Christmas Trees and Christmas Stockings

Tis the Christmas season!! For your enjoyment, now through Christmas my blog will be stories related to Christmas!!




History of The Christmas Tree

The tradition of having an evergreen tree become a symbol of Christmas goes back past recorded written history.

The Druids in ancient England & Gual and the Romans in Europe both used evergreen branches to decorate their homes and public buildings to celebrate the Winter Solstice.

Over the years, these traditions were adopted by Christians, who incorporated them as part of their Christmas holiday celebration.

Trees used specifically to celebrate Christmas are mentioned in the early 1600's in Germany and surrounding countries.

The families would set up these trees in a prominent location of their home and decorate them with colored paper, small toys, food, and sometimes candles.

As these people moved or immigrated to other countries, they brought this tradition with them.

Through the years many different things were used to decorate Christmas trees. As the world moved into the 1900's, many trees were decorated with strings of popcorn, homemade cards and pictures, cotton to look like snow, candy in all shapes and sizes, and occasionally, fancy store made glass balls and hand blown glass figurines.

Candles were sometimes used, but often caused devastating fires, and many different types of candle holders were devised to try to prevent tree fires.

Electric tree lights were first used just 3 years after Thomas Edison has his first mass public demonstration of electric lights back in 1879.

The early Christmas tree lights were handmade and quite expensive.

Today, Christmas tree ornaments can be found in nearly every size, color, and shape imaginable, and they are used to decorate the millions of Christmas trees used throughout the world.



Christmas Stockings

Many families will hang large brightly colored Christmas stockings over the fireplace or on the walls of their homes during Christmastime in the hopes that Santa Claus will fill them with toys, treats, and goodies.

In fact, families have been hanging stockings for as long as there have been stockings!

It’s hard for kids to understand today, but for many hundreds of years, most people only had one or two suits of clothing to wear.

When their clothes were dirty, they would be washed and then hung up (hopefully near a fire) to dry.

Non-essential clothing, such as socks and gloves were especially valuable and a child was unlikely to have more than one pair and was expected to take good care of that one!

If a parent wanted to “hide” a treat (such as a small piece of candy) where they were sure it would be found, they would put it in a child’s stocking and it would be found the next morning.

When Clement Clarke Moore published his famous poem “Twas the night before Christmas” in 1822, the first paragraph talked about hanging stockings:

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

Eventually, it became a general tradition that Christmas gifts were left in the stockings hung up on Christmas Eve.

Any parent who has a child can easily understand that the kids figured out that if they hung bigger stockings, they might get bigger or more treats, so the size of the stockings grew with each passing Christmas.

Even when the families celebrating Christmas grew wealthy enough that they exchanged larger boxed presents, the tradition of hanging up stockings continued (as did the warning that if you were not well behaved, you might not get any presents – just a lump of coal in your stocking).

So be sure to hang up your stocking and hope that Santa Claus brings you a present instead of a lump of coal.


Christmas is almost here!!!

Join me again tomorrow as we celebrate more of Christmas.