Long before the beginning of Christianity, plants and trees that remained green all year had a particular import for people in the winter. Discover the narration of the Christmas tree, from the original winter solstice revels, to Queen Victoria and all the way to the yearly illumination of the Rockefeller Center tree.
Just as people now beautify their homes throughout the festive period with pine, spruce, and fir trees, antique peoples hung evergreen branch over their doors and windows. In many countries it was thought that evergreens would keep left witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and sickness.
The earliest Egyptians worshipped a god called Ra, who had the head of a hawk and wore the sun as a burning disk in his round off. At the solstice, when Ra began to recuperate from the sickness, the Egyptians overflowing their homes with green palm rushes which represent for them the achievement of life over death.
Germany is accredited with preliminary the Christmas tree custom as we now know it in the 16th century when religious Christians brought bejeweled trees into their homes. Some construct Christmas pyramids of wood and bejeweled those with evergreens and candles if wood was scarce.
It is an extensively held belief that Martin Luther, the 16th-century Protestant reformer, first additional lighted candles to a tree. Walking near his home one chill evening, composing a sermon, he was frightened by the brightness of stars flash amidst evergreens. Most 19th-century Americans establish Christmas trees a peculiarity. The first record of one organism on exhibit was in the 1830s by the German settlers of Pennsylvania, although trees had been a custom in many German homes a lot previous.
