Customer Reviews

The Solstice Evergreen: The History Folklore and Origins of the Christmas Tree

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If you want to know about the history of the Christmas Tree as a Christian entity there are hundreds of resources regurgitating the same information all over the internet and in almost every other book ever published on the subject. If you want to know what the significance of the tree was before it was adopted as a symbol of Christmas -- if you care about the meaning of this very beloved and almost universal symbol -- this is the book you need. Accessibly written and filled with wonderful stories and customs from around the world, Sheryl Karas has done a wonderful job of shedding light on a subject few other authors bother to touch. Highly recommended

It is so very hard to find out about Winter Solstice without being inundated by Christian information, even though the symbolism OF Christmas predate Christianity be hundreds or thousands of years. The author is Jewish and she celebrates the Solstice Evergreen without the 'Nativity', just like I do. I find great inspiration and courage in her. Christmas as the birthday of Jesus is a human invention, the Winter Solstice and the Evergreen is the real thing.

Indeed the Christmas tree has pre-Christian, pagan roots. Bit of a shocker for the average reader probably, and might explain why this excellent historical account of the PAGAN origins of the Christmas tree gets inexplicably harsh reviewing once in while. The book contains entertaining folk stories from all over the world, myths and legends about evergreen trees and how they evolved into the Christmas tree. It's hard to fault this book on it's own merits-- but it busts a few belief bubbles if you come at it with preconceived notions.

The author writes in her Introduction to this 1991 book, "Growing up Jewish in a typically Christian New England town made the Christmas season a confusing and lonely time of year for me... My mother did her best to offset the yearly cultural onslaught. Chanukah became a more important holiday than it was before... the real problem was hard to define. I did not feel drawn by the story of the Nativity... What I yearned for was the magic, the specialness of the day. And the most magical thing of all for me was the Christmas tree. As an adult my fascination with the tree stayed with me. When I was twenty-two my housemates and I bought a small pine to decorate our apartment and I enjoyed having a Christmas Tree in my own home for the first time... Ever since that evening the Christmas Tree has been an integral part of my winter celebration. However, because of my background, I needed to clarify the meaning of the tree in my life... this book traces the roots of the Christmas Tree through the ancient symbolism and mythology of the evergreen."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"Because prehistoric people depended on the forests for food and shelter... trees were an important feature of their environment... It is no wonder then that trees became special in the religious life of various societies..." (Pg. 19)
"To say that primitives worshipped the trees ... is to take the evidence too literally... rituals of the tree pay homage to more than the physical form or the spirit within it." (Pg. 37)
"In 375 A.D. the Church ... allowed some of the light-hearted customs of the older celebration... to be incorporated into the reverent observance of Christmas. The use of greenery, however, popularly used to decorate homes and holy places during the Saturnalia, was still prohibited as pagan idolatry." (Pg. 88)
"The most well-known story about lights on the tree attributes their introduction to Martin Luther... (which) shows that the Protestant reformers needed a way to justify the continued use of the tree even while they were rejecting other aspects of basic Catholic theology." (Pg. 106)

I purchased this book with the expectation of reading a history of the Christmas tree. This is not a history book by any stretch of the imagination. It is simply a disconnected collection of myths and stories about trees in general. A great disappointment. If you want to have a few insights into the history of the Christmas tree read The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum.

This book covers more than the Christmas tree's history and actually smothers it in much more focus on the pagan trappings of Christmas and its history.

Just an intro...