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The American Christmas Tree
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Roger Fritts
on December 12, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
The evergreen tree has always been an important part of my
Christmas. As a child I argued with my sister about how to hang
the tinsel. My sister believed that the strands should hang straight,
while I liked the pattern created by tossing them on to the tree
from a distance. My father finally settled this debate by buying a
small tree still in a bucket of earth that I kept in my room and
decorated. After Christmas each year we planted this tree and now,
many years later, three of those trees are still growing and have
grown to over 30 feet.
From where did this tradition of bringing a live tree into the
house at Christmas come? Today many accounts trace the beginning of the Christmas tree tradition back to pre Christian times
when Romans used evergreens, symbols of fertility and regeneration to trim their houses. However, we do not have a direct
documented link between this Roman practice and the modern
Christmas tree. References to this Roman practice may be due
more to our desire to see our Christmas customs as rooted in
ancient traditions, than to actual fact.
The modern Christmas tree began as a custom that was at first
largely limited to a single place -- the German speaking city of
Strasbourg -- where the tradition of Christmas trees seem to have
developed by the beginning of the 17th century.
The ritual began to spread to other parts of Germany only after
1750. A key date in this development may have been 1771, when
the young writer Goethe made an extended visit to Strasbourg. A
Christmas tree scene is included at a dramatic moment of a 1774
novel that established Goethe's literary reputation.
Because of Goethe and his literary colleagues the custom of
having a Christmas tree spread to other parts of Germany. By the
1830s German Protestants had taken the tree as an emblem of their
faith. (German Catholics adopted the holy manger their Christmas
icon.) Protestants have stories that explain the custom's origin. One
story attributes the invention of the Christmas tree to Martin
Luther. While walking in the German woods one Christmas Eve,
Luther had felt particularly inspired by God's work. He hoped to
convey this experience to his children, so he returned home with
an evergreen tree which he decked with candles representative of
the stars of heaven. It is a lovely story, but it is not true.
There are also various stories that describe how the Christmas
tree came to America. For example, one legend says that the first
Christmas tree was brought to the United States by Hessian soldiers
during the American Revolution. This story was reported as fact in
The Washington Post only a month ago. However, there is no
documentation to support this claim. Also, during the American
Revolution, Christmas trees had not yet become wide spread in
Germany.
Folklorists have done their best to seek out the first American
Christmas tree. Possibly as early as 1812 and 1819 an immigrant
artist from Germany drew a picture of a Christmas tree he saw
during a tour of the Pennsylvania countryside, and that picture is
preserved in his sketch books. The first existing written reference
to the Christmas tree dates from 1821. Therefore, the first American Christmas trees were probably set up by Pennsylvania Germans
sometime during the second decade of the 19th century.
There is a true story about a Unitarian minister and a Christmas
tree. It is not the first American Christmas tree, because this tree
was set up on the last day of 1835, at least fifteen years after the
German immigrants in Pennsylvania set up trees. Nevertheless, it
was one of the first, and because it is a story about a Unitarian
minister, I want to tell it this morning.
Karl Follen, as his parents named him at birth, was a descendant of the German elite, the son of a respected judge. Early in his
life Follen became a youthful revolutionary. He was a representative of the emerging liberal nationalist movement in Germany. As
a university student, Follen wrote an explosive political song. The
police arrested him for complicity in a political murder. (The court
later acquitted him). Appointed as member of the faculty at a
German University in 1820 (at the age of 24), Follen continued his
political activities. He was forced to be exiled in Switzerland,
where he received another professional position. Four years later
authorities compelled him to flee again (in the face of new charges
that he had organized a revolutionary cell). This time Follen found
refuge in America. He arrived in New York, having learned
English during the voyage. Carrying letters of introduction from the
aged Marquis de Lafayette, Follen tried to find employment in the
Boston area.
He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and married Eliza
Cabot. He formed close ties with the liberal Unitarian establishment
that dominated Harvard and Boston and found Unitarianism wholly
compatible with his own progressive Christian beliefs.
In 1830, five years after his arrival in America, Follen became
a Unitarian minister, and a U.S. citizen, and Harvard appointed him
to a full-time faculty position. A group of his admirers provided
five years of funding for a new professorship of German literature.
