Why Do We Put Up Christmas Trees? How an Evergreen Ended Up in Your Living Room

Evergreens were winter VIPs long before Christmas

Picture a long, dark winter with no electric lights. Almost every plant looks dead, except the evergreens, which stay green no matter what. It's no surprise that people in many ancient cultures brought evergreen branches indoors in winter as a reminder that life (and spring) would come back.

The ancient Romans, for example, decorated with greenery during Saturnalia, their big midwinter festival. Those weren't Christmas trees yet, but the idea of bringing a little green inside when it's gloomy out is very, very old.

Germany turned it into a Christmas thing

The decorated Christmas tree as we know it mostly traces back to Germany in the 1500s and 1600s. Families set up evergreen trees in their homes and hung them with things like apples, nuts, paper flowers and little baked treats. Basically, the first ornaments were snacks. Respect.

There's a popular legend that the religious reformer Martin Luther was the first to put candles on a tree after seeing stars twinkling through the branches on a winter night. It's a lovely story, but there's no solid evidence it actually happened. And Germany isn't the only one with a claim: Latvia and Estonia both point to records of decorated trees from the 1400s and 1500s.

Then a royal family made it go viral

German traditions traveled with German families. In Britain, the German-born Queen Charlotte had a Christmas tree in the early 1800s, but the tradition really took off after Queen Victoria married her German husband, Prince Albert.

In 1848, the Illustrated London News printed a drawing of the royal family standing around their decorated Christmas tree. People loved it. A couple of years later, an American magazine reprinted the picture with a few edits so the family looked less royal and more American. Suddenly, everybody wanted one. It was the 1800s version of a trending post.

German immigrants had already been bringing the custom to America, especially to places like Pennsylvania. By the late 1800s, Christmas trees were popping up in homes all over the country.

From candles to twinkle lights

Early trees were lit with real candles clipped to the branches, which looked gorgeous and was also, as you might guess, a pretty serious fire hazard. Families usually lit them for only a short time while someone kept watch.

In 1882, Edward H. Johnson, a longtime associate of Thomas Edison and an executive at his electric light company, showed off a tree in his New York City home lit with 80 hand-wired red, white and blue electric bulbs. Electric lights were expensive at first, but over the next few decades they became affordable, and the candle era (thankfully) came to an end.

Today, Americans buy somewhere around 20 to 30 million real Christmas trees in a typical year, and plenty more families pull an artificial tree out of the attic. A typical farm-grown tree takes around seven to 10 years to reach a living-room-friendly height, so the one in your house has been waiting a long time for its big moment.