Show Notes

Story about 1915 Story

A Public School Christmas  – Primary Education 1915 Volume 22-23

There was an old legend of Cathay, which tells of a great white feast held every year, by the King of that Country on his Birthday.
In a room, hung all in white, this King was wont to receive his subjects, who brought to their Lord gifts of snowy white to show that their love and loyalty were without spot or stain. The rich brought their gifts, and the poor theirs, but the King did not regard one gift above another, so long as the gift was white. And so they kept the King’s birthday.
From the thought of this old legend  has come, during the last few years, the keeping of what is known as the White Gift Christmas, in many of our churches, with the emphasis on the loving spirit of the gifts for the birthday of OUR King, rather than in the money value of what is brought.
That there is also inspiration in the story for the public school celebration, was shown in at least one school building last year.
The visitors to this building, on the day before school closed for the  holidays, were soon aware it was “green and white Christmas”.  For every teacher whom they met in the halls was gowned in white and wore a green sash or belt with a spray of evergreen pinned in  her hair or on the gown.
The halls were festooned with green, and every room into which one looked was beautiful, with its green and white. These decorations had been up for a week, they were told, that they might be enjoyed as long as possible, by the whole school family. The lower grade rooms had trees as usual, but decorations on the tree were of white, chains of paper or strings of popcorn. In the upper grade rooms, were branches of evergreen ties with white.
There was an air of expectancy about the building, thigh a peep into the rooms, showed the recitations were on as usual.
Guests were invited into the Kindergarten… When the guests were assembled- mothers, sisters, babies and friends- the piano began to play and the children skipped into the room two by two. Each pair stopped before the tree, to shower it with snowflakes which they carried in baskets in their hands. As they skipped away, they made the familiar Kindergarten circle about the room. Games were played, Christmas stories were told, and songs sung.
Suddenly as they were merrily singing of Kris Kringle, coming over the snow, bells were heard, a rap at the window, and Santa himself stood looking in.
“Shall we ask him in?” asked the teacher? “Yes, yes!” They answered with a shout!..
“Is this D——school”, he asked “I got your letter asking me to come for your presents for the poor children, so here I am,” he announced.
After shaking hands all around, Santa seated himself in the friendly circle. Suddenly one of the children fairly flung himself at the Saint, hugging him about the knees as if he would never let go. As Santa raises him to his lap, the child buried his face in the white beard, only raising it to a whisper, “I want a steam engine”. 
“Of course you do” answered Santa Claus.
The teacher brought in a basket in which were little gifts which the children had been busy for weeks in making in the Kindergarten. One was given to each child to put in Santa’s sack as a gift for some poor child whom Santa might know. “I’ll come back soon and help you give your mothers their presents from this lovely tree” he announced as he left the room.
The guests gathered next to the long corridors to see the procession of all the children of the building. Santa stood in one of the landings on the stairway, with the Superintendent of Schools and his two assistants behind him, as well as the Principal of the building.
The Gong  sounded a signal and in perfect order the children, cane from one room after another, passing through both corridors, up one stairway and down another, the school orchestra playing a joyous march.
Each child brought a gift. There was a penny from each to put into the bag then to used for Christmas pinks for all the shut-ins of the neighborhood. There was a gift of another sort as well. There was to be no receiving of gifts of the usual kind through all the building this year. During the preceding weeks each teacher had talked in her own room of the gifts which do not cost money- only time and thought. They are the gifts which the spirit of kindness and love will teach when to give. Each child was asked to write on paper some gift of this kind which he would like to give and drop it into Santa’s sack.
So they brought them- the money and the papers on which little children as well as eighth grade boys and girls had written of the other gifts which they were giving. There were better lessons to be learned, mothers to be helped in the home, and teachers not to be “plagued” because of the spirit of love which is the spirit of the Christ Child.
The pupils of some rooms, brought their papers fancifully folded. Some carried them in envelopes ties with green or white. It was a beautiful sight to watch them as they passed Santa, big and little dropping their gifts into the sack. Many of the girls wore white, and many of the boys and girls wore white and green. There were green neckties and sprays of evergreen, and big bows upon the hair. The Christmas spirit was in the air, and in the faces as they marched. Santa’s eyes filled with tears and even the big Superintendent was deeply moved.  If only every visitor could have looked over the shoulder of the Principal as she read that night the words which the boys and girls had written!  If only the visitors could have followed the Christmas pinks into the homes where they were welcomed! 
When the pupils were back in their seats, again the gong sounded once more. This time the signal for the assembly. Quickly and in order, the boys and girls massed themselves on the stairway at one end of the corridor, the orchestra still playing it’s march.
It was a sea of childish faces at which Santa looked. A chord at the piano and the voices of the younger children in the lower corridor told the story of how “Once a little baby lay, cradled in the fragrant hay, long ago on Christmas”.
A moments pause, and after a few measures from the piano, the older pupils, replied in their fresh young voices, with the wonderful music of “Silent night, Holy night”.
The Christmas celebration was over and the pupils returned to their rooms and their work. In five minutes, some of the  visitors were listening to the recitations in English Grammer, which was going on in the eight grade room as if nothing unusual had happened.
But the memory of that brief half hour lingers yet.
When someone says “ The public school cannot teach religion” the mind goes back to that public school celebration of Christmas which was the most truly religious of any keeping of the Christmas tide- which the writer has ever enjoyed.
Florence Sears Ware

