It may have passed you by that 2024 was a significant anniversary. Unless, of course, you live in Germany, in which case you could not have missed it. Exhibitions were opened. Television films were screened. Articles were written. Because 2024 was the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic genius and painter of Christmas trees par excellence.
By “Christmas trees” I do not mean the heavily baubled light scaffolds we favour today or the fold-away silver sort we bring out of the garage — the ones made in China. Those are what Christmas trees have become. They are not what they were in Friedrich’s time.
In Friedrich’s time Christmas trees were beacons of hope: eternal evergreens connected to the heavens; mystical proof of the fertility of nature. They were reminders, too, of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. At Christ’s Mass we celebrate his birth, but we need also to remember that he was born to die for us, on a wooden cross. Sorry. This is not stuff they tell you in a Tesco cracker.
For Friedrich, all of nature was a feast of religious symbols. When he looked at a broken ice floe he saw the wreckage of human hope. When he saw a rocky mountain he heard a Wagnerian chorus of angels in the sky. When he glimpsed a ruin on a hill he saw the end of the world. He was not a happy bunny. But he was a pictorial genius whose work sits on the summit of landscape art. And most of it has trees in it.
The story of the Christmas tree is both modern and ancient. Modern because before about 1830 there were no Christmas trees as we know them. Ancient because around the time of the winter solstice — that’s around Christmas to you and me — pretty much every ancient society marked the shortest day not with the happy yodelling of Slade or the drunk-tank laments of the Pogues, but with symbolic displays of evergreens.
The Egyptians, the Chinese, the Jews, they all celebrated the winter solstice with leafy wreaths and signs of nature’s slumbering fertility. Evergreens, especially fir trees, were favoured because they ignored the winter and seemed eternal. For the Vikings, Yggdrasil, the great tree of life, connects the underworld (Niflheim) with the earth (Midgard) and the realm of the gods (Asgard). In every pagan society tree worship was a common practice. Even our own Druids were at it. You don’t have to have sat through the entire cycle of The Lord of the Rings to sense the pagan origins of the humble Christmas tree.
All this came to be codified in Germany. The modern Christmas tree is specifically a German invention. In medieval street theatre and Passion plays, the feast of Adam and Eve, ie Christmas, had as its main German prop the “paradise tree”. Usually a fir tree decorated with apples, it represented the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The same tree from which Eve would later pick the forbidden apple, causing us to be thrown out of the garden.
Paradise trees migrated to the German home and became a staple of domestic decoration at the feast of Adam and Eve. Decorated with paper figurines and cookies symbolising the sacred Host, they were an indoor reminder of the sins of Eve and the sacrifice of Jesus. Apples from the Tree of Knowledge turned prettily into coloured baubles hanging from the branches.
According to a persistent legend, the man who added lights to the spectacle was no less a religious giant than Martin Luther. Coming home in the dark, the legend goes, the great Protestant reformer noticed how beautiful the stars looked poking out from behind a looming fir tree. As soon as he got home he told his children to wire some candles to the paradise tree so the flickering fires could approximate the beautiful effect of stars at night. The lit-up Christmas tree was born.
For the next 200 years it remained a north European habit favoured, in particular, by German Lutherans. As a Protestant creation, it could not and did not cross over quickly to the Catholic home. Friedrich’s family were strict Lutherans. His father was a candle-maker, so there was never a shortage of lights on the Friedrich paradise tree. What was in short supply was good cheer.
Friedrich’s mother died in 1781 when he was seven. A year later his sister died, followed by a second sister who succumbed to typhus. In 1787 he watched his younger brother drown when the two of them were fishing on winter ice. According to some versions of the story, the younger brother was trying to save Caspar David when the ice cracked.
Ice came to play a dark symbolic role in Friedrich’s art, as did the looming fir frees of northern Europe. His breakthrough picture, the painting that made him famous, the so-called Tetschen Altar, from 1808, shows a looming German mountain covered with fir trees, silhouetted against a setting sun. In the middle of the trees we can make out a crucified Christ on a cross.
Friedrich unveiled the painting in a special display at his studio on Christmas Day, 1808. To approximate the effects of a small chapel he lowered the lighting and mounted the picture on a black cloth. The critics were aghast. “It is true presumption when landscape painting wants to slink into the church and creep on to the altars,” snapped Basilius von Ramdohr, the me of then.
In Britain there’s a shortage of Friedrich’s work. The National Gallery owns just one. It’s a winter scene with lots of fir trees, of course, a gothic church looming up in the mist and in the foreground a wooden crucifix in front of which a cripple is praying, his crutches thrown on to the snow. Hope mixed with despair: Friedrich in a nutshell.
Famously, it was Queen Victoria’s German husband, Prince Albert, who popularised the Christmas tree over here. Having a German royal family proved especially helpful with the spread of yule customs. The teenage Victoria remembered having a tree in her bedroom. But it was the publication, in the Illustrated London News in 1848, of a picture of the royal family in Windsor enjoying Christmas round a decorated fir that supercharged the fashion. Within a decade every middle-class household in Britain had a mini-Yggdrasil in the parlour.
In America, meanwhile, it was Moravian emigrants from Germany who brought the fashion with them. An important leap was made when Thomas Edison’s company invented the string of electric lights. On the surface, at least, they hid the yule-time darkness that concerned Friedrich. But only on the surface.
