The Tree of Night

 

What’s with the Christmas tree? Why do we bring a pine or spruce tree into our homes for Christmas?

The conventional answer is that it represents the night sky over Bethlehem, when Jesus was born. 

This works very well. Those round ornaments we conventionally hang in the branches: these are the planets. The Christmas lights are the stars. The silver garland is the Milky Way.

Trees are sacred almost everywhere, because they represent the night sky—the cosmic order.

However, the star on top of the tree is not really the Star of Bethlehem. The Star of Bethlehem moved. “The star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was.” Understand the tree as the spinning night sky, and the star on top is at the very point where it does not move. It is the North Star, and the trunk of the tree is the North Pole. It represents God the Father, around whom all creation revolves.

Christmas is at least in large part a celebration of the Winter Solstice, and of the turning of the year. Not that this means it is at root a “pagan” festival—there is nothing non-Christian or pagan about a reference to nature. Nature, after all, is God’s creation, and is an important way in which he speaks to us.

Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

The turning of each year is a divine parable of salvation history. Jesus’s birth is the birth of the light, corresponding to the Winter Solstice. “I am the way, the truth and the light.”