Everyone knows that the standard Christmas colors are green and red, and if pressed, some of us might come up with a few others, especially white and maybe blue. Thank Elvis for that last one, but why the rest?
You might think that the reasons are obvious, and you’d basically be right. But let’s explore some more complex reasons.
Beyond the pale
The color white’s association with Christmas remains pretty clear: snow. Since Christmas occurs during the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere (where most cultures celebrating Christmas originate), snow naturally gets associated with the holiday. Even in places like southern California, where it hardly ever snows.
If you want to stretch it a bit, white colors most mistletoe berries, which are intimately associated with Christmas. And here’s an even more esoteric connection: white=innocence=Baby Jesus, no?
Deck the walls with boughs of…
…holly, of course. We all know holly: it’s an evergreen with glossy, dark green leaves and red berries. No doubt it was chosen in ancient times (along with conifer boughs) to decorate halls in the winter. Green shows that life flourishes here even in the cold dreary months of winter, and it’s tough enough to make it through the cold, dark months.
It makes sense, then, that red and green symbolize Christmas; especially once the old German Christmas tree tradition became common. And certainly that was part of it…but the Christmas colors of red and green aren’t solely derived from holly sprigs.
Well, don’t leave us hanging!
Oh, the traditional colors of Christmas are symbolic, all right. At a deeply Christian level, green symbolizes eternal life…and admittedly, this equates to the evergreen’s ability to retain its color throughout the year. Red symbolizes nothing less than blood: the blood Jesus shed during His crucifixion.
If that weren’t enough, historical reasons explain that green and red became our standard colors of Christmas. Remember the Christmas tree, O Tannenbaum? In early Christmas pageants depicting the story of Adam and Eve, an apple tree with red fruit and green leaves represents the Tree of Life.
Of course they made do with pine trees that they tied apples to, because apple trees don’t keep their leaves all winter. The result was a green conifer with red decorations hanging all over. Sound familiar?
Eventually, people started erecting apple-hung conifers in their homes around Christmas time. Apparently, this was one of the roots of tradition that results in the modern Christmas tree.
There are other roots, which I’ll discuss at another time–but this does appear to be one of the reasons red and green became Christmas colors!