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS TREES

Evergreen trees (and other evergreen plants) have traditionally been used to celebrate winter festivals (pagan and Christian) for thousands of years. Pagans used branches of evergreen trees to decorate their homes during the winter solstice, as it made them think of the spring to come. The Romans used Fir Trees to decorate their temples at the festival of Saturnalia. However, they were quite different to what we think of as Christmas Trees now.

Nobody is really sure when Fir trees were first used as Christmas trees. It probably began about 1000 years ago in Northern Europe.

Christmas Trees might well have started out as ‘Paradise Trees’ (branches or wooden frames decorated with apples). These were used in medieval German Mystery or Miracle Plays that were acted out in front of Churches during Advent and on Christmas Eve. In early church calendars of saints, 24th December was Adam and Eve’s day. The Paradise Tree represented the Garden of Eden. It was often paraded around the town before the play started, as a way of advertising the play. The plays told Bible stories to people who could not read.

Christmas Trees as they came to be now started around the late 1400s into the 1500s. In what’s now Germany (was the Holy Roman Empire then), the Paradise Tree had more decorations on it (sometimes communion wafers, cherries and later pastry decorations of stars, bells, angels, etc. were added) and it even got a new nickname the ‘Christbaum’ or ‘Christ Tree’.

Some early Christmas Trees, across many parts of northern Europe, were cherry or hawthorn plants (or a branch of the plant) that were put into pots and brought inside so they would hopefully flower at Christmas time. If you couldn’t afford a real plant, people made pyramids of woods and they were decorated to look like a tree with paper, apples and candles. It’s possible that the wooden pyramid trees were meant to be like Paradise Trees. Sometimes they were carried around from house to house, rather than being displayed in a home.

Some trees (or at least small tops of them or branches of fir trees) were hung from the ceiling, mainly in some parts of Germany, some Slavic countries and parts of Poland. This might have been to save space or they just looked nice hanging from the rafters! (If you have lighting hooks on the ceiling, they would also be an obvious place to hang things from.)

The first documented use of a tree at Christmas and New Year celebrations is argued between the cities of Tallinn in Estonia and Riga in Latvia! Both claim that they had the first trees; Tallinn in 1441 and Riga in 1510. Both trees were put up by the ‘Brotherhood of Blackheads’ which was an association of local unmarried merchants, ship owners, and foreigners in Livonia (what is now Estonia and Latvia).

