The week after Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the holidays, when most people put up their decorations and commence to party until the last lights flicker sometime around Jan. 3. Santa makes his first appearance in malls and markets around the country, frantic holiday shoppers search for specials and colored lights appear on house fronts to brighten the darkest month of the year. Central to all the festivities, of course, is the Christmas tree.
The curious custom of decorating a tree for a month with flashing lights and colored bulbs began innocuously with eighth century Germanic tribes. They originally planted fir saplings to honor St. Boniface, who converted them to Christianity. Apparently commerce and Christmas joined hands early. The first written record of a Christmas tree comes from a 1561 forest ordinance from Ammerschweir, Alsace, which declared “no burgher shall have for Christmas more than one bush of more than eight shoes length.” Acceptable decorations included “roses cut of many colored paper, apples, wafers, gilt and sugar.” During the same century, legend has it that Protestant reformer added the first lit candles to the tree.
Christmas tree in a Denver home, circa 1900.
By the 1700s, the “Christbaum” or Christmas tree tradition had been established in Germany and soon spread to other parts of Europe. In the 1840s, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German consort, made the decoration of Christmas trees a popular activity throughout England. The custom came to America via Pennsylvania Dutch (German) settlers, since early New Englanders believed that the celebration of Christmas was a pagan tradition. The Christmas tree market opened up in 1851, when a Catskill farmer named Mark Carr hauled two ox sleds full of evergreens into New York City and sold them all.
Two early pioneers from Germany, Count Henri and Countess Katrina Murat, set up the first holiday tree in Denver for the original Christmas celebration in 1858. Countess Murat decorated a sweet smelling spruce, brought in fresh from the mountains, with small candles that sat in holders made from wooden blocks and pieces of wire. She baked tiny gingerbread figures for ornaments.
Since pine and blue spruce were abundant in Colorado, the tradition flourished. Even on the plains, homesteaders improvised with cottonwoods, tumbleweeds or sagebrush. By the 1890s, the railroads were shipping hundreds of holiday trees to cities and prairie communities. Large, beautiful trees worth $25 – $50 today sold for less than 50 cents each. In mining camps and prairie settlements, handmade ornaments were created from cotton and household items and strung with garlands of popcorns or cranberries. Godey’s Lady’s Book, a well-circulated woman’s magazine found even in remote areas, popularized the festive aspects of Christmas with instructions for colored candles and homemade tree ornaments. Even the roughest saloons featured holiday trees decorated with unusual ornaments, including beer labels and fried oysters. Unfortunately, the small wax candles that often illuminated the tree could lead to disaster when the flame ignited dry branches.
Downtown Denver 16th Street decorated for Christmas, 1940.
Beginning in the 1890s, holiday tree decorating became more sophisticated. The invention of the light bulb inspired the first electrically lit Christmas tree in New York in 1882, and the following year Denver, a pioneer in the use of electricity, followed suit. The Lawrence Street Methodist Church proudly displayed a tree glowing with 30 incandescent bulbs, a demonstration orchestrated by University of Denver physics professor Sidney Short. Three years later, the professor also introduced the city’s first electric trolley.
Christmas-loving Germany introduced the first glass-blown holiday ornaments during the 1890s. A.F. W Woolworth imported these popular and inexpensive items to the United States in mass quantities. Soon delicate miniature animals, toys, glass balls and other figures became widely available in department stores, giving birth to another yuletide tradition. From the 1870s to the 1930s, Germans made the finest holiday ornaments in the world, with nearly 5,000 different molds.
The first attempt at Christmas tree lighting with electricity was a touch and go proposition. Globes were colored with dyes that quickly faded or paints that disintegrated with the heat of the lamp and action of the elements. Flood lighting effects were obtained with tin cans, buckets and flowerpots. Inadequate electric lighting common in homes of the day resulted in blown fuses and blackouts. Fans of indoor lighting often received unpleasant shocks and sometimes started fires. Additionally, in the early years of the twentieth century, a string of lights cost $12, about an average man’s weekly wages.
Celebrants drag a Yule log down a snowy hill in Palmer Lake. Photo by John Whitworth.
A Denver electrician named David Dwight Sturgeon produced the first outdoor lighting display in 1914 to cheer his young grandson, who was very ill and missing out on holiday festivities. Saddened and desperately wanted to help, Sturgeon took some ordinary light bulbs, dipped them in paint, connected them to electrical wire and strung the glowing baubles on the branches of a pine tree outside the boy’s bedroom window. Both the child and the neighbors were delighted. A newspaper reporter named Frances Wayne picked up the story and soon the Sturgeon home was the center of attention all over the city. In 1918, Denver held its first outdoor lighting contest
The following year John Malpiede, at the time Denver’s only electrician, decided to brighten the Christmas scene by replacing the white lights around Civic Center with colored red and green globes. The following year, he installed the first lighted Christmas tree. Over the years he added more lights, and in 1926 persuaded Mayor Ben Stapleton to let him decorate the exterior of City Hall. By the late 1920s, Denver was being called “the Christmas Capital of the World.”
Electric companies nationwide made a concerted effort to improve outdoor colored bulbs so that they would not deteriorate because of the weather. Creative advertisers received an additional benefit as electric signs all over the nation began to flash with colored lights.
The most recent additions to the Christmas lights collection are energy-saving LED lights and fiber optics, along with the pre-lit artificial tree.
Modern technology and color-coordination notwithstanding, holiday trees are still decorated much the same as they were three quarters of a century ago, and a few folks still make that yearly trek to the mountains to cut down their own trees. Fortunately, some traditions never die.
