Swiss exhibition retraces history of Christmas tree
BASEL, Switzerland – It’s a White House tradition. It decorates Vatican offices and brightens homes from Australia to Greenland.
But it took centuries for the Christmas tree to take popular root around the world.
An exhibition at Basel’s Museum of Cultures tells the story of the symbol born on the Upper Rhine, not far from this Swiss city.
The Christmas tree has spurred a multibillion-dollar business with more than 100 million trees cut annually, mostly in Europe and North America. Sales of convenient, long-lasting artificial trees are growing, too, despite occasional warnings that disposing of them causes environmental problems.
The Christmas tree decoration business may be thriving even more. The “Christmas House” in Basel, run by Johann Wanner, claims to be No. 1 of its kind worldwide.
Museum director Dominik Wunderlin describes Wanner as the leading international trendsetter in the field, decorating the White House trees and counting the pope and European royalty among his regular customers – not to mention Michael Jackson.
A tree decorated by Wanner with countless blown-glass trinkets, all in red, ranks among the eye-catchers at the museum show.
The oldest documented reference to a Christmas tree is in a German-language chronicle published in Strasbourg in 1605.
At first, the Christmas tree was mainly a custom among German Lutherans. In 1645, a Roman Catholic theologian in Strasbourg, Johann Conrad Dannhauer, denounced the ritual as a “trifle” distracting from faith.
Slowly the tree, most often a fir, began adorning the castles of European nobility. In a 1708 letter cited by Wunderlin, the German-born Duchess of Orleans recalled the tree as part of the cherished memories of her youth. But her request to present it at Versailles was rejected by her brother-in-law, King Louis XIV.
Prince Albert, the German-born husband of Queen Victoria, got a better response when he introduced the tree in the British court shortly after his marriage.
A late 18th-century Swiss copperplate in the Basel show is the first pictorial evidence that the custom was also gradually taken over by the wealthy middle class. By then, the candles traditionally lighting the Christmas trees were exclusively made of expensive wax. The invention of stearin and paraffin in 1830 made a purchase more affordable.
Only in the last century did the Christmas tree gain popularity worldwide. Acceptance came slowly in predominantly Catholic countries, chiefly because of its Protestant origin. Eventually, however, even the church’s hierarchy signaled formal approval.
Polish-born Pope John Paul II was the first pontiff to have a huge tree put up in St. Peter’s square less than 30 years ago. The unveiling of the tree has since become a major event on the Vatican’s holiday calendar.
Even in the former Iron Curtain, Communist officials failed to extinguish the custom. The tree survived like other Christmas traditions despite atheist campaigns to eliminate all references to Christ.
In East Germany, for example, Santa Claus was renamed “Father Frost,” angels became “winged year-end figures” and the Christmas tree was simply described as “ornamented tree.”