I remember when my daughter Allison was about four, she stood on a kitchen chair to put the angel on the top of our tree, looked over her shoulder, and asked me, in that very serious way little ones have, why we bring a tree inside the house in the first place. I gave her some half-answer about it being pretty, and she nodded the way children nod when they know an adult is improvising. That question stayed with me. So this year, while Paul untangled the lights for the umpteenth time, I sat down with a cup of decaf and finally did some reading on where this lovely tradition comes from.
It turns out the story is older, stranger, and more tangled than I ever realized.
A Missionary, an Oak, and a Little Fir Tree
The earliest thread most historians pull on involves a Benedictine monk named Saint Boniface, who left England in the early 700s to preach in what is now Germany. The widely told legend is that he came upon villagers in Geismar gathered around a great oak tree dedicated to the thunder god Donar, sometimes called Thor. Boniface, by all accounts a brave man, cut the oak down. Where the legend gets warm and Christmas-card lovely is the part that says a small fir tree was growing in the roots of the fallen oak, and Boniface pointed to it as a symbol of the new faith he was bringing. Catholic and Britannica accounts both note that the fir-tree detail is more legend than documented fact, but the cut-down oak is real history.
Whatever actually happened that day, the fir tree slowly took on a Christian meaning in central Europe. By the Middle Ages, the people of Germany were already weaving evergreens into their winter celebrations, and that brings us to the next chapter.
From the Paradise Play to the Parlor
In medieval Germany, churches and town squares put on a play during Advent that retold the story of Adam and Eve. The set piece was a fir tree hung with apples, called the Paradise Tree. When the plays eventually fell out of fashion, the tree itself stayed. Families began bringing fir trees into their homes in December, decorated with apples, paper roses, gilded nuts, and little wafers. The look would have been more like a kitchen than a department store window, and I find that rather charming.
The first written record of a decorated tree set up indoors comes from 1510, in the city of Riga, in what is now Latvia, though the city of Tallinn in Estonia argues their decorated tree from 1441 came first. I'll let those two cities sort it out among themselves.
By the 1500s, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther is said to have been the first to add candles to the branches, supposedly inspired by the stars shining through evergreens on a winter walk home. Whether or not that part is true, candles on trees became the German custom, and they stayed the custom for a very long time. (Paul, our retired pharmacist, always reminds the grandchildren that early electric tree lights were a genuine fire-safety improvement, and he's right.)
Glass Ornaments, Tinsel, and Real Silver
Here in the Midwest, when I take ornaments out of their tissue paper each December, I think about how many of them trace back to one little town. Most of the world's early glass ornaments came from Lauscha, a town in the Thuringian forest of Germany, where glassblowers began making Christmas baubles in the mid-1800s. Tinsel came from Germany too, originally cut from real silver into thin strips. It was beautiful, but it tarnished quickly near the candle flames, which I imagine kept many a household busy.
If you have an heirloom mercury-glass ornament from a grandmother or great-aunt, there's a good chance it began its life in Lauscha. I have two from Paul's mother that we still hang every year, on the higher branches now, away from the cat.
The Royal Family Made It Fashionable
The Christmas tree took its time crossing the English Channel. It came over with German-born royals in the 1700s but was quietly tolerated rather than embraced. That all changed in 1848, when the Illustrated London News published a famous engraving of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert (who was German), and their children gathered around a decorated tree at Windsor Castle.
The picture did what pictures so often do. The tree went, almost overnight, from being a quaint German custom to being the height of fashion in Britain and across the Atlantic in fashionable American homes too. Newspapers in New York and Boston ran the same kind of illustrations, and the tradition began to take root in American parlors.
Christmas Trees Come to America
German immigrants, often called the Pennsylvania Germans, had been putting up Christmas trees in their homes since the mid-1700s, but the rest of the country took its time. Through the early 1800s, many Americans, especially New England Puritans, considered the practice a bit pagan and wanted nothing to do with it. By the 1850s and 1860s, that resistance softened.
I grew up in eastern Iowa, and my own grandmother's stories of trees in the 1920s and 1930s sound a lot like what most American families remember. Strings of cranberries and popcorn, paper chains the children made at the kitchen table, a few precious glass ornaments saved from year to year, and real candles for only a few minutes on Christmas Eve, with a bucket of water nearby just in case.
What Trees Look Like in 2026
I love that this tradition is still very much alive, even if it has changed shape. According to the American Christmas Tree Association, in their most recent surveys, about 83 percent of American households who put up a tree now use an artificial one. Real trees still hold a steady share, around a $2 billion market in the United States, and many families I know enjoy doing both, an artificial tree in the family room and a smaller real one in the kitchen for the scent.
One thing worth knowing if you're shopping this year: the American Christmas Tree Association noted that artificial trees were running roughly 10 to 20 percent more expensive in 2025 than the year before, largely because of tariffs on imported goods. Real-tree growers have held wholesale prices steadier. So if you've been thinking about switching back to a fresh-cut tree, this might just be the year.
A Few Practical Thoughts for Folks Like Us
- If lifting matters more than it used to, a pre-lit artificial tree in two pieces (top and bottom) is far easier on the back than wrestling a one-piece model. My sister-in-law in Des Moines swears by hers.
- If you love a real tree, consider a smaller one set on a sturdy table. Less stooping, easier watering, and the children and grandchildren can still help decorate.
- LED lights run cool, use less electricity, and last for years. Worth the swap if you still have boxes of the old hot ones in the attic.
- Shatterproof ornaments on the lower branches save heartache when grandchildren or pets visit. Save the heirlooms for higher up, or for a special small tree of their own.
What I've come to believe, after reading all this, is that the Christmas tree is really a record of small kindnesses passed down. A monk planting a new idea, a town glassblower making something pretty for someone's mantel, a queen sitting for a portrait, a grandmother saving a bauble for her granddaughter. Each generation adds a little something and lets the rest carry forward.
I think Allison would have liked that answer better than the one I gave her in the kitchen all those years ago. Don't you?