Little is known about either tree apart from that they were put in the town square, were danced around by the Brotherhood of Blackheads and were then set on fire. This is like the custom of the Yule Log. The word used for the ‘tree’ could also mean a mast or pole, tree might have been like a ‘Paradise Tree’ or a tree-shaped wooden candelabra rather than a ‘real’ tree.

In the town square of Riga, the capital of Latvia, there is a plaque which is engraved with “The First New Year’s Tree in Riga in 1510”, in eight languages. You can find out more about the Riga Tree from this website: www.firstchristmastree.com

A picture from Germany in 1521 which shows a tree being paraded through the streets with a man riding a horse behind it. The man is dressed a bishop, possibly representing St. Nicholas.

In 1584, the historian Balthasar Russow wrote about a tradition, in Riga, of a decorated fir tree in the market square where the young men “went with a flock of maidens and women, first sang and danced there and then set the tree aflame”. There’s a record of a small tree in Breman, Germany from 1570. It is described as a tree decorated with “apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers”. It was displayed in a ‘guild-house’ (the meeting place for a society of business men in the city).

The first person to bring a Christmas Tree into a house, in the way we know it today, may have been the 16th century German preacher Martin Luther. A story is told that, one night before Christmas, he was walking through the forest and looked up to see the stars shining through the tree branches. It was so beautiful, that he went home and told his children that it reminded him of Jesus, who left the stars of heaven to come to earth at Christmas. So he brought a tree into his house and decorated it with candles to represent the stars.

Some people say this is the same tree as the ‘Riga’ tree, but it isn’t! The story about Martin Luther seems to date to about 1536 and Riga tree originally took place a couple of decades earlier.

The custom of having Christmas trees could well have travelled along the Baltic sea, from Latvia to Germany. In the 1400s and 1500s, the countries which are now Germany and Latvia were them part of two larger empires which were neighbors.

Another story says that St. Boniface of Crediton (a village in Devon, UK) left England in the 8th centuryand traveled to Germany to preach to the pagan German tribes and convert them to Christianity. He is said to have come across a group of pagans about to sacrifice a young boy while worshipping an oak tree in honour of Thor. In anger, and to stop the sacrifice, St. Boniface cut down the oak tree and, to his amazement, a young fir tree sprang up from the roots of the oak tree. St. Boniface took this as a sign of the Christian faith and his followers decorated the tree with candles so that St. Boniface could preach to the pagans at night. St Boniface was certainly involved in spreading Christianity in parts of Germany, although the legends of the tree seems to have started several centuries later and they’re not mentioned in the early writings about St Boniface.

Haing Trees upside down has also been connected with St. Boniface. One story/theory says that he used the ‘triangle’ shape of an upside down fir tree to help explain the trinity in the Christian faith (God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit). Being upside down it that looked a bit like a cross and so also helped to explain the crucifixion.

There is another legend, from Germany, about how the Christmas Tree came into being, it goes:

Once on a cold Christmas Eve night, a forester and his family were in their cottage gathered round the fire to keep warm. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. When the forester opened the door, he found a poor little boy standing on the door step, lost and alone. The forester welcomed him into his house and the family fed and washed him and put him to bed in the youngest sons own bed (he had to share with his brother that night!). The next morning, Christmas Morning, the family were woken up by a choir of angels, and the poor little boy had turned into Jesus, the Christ Child. The Christ Child went into the front garden of the cottage and broke a branch off a Fir tree and gave it to the family as a present to say thank you for looking after him. So ever since them, people have remembered that night by bringing a Christmas Tree into their homes!

In Germany, the first Christmas Trees were decorated with edible things, such as gingerbread and gold covered apples. In 1605 an unknown German wrote: “At Christmas they set up fir trees in the parlours of Strasbourg and hang thereon roses cut out of many-colored paper, apples, wafers, gold foil, sweets, etc.”.

Some other trees were used in different parts of Germany, such as box or Yew. In the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz it was common to decorate just a branch of a yew tree.

