The Special Tree

The tree is up. Thank you, W. I must say, it is about the prettiest Christmas tree I have seen in a long, long time. Especially at my house. Seems these past few years I was devoid of ........ money. I chose to use one of those "beautiful" optic lights trees to put our packages under. Yikes. What was I thinking? I didn't realize it until now what I was missing. The smell. The lights. The ornaments. The memories. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and there is also a reason for a real Christmas tree. The Christmas tree. Encroaching winter, with its growing cold and darkness, provides the seasonal context for Advent, at least in the northern hemisphere. The "dead of winter" as we say, invokes images of fallow fields, barren trees, hard ground, absent birds and lowering skies. From as far back as we have record, people in northern Europe decorated their dwellings at midwinter with evergreens such as holly, ivy, laurel and yew. "The strange survival of summer greens in the snows had always been a sacrament of the hope for new life through the winter," Explains Hill. In fact, Gregory the Great instructed missionaries to tolerate such customs and dedicate them to Christ. So, for example, holly can remind us of Christ with its prickly leaves (crown of thorns) and red berries (blood).

The decorated Christmas tree derives from this ancient tradition. The custom flourished in Germany as far back as the fifteen hundreds (Martin Luther is said to have decorated a tree indoors), although it did not spread widely in Europe until the nineteenth century. Interestingly, Christmas trees may have reached Revolutionary America by way of German settlers even before they appeared in England! But not until the early twentieth century did Christmas trees become more widely popular in the United States.

The Christmas tree, then, with its dark green branches and forest fragrance, its garlands and lights and bright adornments, comes into our homes in the dead of winter as a symbol of life and a sign of hope.

I think i am going to go turn off the lights and watch the sparkle for a while....

geo