you share a link, people hang decorated gifts with notes on your tree, and everything opens on Christmas Day. It is the paradise tree’s apples and wafers, in a new form: small gifts from the people around you.