This is a question I’ve overheard several times during this past week. Our Church tree arrived last weekend and was set up on Tuesday. Hopefully it will be decorated by some of the younger church members on Saturday, ready for Sunday. Every family has their own tradition as to when the tree goes up and comes down. In many areas, it has become customary to set up one’s Christmas tree on Advent Sunday, 30th November this year. Traditionally, however, Christmas trees were not brought in and decorated until the evening of Christmas Eve (24 December), the end of the Advent season and the start of the twelve days of Christmas.
Although made popular by Prince Albert, the earliest legend of the origin of a fir tree becoming a Christian symbol dates right back to 723 AD. That’s just a hundred years after the burial at Sutton Hoo. When Saint Boniface was evangelising Germany, he came across a pagan ceremony in Geismar. A group of people were dancing under a decorated oak tree as they were about to sacrifice a baby in the name of Thor. Saint Boniface took an axe and called on the Name of Jesus. With one blow he took down the whole tree, to the amazement of the gathered crowd. Revealed behind the fallen tree was a small fir tree.
This story reminded me of the baby Jesus coming to be a sacrifice for sins and thus Saviour of the world as promised by the angel. Also, that even speaking His Name has power in contrast to the gods of the world.
Boniface is alleged to have said,” Let this tree be the symbol of the true God, its leaves are ever green and will not die.” Later Christians have seen symbolism in the pointing of the tree’s needles upwards towards Heaven and that it was a triangle shape, representing a three-in-one God.
We won’t be putting up our tree for a couple of weeks yet but I will be enjoying the sight of other people’s trees and the truth of the symbolism they represent.
Clare Stainsby, in the chorus of her carol ‘Beneath the paper wrappings’ tells us to:
‘Look inside, look above, look beyond and see the love, look inside and you will see.
Look inside, look below, look beyond, and you will know, the One who came to give His life for you and me.’