Christmas Trees and Christmas Ornaments - Real Tradition or Some Newfangled Practice?

One of the nicest parts of Christmas has to be how you get to unpack all the traditional Christmas ornaments that have found their way into your home over the years, and relive all the delightful ways these baubles came to be part of the family. Traditions like this harder and harder to come by these days; for one thing, people don't have any direct link remaining to the times that these traditions were practiced on first-hand knowledge. All people are left with now are all the pretty sepia-toned memories from the past with no present-day experience to help put them in practical practice of traditions now. In the beginning, Christmas trees were decorated with threaded popcorn, real candy canes and apples. What we have now are new practices: baubles and Christmas ornaments mass produced and shipped over here from China, plastic instead of glass and sometimes even molded plastic trees for the living room. Just once in a while there is an original idea that brings back the meaning of it all. The Miller Park Zoo in Illinois has Christmas ornaments up for sale at their gift shop that are made by zoo employees out of reindeer droppings. The droppings are shaped, coated with plastic and decorated to make a largish fun-looking shiny ornament.

Christmas ornaments are always seen in the colors silver, gold, blue, red and white. This has been the tradition since times immemorial; the reason these colors are preferred over others can be chalked up to religious sentiment. In the Christian tradition, green has always stood for life eternal, blue for the skies the Angels descend from, white, for the purity of the Immaculate Conception, red, for the bloodline of the Christ, and gold and silver, and the bounty and fullness of God's blessings on man. But where did the Christmas tree itself come from that the Christmas ornaments hang on?

It so happens that Christmas at one time was not considered traditional. It was considered a strange new non-traditional conception that was not in keeping with the spirit of austerity and restraint that Christianity stood for. But Christianity way back then had to compete with pagan beliefs with their strangely appealing merriment with a festival called Saturnalia that included a tree, decorations, drinking and partying. Christianity is said to stood against the pagan practice of Saturnalia, and to have simply accepted some of the traditions of merriment of that faith to compete on attraction and appeal.

Modern Christmas tree tradition is almost certainly German. They would get an indoor Christmas tree decorated with Christmas ornaments, baubles and edible goodies, and when the right kind of tree was scarce, would build a representative structure, a wooden conical object to stand in for the tree. America hasn't known of the Christmas tree tradition for longer than 150 years, when the German settlers came. But there is something wholesome about the Christmas tradition of a tree and ornaments, especially how it was quickly adopted the world over.