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Christmas Tree Day
"🎶 O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree
How lovely are thy branches
O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree
How lovely are thy branches."
~ Traditional
Counting down to Christmas! Pinecones, nature’s ornaments, adorn the evergreen pine during Yuletide—a favorite tree for holiday decorating, alongside fir and spruce, both indoors and out. The modern tradition of decorating Christmas trees traces its roots to western Germany, where a medieval play about Adam and Eve featured a “paradise tree,” a fir adorned with apples to symbolize the Garden of Eden. Over time, families began setting up their own paradise trees on Christmas Eve, the feast day of Adam and Eve, embellishing them with candles and communion wafers to represent Holy Communion and Christ as the light of the world. By the 1800s, Christmas trees in Europe were decorated with candle-lit branches, handmade ornaments, cookies, and other treats. The tradition gained widespread popularity in the English-speaking world after an 1840s illustration of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert showed the royal family gathered around a beautifully decorated tree, a custom Albert introduced from his German heritage. This exquisite tartan captures the pine’s natural winter beauty, as if waiting for a perfect frosting of snow. 💚 🤎 💙 💚🎄
Christmas Tree Day marks the day and period around which many people choose to decorate trees with lights and ornaments, both indoors and out.
The members of the pine family (pines, spruces, firs, cedars, larches, etc...) are popular choices for Christmas trees and for decorations associated with winter festivals predating the common era.
The pines have cones that are imbricate (with scales overlapping each other like fish scales). The scales are spirally arranged in Fibonacci number ratios.
Because of their widespread occurrence, conifer cones have been a traditional part of the arts and crafts of cultures where conifers are common. Examples of their use includes seasonal wreaths and decorations, fire starters, bird feeders, toys, etc. An intriguing fact about pine cones is that they open and close based on their level of dryness.
Because of this you can use some species of pine cones to predict the weather. Pinecones are the procreative parts of pine trees. Male versions produce pollen, and pollenated female forms yield seeds. Under dry conditions, the outer parts of the cones' scales dry more than the inner parts, causing the cone to open as dry, calm weather provide a better environment for seed dispersal.
In wet weather, the scales absorb moisture and swell shut, shielding the seeds until dryer days. Pinecones continue to exhibit this behavior even off the tree.
By Carol A.L. Martin, this tartan uses the blues and greens of the tree's needles with interspersed colours of the pine cones.
For a great science project to use a standing pinecone as a hygrometer to measure humidity levels, click the pinecones!