At first, a figure of the Baby Jesus was put on the top of the tree. Over time it changed into a star like the Wise Men saw or an angel/fairy that told the shepherds about Jesus. The ‘angel’ might also might have started as a version of the ‘Christkind’ which translates as ‘The Christ Child’ but is normally shown as a little angel figure with blond hair!

The first Christmas Tree in the UK was probably set-up by Queen Charlotte, the German wife of King George III. Queen Charlotte grew up in Mecklenburg-Strelitz and in the 1790s there are records of her having a yew branch in Kew Palace or Windsor Castle. She helped to decorate it herself and it became a popular event for the royal court. In 1800 she had a full yew tree set-up at the Queen’s Lodge in Windsor for a children’s party for rich and noble families. Dr John Watkins, who went to the party described the tree like this: “…from the branches of which hung bunches of sweetmeats, almonds and raisins in papers, fruits and toys, most tastefully arranged; the whole illuminated by small wax candles.”. And “…after the company had walked round and admired the tree, each child obtained a portion of the sweets it bore, together with a toy, and then all returned home quite delighted.”.

Soon having a tree had become popular amongst some rich families. Queen Charlotte died in 1818 and by then, having a Christmas Tree was a tradition among much of the upper classes.

There’s no mention of a Christmas Tree in ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, which was published in 1843.

They became very popular throughout the country from the mid 1840s, when reports of ‘the Royal tree’ were printed in newspapers. In 1848, a drawing of “The Queen’s Christmas tree at Windsor Castle” was published in the Illustrated London News. It showed Queen Victoria, her German Husband Prince Albert and their young children around a tree which was set-up on a table. The drawing was republished in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Philadelphia in December 1850 (but they removed the Queen’s crown and Prince Albert’s moustache to make it look ‘American’!).

The publication of the drawing helped Christmas Trees become popular in the UK and USA.

In Victorian times, the tree would have been decorated with candles to represent stars. In many parts of Europe, candles are still used to decorate Christmas trees.

Christmas Tree ‘skirts’ started as Christmas Tree ‘carpets’. They were made from heavy fabric, often decorated and with fancy frills around the edges, and were used either on the floor, or on tables, and went under the trees and their stands – rather than ‘around’ them. They were used to catch the needles from the trees and also protect the floor or table tops from dripping wax coming from the candles on the trees.

In Germany in the early/mid 1800s it was also ‘fashionable’ to have a forest scene and/or a nativity scene under trees (especially if the trees were placed on tables) and so these scenes also stood on the Tree carpets.

At this point trees were either normally put in pots (if they still had roots on them) or they were attached to a larger piece of wood or other heavy support (if they’d been cut) and so the scenes help to hide these.

In the 1860s proper metal tree holders, for cut trees, started being made. If you were rich, you could get them in very fancy shapes – and some even had music boxes in them, so they ‘plinked’ Christmas tunes!

Less expensive tree holders also became available and were made out of cheaper metals (and they also didn’t look so good), so the ‘carpets’ became smaller and were also put ‘around’ the tree holders and became the Christmas tree skirts that we have today.

Lead and glass decorations started being made in the 1860s and 1870s. Some of the first glass decorations were apples – and that’s probably where round, red, baubles on Christmas Trees comes from! Frank Woolworth started selling glass ornaments in his stores in the USA in 1880.

Tinsel and The Legend of the Christmas Spider

Tinsel was first created in Nuremberg, Germany in the 1878 when thin strips of silver foil were sold as ‘Icicles’. In 1880 ‘angel hair, made from spun glass was sold. The first ‘tinsel’ garlands were sold in the 1890s from silver plated copper wire. But when plastic/man made tinsel was invented, it became very popular as it was much cheaper than metal tinsel and also lighter to go on the tree!

There are also folk stories about how tinsel was created – by The Christmas Spider!

These tales seem to have started in Eastern Germany, Poland or Ukraine but are also told in parts of Finland and Scandinavia. The stories are now also popular in other countries such as the USA; although I live in the UK and most people in my country have never heard of the story/legend!

