Massive frost crystals on holly.Įvergreen plants may have symbolized the continuing presence of life at the coldest and darkest time of the year, and their ritual use is therefore not surprising. Describing a Christmas Eve supper in a country manor house he writes: ‘Beside the accustomed lights, two great wax tapers, called Christmas candles, wreathed with greens, were placed on a highly polished buffet among the family plate’. In Old Christmas he mentions country housewives decorating windows of their houses with ‘glossy branches of holly, with their bright red berries’, and family portraits adorned with holly and ivy in a wealthy manor. Frost-covered holly in a wood.Īn American writer Washington Irving (1783 – 1859) describes traditional celebrations of Christmas that he observed while staying in England. Another much loved evergreen symbol of Christmas is holly. The ease with which it can be trained into different shapes made it an attractive choice, and there is a record that boxwood trees decorated with golden nuts was offered for sale at a Christmas market in Berlin in 1800. There are other references to the use of yew in Christmas celebrations, though its relative rarity, slow growth and poisonous foliage meant that it never became a common Christmas tree.īoxwood was also used as a Christmas tree. He writes that on Christmas Eve an exchange of presents between parents and children took place in a parlour where a great yew bow was fastened to the table, and decorated with tapers and coloured paper ornaments that hang from its twigs. English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge described, in a letter dated to 1798, Christmas celebrations in a German home he visited. Yew is often planted in churchyards in Britain and northern France, and there was a tradition of decorating it for Christmas. Cuttings of yew trees are still sold to pharmaceutical companies for the production of an important anti-cancer drug. Like many poisonous plants it has a long history of use in medicine. Its longevity defies imagination – it can live for up to two thousand years. Yew, for example, was probably sacred to peoples of northern Europe. Other evergreens were also used, originally presumably in pre-Christian winter solstice celebrations and later also at Christmas. Conifers, however, are not the only trees that had this role.
And indeed there is a long tradition, going back to the Middle Ages, of decorating confers for Christmas. When we think of a Christmas tree we usually imagine it to be a conifer – a fir, a spruce or a pine.
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