The evergreen fir tree has traditionally been used to celebrate winter festivals, pagan and Christian, for thousands of years.
Pagans used branches of it to decorate their homes during the winter solstice, as it made them think of the spring to come.
The Romans used fir trees to decorate their temples at the festival of Saturnalia.
Christians use it as a sign of everlasting life with God.
Nobody is really sure when fir trees were first used as Christmas trees.
It probably began in Northern Europe about 1 000 years ago.
Many early Christmas trees seem to have been hung upside down from the ceiling using chains, hung from chandeliers or lighting hooks.
Other early Christmas trees, across many part of Northern Europe, were cherry or hawthorn plants, or a branch of the plant, that were put into pots and brought inside, so they would hopefully flower at Christmas time.
If you could not afford a real plant, people made pyramids of woods and they were decorated to look like a tree with paper, apples and candles.
Sometimes they were carried around from house to house, rather than being displayed in a home.
It is possible that the wooden pyramid trees were meant to be like paradise trees.
These were used in medieval German mystery or miracle plays that were acted out in front of churches on Christmas Eve.
In early church calendars of saints, 24 December was Adam and Eve’s day.
The paradise tree represented the Garden of Eden.
It was often paraded around the town before the play began, as a way of advertising the play.
The plays told Bible stories to people who could not read.
The first documented use of a tree at Christmas and New Year celebrations is in a town square of Riga, the capital of Latvia, in 1510.
In the square there is a plaque which is engraved with “The First New Years Tree in Riga in 1510”, in eight languages.
The tree might have been a paradise tree, rather than a real tree.
Not much is known about the tree, apart from being attended by men wearing black hats, that after a ceremony burnt the tree.
The first first person to bring a Christmas tree into a house, in the way we know it today, may have been the 16th century German preacher, Martin Luther.
A story is told that, one night before Christmas, he was walking through the forest and looked up to see the stars shining through the tree branches.
It was so beautiful that he went home and told his children that it reminded him of Jesus, who left the stars of heaven to come to earth at Christmas.
Another story says that St Boniface of Crediton, a village in Devon, UK, left England and travelled to Germany to preach to the pagan German tribes and convert them to Christianity.
He is said to have come across a group of pagans about to sacrifice a young boy while worshipping an oak tree.
In anger, and to stop the sacrifice, St Boniface is said to have cut down the oak tree and to his amazement a young fir tree sprang up from the roots of the oak tree.
St Boniface took this as a sign of the Christian faith and his followers decorated the tree with candles so that St Boniface could preach to the pagans at night.
There is another legend, from Germany, about how the Christmas tree came into being, it goes:
Once on a cold Christmas Eve night, a forester and his family were in their cottage gathered round the fire to keep warm.
Suddenly there was a knock on the door.
When the forester opened the door, he found a poor little boy standing on the door step, lost and alone.
The forester welcomed him into his house and the family fed and washed him and put him to bed in the youngest son’s own bed, who had to share with his brother that night.
The next morning, Christmas morning, the family was woken up by a choir of angels and the poor little boy had turned into Jesus, the Christ Child.
The Christ Child went into the front garden of the cottage and broke a branch off a fir tree and gave it to the family as a present to say thank you for looking after him.
So ever since then, people have remembered that night by bringing a Christmas tree into their homes and handing out presents.
