December 22, 2023
Family historians are the keepers of their family’s traditions. Most of us are especially fond of holiday traditions, particularly Christmas. If you’re like me, I find it interesting to track how some holiday traditions have changed over the years. Christmas trees are a holiday staple in many homes.
Today it’s a few days before Christmas, and all the houses in town are showcasing lit Christmas trees in their windows. I’ve observed that most of those trees have been up since Thanksgiving weekend. The day after Christmas many of the trees will either be packed away for another year or will be piled up on the curb to be recycled. By that time, the trees will have been up for a month. Many people are sick of them and want them gone, the sooner the better.
It hasn’t always been this way. When I was young in the 1950s, we didn’t go to the tree lot to get a tree until at least the second week in December. After the tree was home, it was a longstanding argument in my family as to when it should be brought inside and decorated. My folks always wanted to wait until around the fifteenth of December. My siblings and I begged for it to go up as soon as we got home with it.
Once the trees of my childhood were in place, we usually kept them up until at least New Year’s Day. My mother, who wasn’t a big fan of the mess that trees made, often agitated to take them down a few days before New Year’s. If the tree we’d picked was dry, she sometimes won, but usually un-decorating the tree was a job for New Year’s Day.
Even earlier in the 1920s when my dad was young, his family always hiked up a nearby mountain on Thanksgiving weekend and cut down a tree. Although they cut their tree early, it didn’t come inside the house until Christmas Eve. On the day of Christmas Eve, the family decorated the tree. For my dad’s family, who were Scandinavian, the big meal as well as the gift giving happened on Christmas Eve. Although the Christmas celebration was over on Christmas Eve, my dad’s family enjoyed their Christmas tree for over a month afterwards. They never took down the tree until my aunt’s birthday – January 30.
According to my father, keeping the tree up so long wasn’t that unusual. Many of their neighbors did the same. Over the last hundred years, Christmas tree traditions have clearly changed. When my dad was born in 1925, most people didn’t decorate their trees until Christmas Eve. No wonder they wanted to enjoy them through January.
Through the years, most families seem to have agreed that the appropriate period to keep a tree in the house is somewhere between three and four weeks. It’s just that the timing of that Christmas tree month has shifted.
Christmas traditions are often passed down through the generations. As you enjoy the twinkling lights of your Christmas tree this year, you might want to consider how the view of what is an appropriate Christmas tree tradition may have changed in your own family.
Carol Stetser
Researcher