The Tree

Christmas and Culture -1

Since the time I can remember, Christmas means putting up a Christmas Tree [ usually artificial] and decorating it. When I was a child, I could sense that the adults in my Grandad's house in Calcutta would get a huge kick out of decorating what seemed to me an enormous tree at the time.

The tree is an essential Christmas icon to me. When in Shillong and Sikkim, I have the luxury of decorating a real pine branch, and an artificial tree, no matter how well crafted in China, cannot match up to the real thing.

The evergreen tree is a symbol of hope, ordained by my European ancestors hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. In lands where a bitter winter turns everything bare, the green pine needles speak of a spring that will follow, of colours that will return to the land.

The Tree was later on appropriated into the Christmas celebrations when my savage ancestors refused to give up their old habit of drinking and making merry during the winter solstice, ( around December 22-23)and by some happy coincidence, Holy Mother the Church (strange honorific given that all the Cardinals were men) decided that the Birthday of Jesus would be celebrated on the 25th of December.

Today, the Tree, a happily secular symbol, adorns many a house across India to signify the hope that the New Year will bring shiny fruits and gifts of prosperity and peace.

The Christmas tree is not a part of any Christian religious or ritualistic ceremony, it is basically a decoration, a cultural icon. Lakhs of Christians in India and elsewhere do not set up and decorate Christmas trees: some in Jharkhand and Orissa decorate their houses with leaves of the Ashoka tree, a symbol of prosperity and celebration pertaining totheir own cultural history.

Several Christian priests in India actually try to discourage their congregations from putting up Christmas trees, but that's a subject for another day.