Just six days to go and our household will be waking at the crack of dawn to three very excited children. Christmas is nearly here, and with it will come all the paraphernalia that is now associated with one of our few remaining ancient festivals. There’ll be lots of long standing traditions as well, many involving plants, but in the hub-bub of presents and food we don’t tend to dwell upon those. Do you ever stop to think about why on earth we decorate a plastic pine tree? What’s with the tradition of hanging a holly wreath at the front door?
To understand the meaning behind many of these traditions, we have to first put Christmas in a geographical context. In Australia we’re blessed with a wealth of evergreen plants able to survive our relatively mild winters, but in Europe, evergreen plants are actually quite limited in number. Conifers such as yew and fir are the mainstay because of their fine leaves, while others like holly, box, and ivy had tough enough foliage to withstand heavy frosts and snow. Little wonder that in a mostly drab winterscape, people felt the need to bring a bit of greenery into the house. In fifteenth century London it was recorded that at Christmas, every house and parish church was “decked with holm, ivy, bays, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green”.
Our Christmas tradition of adorning a conifer with baubles and other decorations dates back to the Middle Ages, when the Church would hang apples from a tree on Christmas eve, a date on the Medieval calendar known as “Adam and Eve Day”. The chosen tree was an evergreen, most likely a fir tree because it would hold its leaves throughout the European winter, symbolising life and renewal.
Christmas is also about the pear tree. One 18th century tradition during the twelve day Christmas festival was to go “wassailing” in local pear and apple orchards. The term wassail means be whole or be in good health, and wassailers would pour cider, perry, honey, spices and pulp from baked apples around trees in the orchard in the hope that they might thrive and produce bumper crops. An old rhyme goes: “Wassaile the trees, that they may beare / You many a Plum and many a Peare: / For more or lesse fruits they will bring, / As you do give them Wassailing.”
Rural folklore tells us that the male partridge was once considered in the same light as the rabbit is today – a lusty suitor capable of producing many offspring. So a partridge in a pear tree had connotations of fertility, one of the most common pagan preoccupations. Then there’s the Christian tradition, which suggests that the partridge represents Jesus Christ, the gift of Christmas, and the pear tree symbolising the cross on which he died.
Oliver Cromwell and his post-Reformation Puritan cronies tried to put an end to all this frivolity in the mid 1600’s. Moralisers and wowsers to a man, the Puritans believed that Christmas was a Catholic festival with pagan practices and no biblical basis. So, in 1647 they passed an ordinance banning Christmas. As with most bans, the festival simply went underground. Clandestine church services were held on December 25th and violent clashes occurred in places like Canterbury and London between supporters and opponents of Christmas. Songs such as the Twelve Days of Christmas became radical protest anthems.
The next time you hang a bauble from a pine tree, it’s worth remembering that Christmas has a lot more going for it than spend-ups and booze-ups. Its traditions are deeper and richer than just family get togethers, and its history can help inform the way we live our lives in the future. Decorate your home with evergreens. Bake some apples. Hang a wreath of native holly from the front door. Get beyond the superficiality of what’s become a festival of commerce, and reclaim the old ways of celebrating the 12 day festival the Medievals called Christmastide.
To loyal readers of Secret Garden: a sincere thankyou for supporting the column again in 2009. I count it a great privilege to write about something I love every week, and hope that you’ve caught a bit of my passion for gardening, the seasons and the natural world. Best wishes for a happy and meaningful Christmas, and here’s to a big year of home growing in 2010.
First published in The Chronicle 19th December 2009.
