Christmas is a time heavy with symbolism. At work I was recently asked to comment on the rituals associated with Christmas and to what extent marketers can latch on to them. This weekend my husband and I enacted a ritual which is laden with meaning and above all memory: we bought and decorated our first Christmas tree. The tree is lovely, a Nordman fir with wide branches with thick needles and for the first day the entire flat had a lovely scent of pine.
I am not writing about this here in order to show everyone what a happy family we now are, but because of the questions that arose when we started talking about the lights on the tree. For me it was absolutely clear that we would have electric lights and we would turn them on every night (so that we could sit next to the tree coo-ing and aah-ing!!) and for my man, it was equally as obvious that we would have candles which we would only light on Christmas Eve.
What we have here is a clash of Christmas cultures. In England the tree arrives whenever you are organised enough to sort it out and as soon as you have time, you decorate it and put it in the window for all to see. It is a way of saying to everyone "look, it's Christmas and we are celebrating too." When we were little, we would have a game around Christmas time which was to guess how many Christmas trees we would be able to count on a particular car journey. It always gave us the feeling of a community, even if you don't know the people.
In Germany there is much more of a sense of the tree being for the children and the family. The tree is traditionally only brought in and decorated on Christmas Eve and only when it is decorated with the presents underneath and the candles lit are the children allowed in. I know how I felt when we flicked the switch to put on the lights for the first time - imagine the expression when you see a beautiful tree lit up with candles for the first time. I think in Germany the tree says we are all together as a family and Christmas is starting and it is now time to be quiet and spend time together.
So what did we do about our tree? Well, we compromised. We now have candles on the tree but we lit them at the weekend. It was quite difficult for my husband and a friend who came round, I think it almost felt blasphemous but we have now managed our own combination of German and English traditions. No doubt lots of families and couples with different cultural backgrounds will be doing the same all over the world.
One last thing: of course I started thinking about the environmental question. Are we adding to the destruction of the environment by buying a tree. Well there were two arguments which made me feel better. 1) in Germany they will collect the trees and dispose of them so that they can be used usefully. (See here). And secondly - a Christmas tree is truly beautiful in a way that you seldom see otherwise.