They expected Harvard would pick up the tab after that. Follen's
son was born in 1830, and the next year his family moved into a
new house.
However, within less than five years, the radical commitments
that had brought him to America in the first place brought him
down. This time the issue was slavery. Follen quickly sensed the
parallels between the anti slavery movement and the principles he
had stood for in Germany. He helped organize a Cambridge
Anti-Slavery Society based at Harvard. Radical abolitionism did not
sit well with the Boston Unitarian establishment. Most of Follen's
acquaintances regarded William Lloyd Garrison as a crazy man.
They warned Charles Follen that becoming an active abolitionist
would surely jeopardize his professional prospects.
In early 1835, Follen learned that his appointment at Harvard
would expire at the end of the spring semester. He and his family
(little Charley turned five that year), would be left with no source
of income. Eliza Follen may have been born into the prominent
Cabot family, but she had few resources of her own, and the family
did not come to her assistance.
His remaining admirers rescued Follen. They arranged for him
to have what was an ideal position. He would oversee the education of two children belonging to a wealthy Boston merchant,
James Perkins, who had recently died (and whose widow was
emotionally incapacitated). In return for this part-time work, Follen
was to have the use of the Perkinses' house, and the family would
pay him the comfortable annual salary of $2,000.
This time Follen's educational principles got him into trouble.
He was committed to a radical method of teaching children derived
from the work of a Swiss reformer. Follen believed children were
intrinsically perfect creatures to begin with, and that education
should therefore consist of cultivating those attributes which were
already present in their young souls. Follen wrote that he intended
to "study their natures," and "awake every dormant energy," the
two boys already possessed.
He dealt with the boys "by imposing only such rules as their
own moral sense approved." Follen shared "a ready sympathy with
all their concerns and wants, and a hearty desire to gratify all their
legitimate and innocent desires."
The Perkins family fired him in December 1835. Even liberal
Unitarians found Follen's ideas about teaching too indulgent.
About this time, in November of 1835 a woman named Harriet
Martineau came to visit. Born in 1802, Harriet Martineau was a
prominent English Unitarian intellectual. She was visiting the
United States to write a book about our country. She met and
quickly befriended Charles Follen. Follen told her that if she really
wanted to understand the central moral issue facing America she
should attend an abolitionist meeting. In response she attended an
abolitionist women's meeting, held in Boston on November 19,
1835. She came to this meeting in the role of reporter. However,
during the meeting someone passed a note to Martineau, asking her
to express her opinion of what she had heard. Martineau did so, but
only with great reluctance. On the one hand, she agreed with the
abolitionists' principles. On the other hand, she knew that making
a public gesture of solidarity with them would alienate her from
most of her American acquaintances. This would cut off her access
to most of the contacts who were her sources for the book on
America she was writing. Later she wrote: "I foresaw that almost
every house in Boston, except those of the abolitionists, would be
shut against me; that my relation to the country would be completely changed, as I should suddenly be transformed from being
a guest and an observer to being considered a missionary or a spy."
As she would acknowledge twenty years later, "The moment of
reading this note was one of the most painful of my life."
The Boston papers reported (and ridiculed) her avowal of
abolitionist sympathies, and newspapers quickly reprinted those
reports throughout the United States. Soon after her political
coming-out in November 1835, Martineau went to spend New
Year's of 1836 with the Follens. Both of them were under heavy
pressure just then; Martineau had just lost her social credibility and
Charles Follen had just lost his post as tutor to the Perkins
children. The visit was a chance to plan a strategy for what would
be (it was now clear), the abolitionist focus of the rest of
Martineau's American visit.
When Martineau arrived at the Follen's home December 31,
1835, Charles and his wife were in the front drawing room of their
house decorating a tree with seven dozen little wax candles. The
tree was the top portion of a fir or spruce and it had a toy hung
from every branch. The Follens had postponed this ritual until New
Year's Eve to adapt to Martineau's schedule. As five-year-old
Charley and two older companions approached the house, the
adults quickly closed the door to the front drawing room. They
moved into an adjacent room, where (as Martineau put it), they sat
around "trying to look as if nothing was going to happen." After
they served their visitors tea and coffee, they played a round of
parlor games. The goal was to distract the children's attention while
Charley's parents were busily lighting the candles.
