Universal signal of Xmas distress?
To begin with, don't believe what you read on the internet, including this blog post you are reading now. For example, when did the "upside down Christmas tree" start?
Legend has it that England's St. Boniface was furious when he saw pagans revering an oak tree in 7th-century Germany where he was teaching. He cut it down, but a fir tree sprang up on the same spot. Boniface used the triangular shape of this fir tree as a tool to describe the Holy Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
The pagans who had been converted to Christianity began to revere the fir tree as God's Trinity Tree. By the 12th century, it was being hung upside down from ceilings at Christmastime in Central and Eastern Europe as a symbol of Christianity and God the Son becoming a man because it resembled the shape of Christ being crucified.
No, probably not (how an upside down tree=Holy Trinity is not explained because, you know, symbolism is weird 'n' shit), because the Christmas Tree has nothing to do with pagan celebrations. If St. Boniface was preaching in Germany in the 7th century, nobody was observing Christmas except as a church mass devoted to the birth of Christ. They sure weren't wassailing or remembering Saturnalia (in Germany? 900 years after the observance died out in Rome?) or doing anything we associate with Christmas. Christmas trees didn't enter Christmas observances until Germany in the 16th century, or about 400 years later than the fir trees supposedly being decorated in "Central and Eastern Europe." And the tree came from the Garden of Eden, not pagan rituals (the Druids were the tree worshippers; they lived in England, not Germany). It was the Paradeisbaum in German morality plays, and got connected to Christmas because the tradition of observing the feast days of Adam and Eve fell in the time around the observance of Christmas, an observance not settled on until about the 6th century. And even then, as I say, it was a religious service or feast day on the church calendar; not a season of 12 days of Christmas and the like.
Oh, and "legend has it" is the "some people say" of stories about history with no basis in history at all.
I don't know how long people have been hanging Christmas trees from the ceiling, but I remember it from my childhood as a quirk some people did just to be different. The trees you can get now are simply inverted artificial trees on a floor-mounted stand. Kind of a weak cousin, if you ask me, to hanging a live tree upside down from the ceiling and proceeding to decorate it. If my mother had only kept our aluminum tree from my youth, I'd hang it upside down this year (if I could glue the branches into the pole, that is). But just as Irving Berlin started the War on Christmas with the help of Bing Crosby in the 1940's ("Holiday Inn," if you don't catch the reference by now), so too people in the '60's were attacking Donald Trump and America by hanging the trees the wrong way up.
Here's Fox News and Corey Lewandowski getting offended by upside-down Christmas trees.— Melanie Schmitz (@MelsLien) November 24, 2017
"I am sure that [the first family] will not be turning the tree upside down. They like this country's traditions." pic.twitter.com/TYiFCRyZnQ
Don't we have Roy Moore to worry about? Or how store clerks greet us this month?
*What? It was the best I could do!
I figure pretty much that you can associate with Corey Lewandowski is going to turn out to be bogus if not a lie. The guy is an incarnation of mendacity.
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