As the holiday season comes to a close with both Christmas and New Year’s around the corner, students at BYU–Hawaii share their memories of Christmas trees and decorations both at home and on their missions.
Weihnachten Christmas in Deutschland
“Germany is the birthplace of the Christmas tree,” according to Rahel Meyer, a sophomore from Germany majoring in communications. “When it is time to celebrate Christmas, a Christmas tree is a necessity in Germany”. Meyer explained many houses in Germany have a Christmas tree and many villages have a village Christmas tree.
“It’s always a big tradition and choosing the right Christmas tree is important. For my family, it’s really important because we love those really big and tall Christmas trees. To find the right Christmas tree we would go one whole day together to go to a big senior buy and we would search for the tree [for] five hours straight.”
Meyer described the Christmas tree in Germany as having real lights, ornaments, tinsel, angels and Christ-like decorations on the Christmas tree. She shared her memories of Christmas tree decorating traditions.
“My family would always give our Christmas tree a name. Every year we had a different Christmas tree with a different name like Bertha or something.
“The tradition in Germany, you don’t have a real Christmas without a Christmas tree,” she said. Back at home, they would have a Christmas tree decorating competition and after one and a half weeks after Christmas she noted, “We all get [the Christmas trees] together in our villages, in our own towns, or wherever we lived, and we all burned them together.”
Meyer said burning all of the Christmas trees became a special occasion with a feast during the bonfire.
Christmas trees in the U.S.
Students from the United States shared their various Christmas tree traditions. Alyssa Odom, a junior from Washington state majoring in music. Odom shared how decorating the Christmas tree was a fun family tradition she would do as a family with her siblings, and she always looked forward to it.
Back at home, her family would have their own Christmas tree tradition. “I grew up with three sisters, there are four girls in our family, and we had a tradition every year.
“My mom would buy, make or collect a new ornament for us, so we would each get a new ornament every year. However many years old we were, that’s how many personal ornaments we would have on our tree.
“We would each decorate the tree as a family, and we would all have our [own] special ornaments. We were always excited to see which one we would get every new year. That is a tradition we kept going even while I was on my mission. My mom would still mail me an ornament, so that I could decorate even though I wasn’t with the family.”
Odom explained her family would always have white lights on their Christmas tree and always had a star on top that was gold and sparkly.
“If you looked at our tree, you would just see the light [...] it would have all the fun accents of ornaments but the focus was always the light.” Because Odom’s Christmas tree focused on the light, she felt her tree was what Christmas should be about–the Savior Jesus Christ.
Sam Bybee, a senior from Oregon majoring in biology, shared a tradition he had with his family decorating their Christmas tree. “One of my memories of Christmas tree decorating is that every year we would decorate [a] Christmas tree sometime in the week after Thanksgiving. My family got together, and we would have a few boxes of ornaments that are [...] sentimental.
“Me and my brothers’ kind of hate it, but now that we are older, we cherish the memory of decorating the tree all together.”
Bybee said he used to work on a Christmas tree farm. He described his family’s Christmas tree saying, “We always get a noble fir tree, probably about seven feet tall. Not super sparse, not too spaced out, not super bushy either.”
His father used to cut down Christmas trees at the Christmas tree farm but stopped due to the cold weather and the Oregon mud, so his family would get plastic Christmas trees instead. Sharing his view on plastic Christmas trees, Bybee said they are not the same as real trees because they do not smell like Christmas.