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| Luther amidst his family at Wittenberg, on Christmas Eve. |
The decorated Christmas tree has been traced by several historians back to about the year 1500, in the province of Alsace along the upper Rhine River. Alsace was then a part of Germany. The earliest written record is dated 1521. Another reference is from Strasburg in 1605: "At Christmas, fir trees are set up in the rooms and hung with roses cut from paper of many colors, apples, wafers, spangle-gold, sugar, etc."
An early German legend tells how Winfrid (St. Boniface), an eighth century English missionary, got some tribes to set up fir trees at Christmas as a replacement for their traditional sacred oak.
Christmas trees have been decorated in some fashion since the custom began-starting apparently, as we have seen, with apples and wafers, paper or cloth roses, and sugar candy. Later, cookies in the shapes of flowers, bells, stars, angels, hearts, men and animals, replaced the wafers. Also added were candles, ribbons, a star for the tip, nuts and fruits gilded or covered with bright colored paper, toys, dolls, glittering strings of beads, and other ornaments.
One story credits the lighted Christmas tree to Martin Luther, the German Protestant reformer (1483-1546). It is said that he cut a small evergreen tree, brought it into his home, and attached lighted candles-to simulate the bright starlit sky of Christmas Eve.
Candles as a decoration on Christmas trees did not become accepted as part of the decorations in Germany until about 1700, when the Christmas tree custom spread from the Rhine River district to the rest of Germany and to Austria, particularly in the cities and towns. Candles on the cut trees, while beautiful, were also rather unsafe, so they were usually lighted only for a short time and carefully watched.
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