Who was Wilhelm Mannhardt and how did he know anything about Christmas trees and maypoles.

The first question that I had when I read Mannhardt’s theory on the Christmas tree was “who was this guy?”  Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831-1880) was a student of Jacob Grimm - the same Jacob Grimm who had terrorized generations of children with his scary German folk tales.  Mannhardt was an anthropologist.  His main area of interest was folklore and folk traditions as they pertained to pre Christian societies in Europe.  During his lifetime he collected stories and recorded folk traditions throughout Europe.  He sent out thousands of questionnaires on local traditions and recorded the results in a masterwork titled Wald und Feldkultes or “Forest and Field Cults”.  Sadly, he was plagued by poor health his whole life, limiting his research, and died at age 49 before he could complete his work.

I wondered what information Mannhardt had about the maypole which no one else seemed to know.  Quite a bit, it turned out - he was the preeminent expert on maypoles in our modern era and a large section in Forest and Field Cults is dedicated to them.  I decided to look into what he had discovered to see if I could establish a link between the maypole and the Christmas tree.  As I looked at what he said about maypoles, I realized that the maypole he was describing was only distantly recognizable compared with what we know as a maypole these days.

Where did the information used in this blog come from?

 I realized early on that I could not use contemporary sources to answer the question of where the tree came from - they were entirely useless.  I decided to try 2 strategies that had not been explored to find an answer as to where the Christmas tree had come from.  Firstly, I would find the earliest records of Christmas trees and try to figure out why people had started putting them up.  This proved to be more difficult than I had expected - there were several trees billed as “the first tree ever”.  Secondly, I started plumbing sources that nobody else had used to try to work out where the tree had come from.  I began reading histories written by Roman and Greek authors, early medieval church records, hagiographies, and the Bible looking for any shred that might tell me about Christmas tree.  I looked at German mythology and folklore as many of the purportedly first Christmas trees come from a region in western Germany on the border with France.  I also looked at some modern research on tree worship in the Middle East and German research on the Christmas tree.  The German research was particularly helpful - the first trees pop up mostly in Germany so there has been a lot of interest there on where it came from.  The information presented in this blog is the result of over 6 years of reading these sources.

While looking at German folklore I came across an explanation for the tree that I had never seen before and I could find nowhere on the internet.  In the late 19th century, a German anthropologist named Wilhelm Mannhardt had hypothesized that the modern Christmas tree had originally been derived from a decorated tree called a “maypole”.  I decided to test his hypothesis.  Following the trail of evidence based on Mannhardt’s research eventually led not only to the origin of the Christmas tree but to a series of monstrous crimes against humanity.  Crimes that had subsequently been covered up and scrubbed from history so that almost no one knows about them - crimes were so vast and impactful that they continue to reverberate, shaping not only the Christmas tree but the modern world around us.

What is this blog and why did I start it?

 I have always been intrigued by the Christmas tree.  It can be found around the world as a popular symbol of Christmas.  There has always seemed to me that there was something missing or wrong about it.  What does a decorated tree have to do with the birth of Christ?  There has been speculation that the tree had originally been a heathen tradition but there was scant information to prove this.

My curiosity started in grade 2 when I was given a coloring page just before the Christmas break.  It was a joyful scene of the Nativity with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in the manger.  Beside them was a decorated conifer tree growing out of a sand dune.  “What in the heck is that doing there?” I thought to myself.  Even in the second grade I knew that fir trees did not grow in the desert - the picture had an air of wrongness to it.  The wrongness of the tree was to grow stronger over time as I learned more about it.  I began to read theories on the origins of the tree.  Most of them seemed, at best, implausible.  I also began to collect books on the matter.  None of them were helpful - most came to the conclusion that the tree was either 1) a purely Christian invention or 2) that there was not enough information to tell where the tree had come from.  The idea that the tree was entirely Christian seemed unlikely and the supposed lack of historical documents on the tree also looked improbable- surely there had been people keeping records as the first trees went up around the 16th century which could point to its origin.  As it turned out none of what my books said was true - the tree was not Christian in origin and there was, in fact, a historical record that pointed to its origins.  What was true is that none of what I assumed to be factual about the tree was correct.  I had been lied to since the 2nd grade.