CHRISTMAS TREES
I left you last week back in 1942 and we'd finished putting our home-made decorations up. The next stage in the decorations came after mother had had a good root in the store cupboards and wardrobes. She always emerged with the same things, an assortment of boxes containing the baubles for the tree and the tree itself. This might surprise you but we always used an artificial tree that I suspect my mother and father bought in the 1930s when I was born.
When we unwrapped the bundle furled up in brown paper, looking rather like a large umbrella, what we had was a small white wooden box with green holly leaves stencilled on it and a broomstick wrapped in green paper. At intervals up the 'tree', twisted wire brushes with dark green paper bristles were inserted in the wrapping. When these were bent out and coaxed into shape they formed quite a convincing tree. We had no electric Christmas lights, at the end of each branch was a small tin spring loaded cup and we put cake decoration candles in these. These were only lit on Christmas Eve and the day itself and in case you're wondering, yes, they were definitely a fire hazard! The miracle was that it wasn't until after the war that the tree caught fire and I remember father putting it out and trimming the remains into shape again. We used this truncated tree until about 1956 and then I think it finally bit the dust when the family flit to Sough in 1955 while I was in the army.
Once the tree was up we decorated it using the pre-war baubles. Most of them were very thin glass and it was amazing how many years they had survived. There was some tinsel as well and if it looked a bit bare we made streamers from crepe paper and filled in the gaps. We never had a fairy on top of the tree. Mother used to show us how to make wool bobbles using the waxed cardboard cover off the top of the old-fashioned milk bottles. You could push out the centre of the cap, it was meant to be used for a straw, and if you threaded wool through and kept winding until the hole was full you could cut round the wool the outside edge of the cap, tie the bunch tightly with another piece of wool, draw the whole thing out of the hole and then fluff it up into a tidy little pom-pom which went on top of the tree. I remember father coming home one day with several tight rolls of thin aluminium tape, just the thing for some extra decoration. It wasn't till much later I found out that these were actually Top Secret! They were used by the RAF who dropped long lengths of the tape from aircraft to confuse the German radar installations, they called it 'Windows'. I was asked the other day whether I had a Christmas Tree and my reply was unprintable. I always liked Christmas trees until I found out that I had been subjected to manipulation for years. I don’t like manipulation and so I turned against the dreaded Yuletide Tree. Why?
We have to start with St Boniface, this wasn’t his given name, he was born in 675 in Wessex, named Wynfrith and educated by the Benedictines at Exeter and Nursling (between Winchester and Southampton). They must have done a good job because he became a monk and was ordained a priest by the time he reached 30. Between 716 and 722 he made two attempts to evangelise the Frisian Saxons but was repulsed by their king, Radbod. Frisia was an ancient region of Germany and the Netherlands that lay between the mouths of the Rhine and the Ems. He returned to England to find he had been elected abbot in his absence but declined the post as he wanted to pursue a career as a missionary. He travelled to Rome where Pope Gregory gave him the task of converting the Pagans to the east of the Rhine and changed his name to Boniface. Radbod had died by this time so Boniface went to Frisia to help Bishop Willibrord convert the Frisians and in 722 he went to Hesse and founded a Benedictine monastery as a base camp.
He was called to Rome and the Pope made him a missionary bishop and introduced him to Charles Martel who’s protection was essential to his mission. Martel (The Hammer) was Mayor of Austrasia, an ancient region in France, and became the ruler of the Frankish kingdom, roughly equating to modern France. The story goes that when Boniface arrived at Geismar he found the Pagans worshipping Thor under a sacred oak tree where they made human sacrifices. His solution to this was, to say the least, direct. He cut the oak down and replaced it with a fir tree which grew, miraculously at a great pace. He told the pagans that the triangular shape of the tree was to remind them of the three points of the Trinity. This symbol was gradually accepted by the Pagans and eventually became a universal symbol of Christmas in what became Germany.
We move on rapidly to George IV in England (1820-1830), leaving Boniface to come to a sticky end at the hands of the Frisians and become a martyr of the church. George IV brought the Germanic symbol of Christmas to England but it never took hold outside the royal family and its sycophants because of the unpopularity of the monarchy. It wasn’t until Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert re-introduced the custom that it took hold in England. From then on it became the universal symbol of Christmas it is today. Some scholars say that it was Albert who introduced the concept of candles on the tree to represent the light of Christianity, others point out that the baubles are probably a vestigial representation of the human sacrifices made under the oak of Thor.
So, what have we got? A pagan symbol stolen by the church to reinforce the brainwashing of the Germanic pagans, used again by a German monarchy to cement its place in a foreign country. If you read the history and believe it, it reminds you of human sacrifice, religious domination and monarchical social engineering so sorry, no Christmas tree for me.
Some of you might recognise my Xmas tree rant, I first threw a wobbly about it twelve years ago but I thought it was worth repeating. Next week we'll have a look at wartime cooking for Christmas and the miracles that my mother and father's 'contacts' accomplished to make sure we had food to remember.
Dressing the tree at Hey Farm in 1977.
