Pagan History of Xmas Tree—Looking Beyond the Commercialism of the Celebration

Decorating an Xmas tree (or Christmas tree) is probably one of the more exciting activities to do during the early days of the Christmas holiday. Your family will go to a Christmas tree farm and cut fresh trees that you can use for the entire holiday celebration. After erecting it, either inside or outside your home, you will now begin to decorate it with various ornaments such as small icons of Santa Claus, snowman, poinsettia, candies, and others. You may also purchase a fiber-optic pre-lit Christmas tree if you are looking for a diversion from the usual evergreen coniferous trees.

Let us get beyond first with the commercialism of the Christmas season, and instead look back from where the Christmas tree began. If you are a Christian, definitely you have in your mind that Christians started the use of Christmas trees as part of the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

However, you are quite wrong.

Historically, the celebration of Christmas during the early years is considered to be a pagan-related activity. Thus, instead of a Christian history of the Christmas tree, we will deal with the pagan history of the Xmas tree.

The use of evergreen trees as a Christmas tree represents the celebration of the renewal of life for pagans. In Greek paganism, Dionysius (the Greek god dubbed by different modern scholars as a “life-death-rebirth deity) carries a coniferous tree. The Yule tradition (where the term Yuletide came from) was celebrated by the early German tribes through sacrificing slaves and male animals by suspending them on the branch of a coniferous tree.

The Pagan history of xmas trees will just remain as a history forever. What matters most is the importance of the Christmas tree as part of the Christmas holiday celebration.

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Pagan History of Xmas Tree—Looking Beyond the Commercialism of the Celebration
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