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CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS

CHRISTMAS TREE

In his Survey of London, first published in 1598,

John Stow writes of reading a 1444 account

describing not only the decorating of the house

and the church for Christmas but also of a tree:

“. . . at the Leadenhall, in Cornhill, a Standard of

tree, being set up in the midst of the pavement,

fast in the ground, nailed full of holme and ivie,

sor disport of Christmas to the people.” Stow’s

research shows us that trees were part of the

“evergreen decking,” or decorations, used at the

winter solstice as early as the fifteenth century

and most likely even before that.

However, the tree would not become a sym-

bol of Christmas until the Victorian period, aided

by the royal public relations campaign it received

when Victoria and Albert and their family were

pictured around their decorated tree in an engrav-

ing in the Illustrated London News in 1848. In

Germany, Albert’s birthplace, the Christmas tree

had long been popular, and Albert was a great

champion of the custom in his new home. People

were anxious to get themselves a tree to mimic

what they saw the royals doing, just as many

people today like to copy whatever celebrities

are doing.

By 1850, the decorated Christmas tree was

well established in England, and Charles Dickens

wrote an extensive essay on the subject, in which

he noted, “I have been looking on, this evening,

at a merry company of children assembled round

that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree.”

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

In The Book of Days, Robert Chambers, a prom-

inent nineteenth-century Scottish author, pub-

lisher, and evolutionary thinker, writes that

the custom of decorating with real flowers and

greenery is “instinctive in human nature; and we

accordingly find scarcely any nation, civilised or

savage, with which it has not become more or less

familiar.” An evidence of this practice is the use

of evergreens for “decking” not only the home

and the church but also the streets during the

Christmas season.

Greens you can use to create your own

Downton-style Christmas decorations are holly,

ivy, rosemary, laurel or bay, evergreen oak, yew,

cypress, and box. (Interestingly, ivy would never

be used in churches because of its association

with Bacchus,the god of wine,and box,once used

for decorating gingerbread, is poisonous when

ingested.) Homemade paper chains and other

decorations appeared in the Downton era and can

also be easily re-created today (see page 50).

In Edwardian England, according to popular

custom, all of these Christmas decorations had to

be taken down the evening of Twelfth Night, the

day before Epiphany. But in the past, the greens

would not have been removed until the evening

of February 1, the day before Candlemas (the tra-

ditional end of the Christmas-Epiphany season),

as these few lines from a Candlemas Eve carol

by seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick

illustrate: