Are Christmas Trees Pagan? No Record Ties Them to a Pagan Rite

No record ties the Christmas tree to a pagan rite. The earliest records come from German-speaking towns in the 1500s, and the first description of a decorated tree is from Strasbourg in 1605. Romans hung green branches at the New Year, and some historians think the tree grew from that “partly at least,” but no document shows it.

The fir in the forest belongs to God, whoever else has used it. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof,” says the psalm (Psalm 24:1), and Paul quoted it to Christians in Corinth who worried about meat that might have been offered to idols (1 Corinthians 10:26). Long before anyone set a fir tree in a parlour, Scripture had made the green tree a picture of the believer. The one who trusts in the Lord, Jeremiah says, “shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green” (Jeremiah 17:8). Even Tertullian, who scolded Christians for hanging pagan laurels on their doors, turned to the believer and said, “You are a light of the world, and a tree ever green.”

Why do people say the Christmas tree is pagan?

Because there is real evidence of green branches in pagan winter festivals, and historians have taken it seriously. The Roman New Year fell on the Kalends of January, the first day of the month, and people decked their houses with laurel and greenery for it. Clement Miles, in his 1912 study of Christmas customs, found the practice “common throughout the Empire,” as Libanius, Tertullian and John Chrysostom describe it. The Church went on condemning it: Bishop Martin of Braga, in the sixth century, still had to “forbid the adorning of houses with laurels and green trees.”

Tertullian’s own words are painful for Christians to read. In his treatise On Idolatry he lists the Saturnalia, New Year’s and the midwinter festivals among the pagan days believers were keeping, with “presents” that “come and go.” Then he turns to the lamps and laurels hung on doors at public rejoicings for emperors and victories: “You will now-a-days find more doors of heathens without lamps and laurel-wreaths than of Christians.” Some Christians of his day were doing what their neighbours did. Tertullian forbade it outright, because the Romans had gods of doors and thresholds: “To an idol you will have done whatever you shall have done to an entrance.”

People often name the Saturnalia, yet it is the weakest part of the case. It began on 17 December and ran for three days under Augustus, or seven with the market of little clay figures that followed it, as the Roman writer Macrobius records. What the sources describe is feasting, gifts of candles and clay figures, and masters waiting on their slaves at table. Miles found its influence on Christmas “less certain” than the New Year’s, and none of these sources describes a tree. The wider case about Saturnalia, the sun and the date of the feast is weighed in does Christmas have pagan origins?

What did Clement Miles think?

The fullest case for a pagan root is his, and it is more interesting than the usual one. He took up an earlier scholar’s idea, Dr Tille’s, that two things met in the tree: the Roman custom of decking houses “with laurels and green trees at the Kalends of January,” and the old belief that on Christmas Eve apple and other trees blossomed and bore fruit. A link with the Roman New Year was, to him, “very possible.” Yet he saw closer likenesses in the villages of Europe, in folk customs that “in no way suggest Roman or Greek influence.” Girls in Alsace set a little fir or holly-bush over the village fountain on New Year’s Eve. In Sweden young pines, stripped of bark and branches, stood outside the houses at Christmastide. At Brough in England a holly-tree with torches on its branches was carried through the town on Twelfth Night.

So Miles placed the Christmas tree beside the May-pole, in “a class of primitive sacraments,” and thought it “may well be a descendant of some sacred tree carried about or set up at the beginning-of-winter festival.” He was careful to the end: the tree may have grown “partly at least” from the Roman New Year greenery. He knew the limits of his case: “it is difficult to be certain of their exact ancestry.”

What do the earliest records of the Christmas tree show?

They show no pagan rite. Miles himself wrote that “there is no recorded instance of the use of a tree at Christmas in Germany before the seventeenth century.” Research since his day has found older traces, collected by Bernd Brunner in his book Inventing the Christmas Tree, the oldest claimed at Freiburg in 1419. Not all of them belong to Christmas itself. The merchants of Riga are said to have set up their tree of 1510 for the winter solstice, and Strasbourg banned the cutting of branches for the New Year in 1494. The early tree seems to have belonged to the whole winter season, in towns where the people setting it up were Christians.

In 1605 a citizen of Strasbourg left the first description of a decorated tree in a home: firs set up in parlours and decked with paper flowers, fruit and sweets. A few decades later the cathedral preacher of the same city complained about “the Christmas- or fir-tree, which people set up in their houses.” “Whence comes the custom,” he wrote, “I know not.” If a pagan rite stood behind it, he could not name one. The story of where the tree came from, and what it came to mean, is told in the history and meaning of the Christmas tree.

Between the Roman laurels and these town records, the sources Miles and Brunner gathered show no tree at all. That silence proves nothing either way. It leaves the pagan link unproven, and the tree we can see in the records is the one Christian households kept.

Did Norse or Germanic pagans have a Yule tree?

They had Yule, and they had sacred trees. What no source gives us is a Yule tree. The Venerable Bede, in his book on the reckoning of time, says the English of old named two months Giuli “from the day when the sun turns back” and began their year on 25 December. “That very night, which we hold so sacred,” he writes, “they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, ‘mother’s night’, because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night.” Bede does not say what those ceremonies were, and he names no tree.

The Germanic peoples did honour trees. The oldest life of Boniface tells how he felled a great oak that pagans held sacred, and Willibald, who wrote it, says some of the people there, “not yet strong in the spirit,” still offered “sacrifices to trees and springs.” But Willibald says nothing of decorating the oak, or of midwinter. The often-repeated story that Germanic tribes hung a Yule tree with offerings to Odin rests on no ancient or medieval text that we have been able to find.

Does Jeremiah 10 say Christmas trees are pagan?

No. The prophet is mocking a god made by hand: wood from the forest, shaped with an axe, covered in silver and gold, dressed in blue and purple, and too lifeless to walk. His target is the worship of carved images, not a custom first recorded in the 1500s; the passage is read verse by verse in is the Christmas tree in the Bible?

Can a Christian have a Christmas tree?

Yes, and Paul shows why. In Corinth some of the meat for sale had been offered to idols, and believers asked whether they could eat it. “Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question for conscience sake: For the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof” (1 Corinthians 10:25–26). Only if someone at the table says “this is offered in sacrifice unto idols” should they leave it, for that person’s conscience (verses 28–29). Over all of it Paul writes: “whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (verse 31).

A tree set up for the birth of Christ honours no idol, and the earth it grew from is the Lord’s. Paul gives the same freedom about holy days in Romans 14:6: the one who keeps a day keeps it “unto the Lord,” and of the one who does not he says, “to the Lord he doth not regard it.” So the tree is a freedom. A household may set one up with thanksgiving, or leave the corner bare, and either way the question Paul asks is the same: is this done for the Lord?

Tertullian began his chapter on lamps and laurels with a word of Jesus: “let your works shine.” In his day, he complained, the shops and gates shone instead. A tree can glitter in a house where no one prays; it can also stand where the light is real. When we light ours this December, we stand on the Lord’s earth beside one of his trees, and we ask for the brightness he wants most: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

Related reading

• What does the Christmas tree symbolize? Its meaning and origin
• Is the Christmas tree in the Bible?
• Does Christmas have pagan origins?
• Why is Christmas celebrated on 25 December?
• Is holly in the Bible?