The Christmas Tree in Anthroposophy

What it Means Today

Steiner's striking claim, that the lit indoor tree is barely a hundred years old while the festival around it reaches back to the oldest Mysteries, has since been confirmed by careful folklore scholarship. Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, the German folklorist and ethnologist who taught at the University of Marburg from 1961, traced the custom in her standard cultural history Das Weihnachtsfest. Eine Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte der Weihnachtszeit (1978). She located the decorated, candle-lit indoor tree in the Protestant German middle class of the early nineteenth century, carried outward from the Rhineland and Alsace into bourgeois parlours across Europe and, later, the world. Earlier traces survive in Alsatian guild and city records, and the older Paradise plays of the medieval church hung apples on an evergreen on the feast of Adam and Eve, the very day before Christmas that Steiner names. The tree Steiner read in 1906 was, on the documentary record, a recent thing dressed in very old meanings.

This is where the anthroposophical reading earns its keep. A folklorist asks when the object appeared; Steiner asks what older picture the object carries. He answered that the green tree stands for the Paradise of material nature, its lights for the spiritual Sun born at midnight, its roses for life ready to pass through death and rise again. Thalira synthesis: the Christmas tree is a young vessel for an old gnosis, a parlour ornament that still quietly stages the human being's descent from light into matter and the promise of return. In a Waldorf Advent garden, where children walk a spiral of greenery to light a single candle, that staging is acted out rather than explained, and Steiner's evergreen recovers the Mystery its candles once carried.