Not only in the summertime

The rites surrounding a household’s Christmas tree can lead to familial precipices. Real or artificial? Plastic or aluminum? Living or cut? When and where to put it up? What lights—all white, colored, blinking, steady, bubble? Angel or star on the top? Or weird bulbous pointy thing? And then there are the ornaments—which ones, from what side of the family?

It’s a thing.

My mom always bought the tree from the lot at Safeway soon after Thanksgiving. She left it standing in a pail of water in a shady corner of the back yard until around the second weekend in December and we could finally put it up in the bay window in the living room and decorate it. In unvarying ritual, Dad put on the strands of lights; we screwed in the bulbs (this was pre-integrated lights, folks) except for on the high branches; Mom draped the garland. Then we pulled the glass ball ornaments out of their tissue-paper nests in yellowing cardboard boxes, connected the wire hangers and carefully hung them on the tree. Some of those ornaments were pre-war, and their paint was fading; I don’t recall my parents ever buying any new ornaments throughout my childhood; we just used the same ones year after year.

But I know people who don’t even buy their tree until the 24^th. I don’t judge.

However, in the meantime, “O Tannenbaum” is perfectly appropriate for Advent.

The melody for this song is a German folk tune dating to 16^th Century Silesia, an area of Eastern Europe that has belonged at one time or another to Austria, Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia (as was). Clearly it’s a province whose inhabitants need to value things like music, art and suchlike as antidotes for politics.

The 19^th Century lyrics that have been set to the old tune do not specifically refer to Christmas—a Tannenbaum is actually a fir tree, although the word has taken on the meaning of a fir tree for Christmas. There’s also no mention of decorating the fir tree. No, the words speak of how the tree’s leaves stay green throughout the year, winter as well as summer. (Additional verses added over the years do bring in Christmas.)

Evergreens—firs, pines and the like—are of course symbols of eternal life. Pre-Christian Europeans decorated their houses with evergreen branches to celebrate the winter solstice, when the sun turns the corner and begins to return to the world. Christians go one step further with adding lights—candles and then electric—to beat back the darkness. The ornaments help refract the light into the room. 

(Unless you’re like someone I know whose family tradition is to not have lights on your tree. I don’t judge.)

I love Christmas trees, however they're decorated, wherever they are, even if it's for commercial purposes; I just love them. 

Let’s hear the Philharmonic Children’s Choir of Dresden sing about them, then:

Seems appropriate to have kids singing this one.