The first American Christmas tree was recorded in a German Moravian church settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1747. From then on, most accounts of American Christmas trees are rather spotty. It wasn’t until the 1820s that more consistent attestations of Christmas trees were being produced out of Philadelphia. In 1819, Philadelphia artist John Lewis Krimmel produced one of the first American sketches of an American family around a Christmas tree on the dinner table. The first news article on Christmas trees in a major American city can be found in an 1825 edition of Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post which described “trees visible through windows, whose green boughs are laden with fruit, richer than the golden apples of the Hesperides … ” Philadelphian Hermann Albrecht and Abram Mott are also credited for creating the first patents for Christmas tree stands on October 10, 1876. Before then, putting up a tree was literally like hell (especially considering that people experienced frequent fires since they used candles to light their trees).
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 17:06:02 +0000
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