Finally, they threw open the double doors and the children
poured in, their voices instantaneously hushed. "Their faces were
upturned to the blaze, all eyes wide open, all lips parted, all steps
arrested. Nobody spoke, only Charley leaped for joy." After a few
moments the children discovered that the tree "bore something
eatable," and "the babble began again." The adults told the children
to take what they could from the tree without burning themselves
on the candles. (Martineau reported that "We tall people kept
watch, and helped them with good things from the higher
branches.")
After the children had eaten their fill of the edibles, the evening
continued with dancing and mugs of "steaming mulled wine." By
eleven, all the other guests had gone home; little Charley was in
bed; and Harriet Martineau herself was left alone with the boy's
parents, Charles and Eliza Follen. The tree was a success, a time
of joy for the grownups as well as for five-year-old Charles and his
friends, the Perkins children. The whole event took place in the
Perkinses' house, where the Follens were still living. It had been a
delightful evening, and Martineau concluded her account by
predicting that the Christmas tree ritual would surely become an
established American tradition.
Martineau would always recall her American sojourn as a
profoundly transforming episode in her life. Because of Charles
Follen, She had transformed herself from a journalist into an
activist. She regarded Follen as her "very nearest friend, guide, and
guardian." To the end of her life she kept his portrait (next to one
of William Lloyd Garrison), in her parlor.
As for Charles Follen, he went on to serve as the minister of a
new Unitarian Church in Lexington, Massachusetts. In keeping with
his radical approach to everything, he insisted that the congregation
construct its sanctuary in the shape of a circle. The circle was to
show the equality of the lay members of the congregation with the
minister. The cost of a round building was beyond the means of the
new congregation. Instead they build an eight sided sanctuary, and
this became the first round Protestant worship space in America.
This eight sided Unitarian church now called "Follen Church" still
exists in Lexington, Massachusetts.
In January of 1840, Reverend Follen died in a shipboard fire
when on his way from New York to Boston. He was 44 years old.
Even in death he was controversial. When word of Rev. Follen's
death reached Boston, William Ellery Channing, the father of
American Unitarianism, agreed to officiate at Rev. Follen's
memorial service at Federal Street Church, the most important
Unitarian Church in the world. The Anti Slavery Society and Rev.
Follen's family requested the use of the church building from the
Standing Committee. Normally the Standing Committee would
have granted the request as a matter of course. However, because
of Follen's leadership in the Anti-Slavery Society, the Standing
Committee voted unanimously against holding the memorial service
in their building. The leaders of the Federal Street Church did not
wish to honor a radical reformer.
Channing had served as minister of Federal Street Church for
thirty-nine years. In defiance of the vote of the Standing Committee, the next Sunday morning he preached a memorial sermon for
his friend Rev. Follen.
To Charles Follen [Channing said] the most grievous sight
on earth was the sight of man oppressed, trodden down by
his brother. To lift him up, to make him free, to restore him
to the dignity of man . . . this seemed to him the grandest
work on earth, and he consecrated himself to it with his
whole soul.
Following the service, Channing wrote out a letter to the Standing
Committee relinquishing his salary. He stated it was his wish that
all his public functions as minister should cease.
In 1838 Harriet Martineau published her account of the Follen's
Christmas tree. In part, because of her writing, the idea of there
being an evergreen tree inside the house at Christmas became a
popular custom in our country.
This year, farmers will sell thirty-three million live Christmas trees
from lots across the United States. Members of Charles Follen's old
church in Lexington, Massachusetts sell Christmas trees on the
grounds of the Church that he served during the last years of his
life.
Today few people remember his name. Nevertheless, each Christmas when I struggle to erect a Christmas tree in my house, I
remember the life and the beliefs of Rev. Charles Follen. I
remember the deep courage that he showed by his radical belief in
the rights and dignity of every human being whatever the color of
their skin.
Sources:
Nissenbaum, Stephen, The Battle For Christmas, Vintage Books, New York,
1996, pages 176-187, 195-198.
Mendelsohn, Jack, Channing, The Reluctant Radical, Little, Brown & Co,
Boston, 1971, 268-269.
cluuc@his.com
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