Apples, wafers and candles
Evergreen trees brought indoors at Christmas are recorded in parts of Germany and the Baltic region from the sixteenth century. Early trees were decorated with food: apples, nuts, gingerbread and wafers. One explanation links the apples to medieval paradise plays performed on 24 December, the feast of Adam and Eve, in which a tree hung with apples stood for the Garden of Eden.
Candles followed, fixed to the branches with wax or small clips. They were beautiful and dangerous, which is why candlelit trees were usually lit for only a short time, with a bucket of water nearby.
The tree reaches Britain and America
The custom spread with German families abroad. In Britain it became fashionable after 1848, when the Illustrated London News printed an engraving of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their children around a decorated tree at Windsor. Albert was German-born, and the picture made the tree a model for families across Britain. A version of the same engraving, with the royal details removed, was printed in America soon after.
Glass baubles from Lauscha
The glass ornament as we know it began in Lauscha, a glassmaking village in Thuringia, in the mid-nineteenth century. Glassblowers there began making hollow glass balls and fruit shapes for trees, silvered on the inside to catch the candlelight. A popular story credits a local glassblower with inventing them because his family could not afford real fruit; it is a nice story, but hard to verify.
What is certain is that Lauscha ornaments became an export business. By the 1880s the American retailer F. W. Woolworth was importing German glass ornaments, and within a few years they were selling in very large numbers.
Tinsel made of silver
Tinsel is usually traced back to Nuremberg in the early seventeenth century, where it was made from thin strips of real silver. It sparkled beautifully in candlelight and tarnished quickly. Later versions used cheaper metals; for much of the twentieth century tinsel was made with lead, which was phased out in the United States in the 1970s over health concerns. Modern tinsel is plastic.
The first electric lights
In 1882 Edward H. Johnson, a colleague of Thomas Edison, lit a Christmas tree in his New York home with 80 small electric bulbs in red, white and blue, wired by hand. A newspaper reporter wrote about it, and the idea caught on - slowly at first, because electric lights were expensive and most homes had no electricity. In 1895 President Grover Cleveland had the White House family tree lit with electric lights, and pre-wired strings became widely affordable in the decades that followed.
Stars and angels on top
The topper has its own history: a star for the star of Bethlehem, or an angel for the angels who announced the birth to the shepherds. Both were common by the nineteenth century, and the choice between them still divides families.
A tree made of layers
Look at a decorated tree today and you can see its history in layers: evergreen branches from medieval custom, a topper from the Christmas story, glass from a Thuringian village, tinsel from Nuremberg and lights from a New York living room in 1882.