Dear Friends,
At a recent Advent gathering of parishioners I presented a brief history of some of our Christmas traditions. I enjoy the podcast Hark! It looks into the history of many of our favorite Christmas songs and I would recommend it to those of you who are podcast fans. Using the same format as the podcast, I talked about other Christmas traditions.
I used as my source the recently published Oxford Handbook of Christmas. It quickly emerges in the essays contained in the book, that insofar as Christmas traditions are concerned, the origins of most Christmas traditions are a little obscure. In the chapter “Trees and Decorations,” University of Illinois Springfield history professor David Bertaina dismisses claims that the Christmas tree derives from Martin Luther or earlier Germanic pagan customs. While he acknowledges the Germanic worship of trees before Christianity, he does not see the Christmas tree at all connected with that worship. Rather, he argues instead that the Christmas tree likely developed out of Medieval morality plays. Bertaina writes: In that time, a Paradise Tree was set up for plays to represent the Tree of Knowledge… The actor playing Adam would later parade through the streets of the town with the tree. The tree symbolized humanity’s downfall but also represented the tree of the cross. The trees were decorated with apples, representing the Fall of humankind, while round pastry wagers on the tree of life symbolized the Eucharistic host…
Children would eat the pastries and fruits that hung on the tree of our redemption at the end of the play. Through the 15th and 16th centuries, Paradise Trees were set up in public places like hospitals, churches, and town squares, where they were likewise decorated with fruits and sweets. The first tree coming indoors was in a church in Strasburg, France in 1605. Bertaina notes the red glass balls we hang today on trees stand in for the apples placed on Paradise Trees. The Paradise Trees migrated to the foyers and receiving rooms of wealthy homes in the late 18th and 19th centuries and came to the United States with Eastern European immigration.
While curiosity cannot help seeking out the origins of things, there is some sense in which knowing the origin of the Christmas tree does not matter all that much. What matters is our sharing in the tradition and the deeper meaning that enfleshed traditions can convey. The point of a tradition is not remembering the past but entering the past—or, rather, entering transcendent realities that were manifested in the past but are also manifested in the present through the tradition. Simply put, a tradition is the past made mystically, bloodlessly present. That is what happens each time we Catholics gather for Eucharist. The past and the present become one.
With each of our Christmas traditions we spiritually enter into the incarnation, the wonder and beauty of God taking on human flesh. Everything in the Nativity narrative is beautiful, sublime, and terrifying. All that beauty and sublimity can be approached simply by participating in the traditions of Christmas.
As we approach the Christmas celebration this year, let us remember that the tree and the gifts around the tree are opportunities to enter into what Christ has secured for us by divinity taking on our human reality. Let’s take a few minutes to pause and remind ourselves that when God became one of us, he identified himself with us so completely that all we have to do is accept God’s acceptance to be one with God into the ages. God is giving us the greatest gift – open it!
Peace,
Fr. Damian