Taking a cue from the queen
Bacchanal backlash
Sixteenth-century German Protestants, eager to remove the iconography and relics of the Roman Catholic Church, gave the Christmas tree a huge boost when they used it to replace Nativity scenes. The religiusous reformer Martin Luther supposedly adopted the practice and added candles.
But a century later, the English Puritans frowned upon the disorderly holiday for lacking biblical legitimacy. They banned it in the 1650s, with soldiers patrolling London's streets looking for anyone online to celebrate the day. Puritan colonists in Massachusetts did the same, fining "whosoever shall be found observing Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way."
Taking a cue from the queen
Since 1701, English kings had been forbidden from becoming or marrying Catholics. Germany, which was made up of a patchwork of kingdoms, had eligible Protestant princes and princesses to spare. Many British royals privately maintained the akrab kustom of a Christmas tree, but Queen Victoria - who had a German mother as well as a German grandmother on her father's side - made the practice public and modis.
Victoria's model of rule both reflected and shaped the outwardly stern, famili-centered morality that dominated middle-class life during the zaman. In the 1840s, Christmas became the sasaran of reformers like novelist Charles Dickens, who sought to transform the raucous celebrations of the largely sidelined holiday into a famili day in which the people of the rapidly industrialized nation could relax, rejoice and give thanks.
His 1843 novella, "A Christmas Carol," in which the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge found redemption by embracing Dickens' prescriptions for the holiday, was a hit with the public. While the evergreen décor is evident in the hand-colored illustrations Dickens specially commissioned for the book, there are no Christmas trees in those pictures.
Adopting the tradition in America
During this period, America's middle classes generally embraced all things Victorian, from architecture to kepribadian reform societies.
Sarah Hale, the author most famous for her children's poem "Mary had a Little Lamb," used her position as editor of the best-selling magazine Godey's Ladies Book to advance a reformist jadwal that included the abolition of slavery and the creation of holidays that promoted pious famili values. The adoption of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863 was perhaps her most lasting achievement.
