The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.
People have been hanging up midwinter decorations since long before Christmas appeared. They’re mentioned in the Roman feast of Saturnalia, which probably began in the 5th century BC. Some 900 years later, a Christian bishop in Turkey wrote disapprovingly about members of his congregation who were drinking, feasting, dancing and ‘crowning their doors’ with decorations in a pagan fashion at this time of year.
The 6th-century Pope Gregory the Great decided to bow to the inevitable and took a different line, recommending that these celebrations should be reinvented rather than banned. So the installing of green boughs and natural adornments was instead focused on churches – using plants that have retained their festive significance to this day. Nature, of course, has a role to play. In countries like the UK, midwinter greenery is limited. The leaves that are available – holly, ivy and mistletoe – became obvious choices for decorations. Mistletoe had supposedly long been revered by druids, while holly and ivy were celebrated in English songs at least from the 15th century.
Which is why more than 1000 years later I used my lunch break to go in search of whatever Christmas decorations Woolworth’s had to offer. It was 1970, a month since our wedding. Angela’s parents were in America, my parents were in Lincoln, we had no car and I was working on Christmas Eve so we’d decided to stay put. The others who we shared the terraced house with in Fallowfield, South Manchester, had gone home to mum and dad. So we had the place to ourselves and of course we’d be buying a real tree.
I headed for the nearby branch of Woolworths which is where I found a box of elegant glass tree decorations for one shilling and tenpence (less than 10p). I did not know at the time that the first hand-blown glass workshop was established in the German town of Lauscha round about 1597. In 1847 a craftsman called Hans Greiner began to make Christmas ornaments in the shape of fruit and nuts that were hand-blown into moulds, and then silvered inside.
Greatly aiding my lunchtime shopping expedition was the fact that in 1880 Frank Woolworth began to import large quantities of these glass baubles and stars, originally produced by family workshops in Germany and sell them at affordable prices. Ten years later he was reportedly selling $25 million worth of baubles a year. In addition I bought a small plastic doll to sit on top of the tree. Since it had wings it might have been an angel or a fairy, though the magic wand suggested the second. More than half a century later on some of the glass baubles have broken, but most are still intact, and they’ve been augmented by others most of which belonged to Angela’s mother. The dolls head has a tendency to fall off, but it still sits atop our now symbolic version of a Christmas tree.
It’s common knowledge that the Christmas tree was introduced into Britain by the Prince Consort. In reality It was Queen Charlotte the wife of George III, who, following German tradition, set up the first recorded Christmas tree at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, in December 1800. The Christmas tree became an essential element of parties for children of the upper class. Any hardy evergreen could be used; they’d usually be festooned with candles and trinkets, and surrounded by presents
In December 1840, Prince Albert imported some Christmas trees from his ancestral home in Germany. A few years later, when the Illustrated London News and other magazines started the annual tradition of providing pictures (such as the one above) of the royal Christmas trees and the general public quickly latched onto the idea.
In those days the tree would have been decorated with candles to represent stars. This turned out to be a bit dodgy in terms of health and safety and talk about banning the use of naked flames on Christmas trees began to gather momentum, because of the many fires they’d caused.
A solution was found In 1881, when the newly opened Savoy Theatre in London became the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity, fitted out with 1,200 incandescent light bulbs created by North East inventor Sir Joseph Swan. A year later the theatre’s owner – Richard D’Oyly Carte – commissioned Swan to create miniature lights to adorn the dresses of the lead fairies on the opening night of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe: thus ‘fairy lights’. A year later an American inventor Edward Johnson decorated a Christmas tree with these lights and another ancient tradition saw the light of day.
So let’s get back to me and my expedition to Woolworth’s on Deansgate in December 1970. Pleased with myself I brought my purchases home and at the first opportunity we went somewhere and bought a small (probably very small tree). It’s possible I went and bought some lights but that I don’t recall. I haven’t been able to find a photo from that year, but in October 1973 Isabel had arrived, and you can see her below next to our tree of that year sharing a joke with Angela.
