Author: Erick San Luis
A centuries old tradition
Nothing elicits quite the same amount of joy as a beautifully decorated Christmas tree, such as Marquis Reforma's.
It may seem like it's always been a tradition for families to hang ornaments, tinsel, and lights from evergreens. Still, those festive firs have only become a holiday's custom stateside in the last couple hundred years. We leave you 4 fun facts about Christmas trees to spark the conversation while hanging the family's ornaments:
Early Romans were the first to celebrate with pines.
Evergreen trees have been synonymous with Christmas for centuries. Early Romans used evergreens to decorate their temples for Saturnalia, a festival they celebrated in December. When Christians adopted the winter holidays, they picked up on the evergreen tree to symbolize eternal life.
Queen Victoria popularized the Christmas tree
Strict religious attitudes about Christmas trees had finally begun to soften by the early 1800s. It wasn't until Queen Victoria and the royal family were sketched next to the household fir tree in 1848 that they became popular in the English-speaking world.
Thomas Edison's colleague was the first to put electric lights on a Christmas tree.
Edward Johnson, Thomas Edison's colleague, and friend, first thought of putting electric lights on a Christmas tree instead of the traditional candles. However, the first bulb-lit tree did stand in Edison's power plant in Manhattan in 1882, set on a rotating box to see all 80 blinking red, white, and blue lights. No one had seen anything like it.
Christmas trees take nearly a decade to grow
Your average six- to seven-foot Christmas tree takes between eight and ten years to grow. Along the way, it will be sheared to keep its conical shape for more effortless decorating. For every tree that's cut down, farmers usually plant up to three seedlings. Of the approximately 2,000 seedlings planted per acre, about one-half to three-quarters will make it to maturity.
Nothing elicits quite the same amount of joy as a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. We invite you to visit our traditional Christmas tree at Marquis Reforma's hotel lobby from November 27th to the end of the season. -E.S.