James Cooper
speaker
360 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Dec 2024
James Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The earliest Christmas trees had red apples put on them. And we have red round baubles today because when glassblowers first made decorations, they made them to look like apples because that's what people were used to putting on their trees.
Yeah, the short answer is no one really knows. The long answer is it's complicated. I'll try and do my best to explain. You might have heard some people say it's because we took it from the Romans. That kind of doesn't really fit if you look really at the evidence. The earliest records of people trying to find out when to celebrate the birth of Christ was actually to do with his death.
Because in the early church, the early Christians, there was kind of a belief that you are important people, especially prophets. And so especially the son of God was born and died on the same day. And they were trying to work out when Jesus died. And they came up with the date.
of the 25th of March as a good consensus date because there were various dates in and around that time, but they chose the 25th of March. And it changed from the belief that you were born and died on the same day to you were conceived and died on the same day. So if you then put nine months onto the conception of Jesus being on the 25th of March, you get his birth on the 25th of December.
Now that happened to coincide with several other midwinter festivals, so it worked quite well, but the earliest evidence seems to be that it was actually the early church working out the death of Jesus rather than anything to do with his birth, which is kind of surreal, but there we go.
Okay, yeah. The earliest Christmas trees seems to have actually come from trees that were paraded around towns in the early Middle Ages as part of what were known as paradise trees or miracle trees. There were plays put on outside churches traditionally on Christmas Eve telling the story from creation up to the time of Jesus, kind of like an old version of Handel's Messiah.
basically, and to drum up support and interest in the plays. And they would carry around branches of apple trees or just dead, you know, not the fir trees as we think of them today, but branches of trees or frames of trees. And they were decorated with apples traditionally because they represented the Garden of Eden. And so the earliest trees had red apples put on them.
And then when trees became popular as an indoor custom, firstly in northern Germany, and people started decorating fir trees, they still traditionally put things like apples on them. And we have red round baubles today because when glassblowers first made decorations, they made them to look like apples because that's what people were used to putting on their trees.
Yeah, they were the ones that sort of did the first big introduction, certainly into the States. They came over from Germany, from Bavarian glassblowers. And you also had things like gingerbread that were put on trees, shapes cut out of bits of paper, stars and angels and things like that. But yeah, the first commercial ornaments came in the way of glass blown ornaments.
And the big ones were from the Walrus.
Yeah, indeed. But Christmas trees didn't really become a thing in the US until the 1850s onwards. Before that, you would have some of the German and Dutch immigrants that would have had trees, but they were looked on as a very unusual custom. They only came into the UK then. predominantly in the 1840s.
The earliest tree in the UK was from one of the royal family, Queen Charlotte, who was the German wife of King George III. She put up a yew tree in one of the lodges at Windsor Castle in 1800. It's a children's party. But Queen Victoria and her German husband, Prince Albert, really popularised the Christmas tree in the UK. And in 1848,
there was a drawing published of the royal tree at Windsor in one of the big London newspapers and that sort of became the ignition of the popularity of trees in the UK and then in December 1850 that same drawing but with some early Photoshop going on because they took out Prince Albert's moustache and swapped the, took off Queen Victoria's tiara to make it look more homely and American
And that was published in 1850 in Philadelphia. And that's when Christmas trees started to become popular in America because they were seen as sort of the fashionable British thing to do.
Yeah, well, the first ones were much smaller than we have today. They might have just been a branch or part of a tree. And they were often put on tables, on tabletops. And you'd traditionally, some of the earliest ones from Germany, they would have sort of your traditional sort of Christmas village was put under a little Christmas scene there.
And then people started, when gift giving became more popular in the late Victorian period, it became a place that you could put your presents. And then bigger trees came along and they became put on the floor, and you got it from that.
No, most of them are pre-tree. Basically, since people have been celebrating the winter solstice, which is the mark of in December the 21st, December the 22nd, the shortest day of the year, having greenery in your house, sort of reminded you that winter wouldn't last forever and that spring would come.
And there's some thought that some greenery plants, like some of the spruces and some of the firs, actually have anti-insect and anti-fungal properties to them. So if you're living in a cold, drafty house with lots of fleas and things, actually having those strewn around on the floor would also make it smell nice, but they could help keep some of the bugs at bay, which would be quite nice.
And what about holly? holly in the Middle Ages became to represent the crown of thorns that Jesus had when he died and in Scandinavia the translation can be the Christ thorn with the red berries being the blood of Christ ivy was given the symbol at the similarity of that it has to cling to something to live so Christians needs to cling to God And then wreaths came farther back from that.
Back in the Roman times, they had wreaths given at the Olympic Games and sporting events. And so they were a sign of victory. So an everlasting life because they go round and round and round. So that, again, was given a new meaning of the Christmas wreath became a symbol of everlasting life and sort of the turning of the year and things like that.
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