Like a good many devilish things, the accusation that Christmas trees are rooted in paganism is—in addition to being horticulturally incorrect—also doctrinally backwards. 180° backwards. Christmas trees are not so much copies of pagan practices as the pagan rituals were corruptions of God's original creation.
I have met more than my share of self-appointed Scrooges and Grinches who cannot get their seasonal jollies by baking gingerbread men or sucking on candy canes like normal people. No, they find their holiday cheer by putting a bug in your hum as they self-righteously announce "The decoration of Christmas trees is a survival of pagan tree veneration," or smugly advance their rhetorical query, "Do you really want to give the impression that you are worshipping a tree?" Then, while you are staggering on the defensive, they bring out the coup de grâce, the deathblow of argumentation; they quote scripture.
For the customs of the peoples are delusion;
Because it is wood cut from the forest,
The work of the hands of a craftsman with a cutting
tool.
They decorate it with silver and with gold;
They fasten it with nails and with hammers
So that it will not totter.
But they are altogether stupid and foolish
In their discipline of delusion—
their idol is
wood!
Jeremiah 10:3, 4, 10 NASB
Jeremiah does state that the heathen nations in the vicinity of ancient Judah decorated trees in their polytheistic rites of worship. So now, please explain the 2000 year gap that shows how this Babylonian custom overcame the language barrier, was transported to another continent, and carried on until 1521 in Alsace, (then, a district of the Holy Roman Empire; present-day, the region around the French and German border) where the first occurrence of a Christmas tree is recorded.
While you are working on finding the missing links for the evolution of the Christmas tree that way, I will tell you how the medieval Christian church in Europe was educating the illiterate peasantry about sin and redemption. They were putting on plays. One of the most popular dramas was the Paradise play that told the story of Adam and Eve's fall and subsequent ejection from the Garden of Eden. The staging was usually simple; often, the only item on the set was a fir tree with fruit tied to its boughs. Although these plays could be given any time, some dates were timelier than others. The Passion play depicting Jesus' crucifixion was usually given in the spring; plays about the revelations that Jesus shared with St. John were commonly held about the time of his feast day in late June. And this play with the paradise tree was often performed around December 24 because it was the feast day of Adam and Eve. If you are looking for a custom from which the modern Christmas tree could have developed, then this one fits the timing, the geography, and the culture far better than Canaanite idol worship ever did.
After a couple of days spent researching the so-called pagan beginnings of the Christmas tree, I began noticing a pattern; the overwhelming majority of claims for the pagan origins of Christmas were also Catholic-bashing articles. These generally focused more on date setting and on claims of "making up" a feast not specifically prescribed in the Gospels. Since neither of those are Christmas tree specific, I will address them in a separate post. What is noteworthy, however, is that Christmas trees first became popular during the span of the Protestant reformation, which is fairly strong circumstantial evidence that Christmas trees did not have a pagan origin.
The Celts and Druids were into fantastical wood lore. On the European continent, sacred groves were common among both the Scandinavian and Germanic tribes. The Greeks had their wood sprites and dryads. The sakaki is an evergreen tree used in sacred rituals of Japanese mythology. India has its kalpa-vriksha, a wishing tree. The African baobab tree is associated with a rich and complex history that blends fact with folklore. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible summarizes, "Tree-worship may be traced from the interior of Africa not only into Egypt and Arabia, but also onward uninterruptedly into Palestine and Syria, Assyria, Persia, India, Tibet, Siam, the Philippine Islands, China, Japan, and Siberia, also westward into Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and other countries."¹
(Curiously, the one area of the ancient world where tree worship was less common was among the Native Americans, who were also the most geographically separated from their contemporaries. And while they still had their totem poles and prayer sticks, in the absence of a written language, those were used principally as memory devices. As a generalization, trees were considered as gifts of the Great Spirit for healing and were not directly worshiped.)
Why did the heathen begin using trees for worship? I have come to believe that the answer for that centers—literally centers—on the Garden of Eden. "and Jehovah God caused to sprout from the ground every tree desirable for appearance, and good for food, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Genesis 2:9. In time, Adam and Eve's eyewitness account of these trees would be imbued with mysticism.
Ask the Rabbi² estimates world population at the time of the Tower of Babel at over 920,000 people, and bases this on his timeline of 339 years between disembarking the ark and the dispersion at Babel. Andrew Snelling,³ using a 101 year calculation for that period, figures a 9,000 person minimum. Either way, it leaves a rapidly expanding youthful population, which has very few elders to pass along the knowledge of God. (And at least one of those was drunk for a spell!) In a world with harsher climatic conditions, little-to-no wealth laid up for a jump-start inheritance, altered nutritional needs, and the time-stresses inherent in raising children, it would be fairly safe to assume that some details about the trees of Eden are going to slip some minds, some will be embellished by some others, and that some of the second- and third-generation children who never knew life in the old world will decide that the old geezers don't know what they are talking about. Satan, who was in Eden and knew better, could spin a confusing web of fables and disinformation to misdirect mankind into worshiping the creation rather than the creator. cf Romans 1:25.
Like the Doctrine of Evolution, history and archaeology have provided some metaphorical fossils that could be interpreted to support the notion that the Christmas tree grew from pagan origins, but there are missing links in that record. Other than saying, 'It surely looks possible,' the theory cannot be proven. The true believers who carry the torch of Truth across the generations are not going to willingly copy a heathen practice. Give the reformers some credit and exercise the wisdom of Gamaliel here: if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. Acts 5:38. Christmas trees have been around for almost five centuries now; if the original intent was to mock God with tree-worship, the tradition would not have survived, at least not outside a few cults.
And there is another reason that deconstructs the possibility that my Christmas tree could be an idol. I have been taught since childhood that it represents New Life, both the new life of a baby in a stable and the new life He would purchase with blood when He became a man. It has always been this way for me. It wasn't until I was well into my teens that I learned that the Druids thought of a fir tree as a sacred wood, so I definitely could not have retroactively made the Christmas tree into an idol. It wasn't until sometime later that I read an article by a wiccan author who gleefully crowed that they had "infiltrated" Christianity with tree-worship, without providing a shred of evidence that Christians are worshiping trees. You cannot take a snapshot of an "effect" and then go to your smorgasbord of "causes" to pick one that suits your worldview. Those are straw man arguments that do not prove a thing.
But mostly, my Christmas tree is not an idol because I do not idolize it.
¹ Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, Genesis of Earth and Man, p. 139
² Ask the Rabbi http://www.jewishanswers.org/ask-the-rabbi-3463/noah-tower-of-babel-population-growth/?p=3463
³ Snelling, Andrew. Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation, & the Flood. Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research, 2009. p. 289
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