All the versions of the story involve a poor family who can’t afford to decorate a Tree for Christmas (in some versions the tree grew from a pine cone in their house, in others the family have bought a tree into the house). When the children go to sleep on Christmas Eve a spider covers the tree in cobwebs. Then on Christmas morning the cobwebs are magically turned into silver and gold strands which decorate the tree!

Some versions of the story say that it’s the light of the sun which changed the cobwebs into silver and gold but other versions say it’s St Nicholas / Santa Claus / Father Christmas / das Christkind which made the magic happen.

In parts of Germany, Poland, and Ukraine it’s meant to be good luck to find a spider or a spider’s web on your Christmas Tree. Spider’s web Christmas Tree decorations are also popular in Ukraine. They’re called ‘pavuchky’ (which means ‘little spider’) and the decorations are normally made of paper and silver wire. You might even put an artificial spider’s web on your tree!

Christmas Tree Lights

There are a few different claims as to who invented popularised the first strings of ‘electric’ Christmas Tree lights. In 1880, the famous inventor Thomas Edison put some of his new electric light bulbs around his office. And in 1882 Edward Johnson, who was a colleague of Edison, hand-strung 80 red, white and blue bulbs together and put them on his tree in his New York apartment (there were two additional strings of 28 lights mounted from the ceiling!). The lights were about the size of a walnut.

In 1890 the Edison company published a brochure offering lighting services for Christmas. In 1900 another Edison advert offered bulbs which you could rent, along with their lighting system, for use over Christmas! There are records in a diary from 1891 where settlers in Montana used electric lights on a tree. However, most people couldn’t easily use electric tree lights at this time as electricity wasn’t widely installed in homes. But rich people liked to show off with lights installed just for Christmas, this would have cost about $300 per tree then, more than $2000 money today!

Electric tree lights first because widely known in the USA in 1895 when President Grover Cleveland has the tree in the White House decorated with lights as his young daughters liked them! The tradition of the National Christmas Tree on the White House lawn started in 1923 with President Calvin Coolidge.

In the December 1901 edition of “The Ladies’ Home Journal”, there was an advert for “Edison Miniature Lamps” which boasted ‘no smoke, smell or grease’; and you could buy or rent the lights. In 1903 there was an advert from Edisons with Christmas lights called festoons – which had eight lights per ‘festoon’. Sets of three festoons (so 24 lights) cost $12 or you could rent the lights from $1.50. This was still quite expensive, but much cheaper than $300.

Another claim to the first widespread sale of strings of lights comes from Ralph Morris, an American telephonist. In 1908, he used telephone wire to string together small bulbs from a telephone exchange and decorated a table top tree with them. Leavitt Morris, the son of Ralph, wrote an article in 1952 for the Christian Science Monitor, about his father inventing Christmas Tree lights, as he was un-aware of the Edison lights.

In 1885 a hospital in Chicago burned down because of candles on a Christmas Tree. In 1908 insurance companies in the USA tried to get a law made that would ban candles from being used on Christmas Trees because of the many fires they had caused. However, people still used candles to light Christmas Trees and there were more fires.

In 1917, a fire from Christmas Tree candles in New York, gave a teenager called Albert Sadacca an idea. His family came from Spain and made novelty wicker bird cages that lit up. Albert thought of using the lights in long strings and also suggested painting the bulbs bright colors like red and green. In the following years, he and his brothers formed the NOMA Electric Company, which became a very famous name in Christmas lights.

The most lights lit at the same time on a Christmas tree is 194,672 and was done by Kiwanis Malmedy / Haute Fagnes Belgium in Malmedy, Belgium, on 10 December 2010!

Many towns and villages have their own Christmas Trees. One of the most famous is the tree in Trafalgar Square in London, England, which is given to the UK by Norway every year as a ‘thank you’ present for the help the UK gave Norway in World War II. The White House in the USA has had a big tree on the front lawn since the 1920s.