By Rafe Calder
Nobody knows. That is the short answer, and the sources are honest about it. Historians cited by two publications we read say the place and date of the first Christmas tree are disputed. What survives is a handful of town records, each a little different, and each claimed by someone.
Freiburg, 1419
This is the date most often repeated. The history site Medievalists.net, summarising a historian’s work, says the city’s Fraternity of Baker’s Apprentices recorded seeing a tree at the local hospital decorated with apples, wafers, gingerbread and tinsel. The article does not say whether the tree was indoors or outdoors. Time magazine says a guild put up a tree decorated with apples, flour-paste wafers, tinsel and gingerbread. The two accounts agree on the trimmings and differ on who put it up and where.
Medievalists.net then adds the doubt: another historian argues that evidence for a Christmas tree in Freiburg can be traced back only to 1625, not earlier. We report the argument and do not take a side.
Tallinn and Riga
Medievalists.net says a document from Tallinn in 1441 describes a tree set up in front of the town hall for a dance. The historian it follows calls the record ambiguous, because the Middle Low German word “bom” could also mean a decorated mast or pole. Wikipedia says the Brotherhood of Blackheads put up trees in its guild houses in Reval, now Tallinn, and in Riga in 1441, 1442, 1510 and 1514, and does not assign each year to a city. On the last night of the celebrations, it says, the tree was taken to the Town Hall Square, where members danced around it.
Medievalists.net gives Riga’s 1510 version separately. The Brotherhood of Blackheads, a guild of foreign merchants and shipowners, put up a tree in the main square for the winter solstice, decorated with thread, straw and apples, and later burned it on a bonfire. The article says Riga has long claimed this as the earliest tree, and does not say historians accept the claim.
Bremen, 1570
Here the record is a guild chronicle, and two sources quote it with small differences. Medievalists.net says it describes a tree in the guild hall decorated with apples, nuts, pretzels and paper flowers, and that children could shake it as they would shake a tree at the autumn harvest. Wikipedia lists the decorations as apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers, for the members’ children. Dates are in the Wikipedia list and not in the other. We cannot say which wording is closer to the chronicle.
Strasbourg, 1604 or 1605
Time quotes a historian who says the first decorated indoor tree was recorded in Strasbourg in 1605, hung with roses, apples, wafers and other sweets. Wikipedia gives the Strasbourg chronicle as written in 1604, and describes Protestant craftsmen bringing fir trees into their homes and decorating them with paper roses, apples, wafers, tinsel and sweetmeats. It adds that records indicate a tree was placed in Strasbourg Cathedral in 1539. Medievalists.net gives no 1605 date at all.
On cutting rules the sources vary again. Medievalists.net says the practice of cutting pine branches to bring home for New Year was banned by the town clerk in 1494, and that a law in Upper Alsace in 1561 limited citizens to one pine “in the length of eight shoes” from the forest. Time says that in Germany demand was high enough in the fifteenth century for Strasbourg to pass laws against cutting pine branches, and that in the 1530s Alsatian ordinances limited each household to one tree. The years differ and the claims overlap. Time also describes Strasbourg in the seventeenth century as thought to host the oldest Christmas tree market, selling unadorned trees under the word Weihnachtsbaum.
What the lists have in common
Read side by side, the early records share a pattern. The trees are in guild halls, hospitals and town squares, not yet in family sitting rooms. The decorations are food: apples, wafers, gingerbread, nuts, pretzels. Time adds that medieval Paradise Plays, performed on Christmas Eve, showed the tree of knowledge as an evergreen fir with apples tied to its branches. That detail is from Time and we have no second source for it.
Our reading: the question of who was first is the wrong one, since the sources suggest a custom that grew in several northern towns at once. Medievalists.net says the historian it follows finds only scattered medieval references but thinks they suggest trees were becoming common across northern Europe by the fifteenth century, and that many documents date from the sixteenth century though the traditions were often decades older.
From guild hall to living room
Wikipedia quotes a historian who says the tree spread through German society from the top down: from elite households to wider groups, from town to country, from the Protestant north to the Catholic south, and from Prussia to other German states. The Lower Rhine, a Catholic-majority area, long regarded the tree as a Protestant custom, Wikipedia says, and accepted it more widely around 1815 through Prussian officials who moved there after the Congress of Vienna.
Wikipedia says the German-born Queen Charlotte introduced a tree at a children’s party in 1800, and that the custom did not spread much beyond the royal family at first. Wikipedia says the Illustrated London News described the trees at Windsor Castle in 1848, with a cover showing the main tree surrounded by the royal family. Time describes an engraving of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their children around a tree in the same paper that year, and says an American magazine reprinted it a couple of years later as “The Christmas Tree”.
Dates in order
- 1419: Freiburg, according to Medievalists.net and Time, doubted by a historian who dates the evidence to 1625.
- 1441: Tallinn, according to Medievalists.net and Wikipedia.
- 1510: Riga, according to Medievalists.net and Wikipedia.
- 1539: a tree in Strasbourg Cathedral, according to Wikipedia.
- 1570: Bremen, according to Medievalists.net and Wikipedia.
- 1604 or 1605: Strasbourg, according to Wikipedia and Time.
- 1800: Queen Charlotte’s party, according to Wikipedia.
- 1848: the royal picture, according to Wikipedia and Time.
Questions a buyer would ask
Does Tannenbaum mean Christmas tree? Wikipedia says no: the word means fir tree, the German word for a Christmas tree is Weihnachtsbaum, and the mix-up comes from the English words set to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”.
What kind of sources these are
Medievalists.net is a history news site and its article summarises another historian’s work. Time is a news magazine. Wikipedia is open to anyone to edit. We read no archive, museum or city record, so every date here is a report of someone else’s reading.
What we left out
We left out the American claims to a first tree, which Wikipedia lists as claims, and the claim about a London street tree of 1444, which the history site draws from a sixteenth-century account of the city. We left out all prices and trade figures.
Quick answers
Where was the first Christmas tree? Nobody can say. Medievalists.net reports that its historian calls the place of the first Christmas tree disputed, with Freiburg, Tallinn, Riga, Bremen and Strasbourg all cited.
Who first decorated a Christmas tree in Germany? Time and Medievalists.net both cite a 1419 Freiburg record of a tree trimmed with apples, wafers and gingerbread, though one historian dates the Freiburg evidence only to 1625.
When did a Christmas tree reach the British royal family? According to Wikipedia, the German-born Queen Charlotte introduced a tree at a children’s party in 1800, though it spread little beyond the royal family at first.
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