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Christmas on an archival note



Dean DeBolt wrote:

In Genesis 1:14, God said of the lights in the firmament "let them
be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years."  Con-
sequently lights are indeed signs and associated with Christmas.
One legend of the Christmas tree is that it was Martin Luther who
fashioned the first Christmas tree and decorated it with lighted
candles to indicate the stars in the sky. The first illustration that
we have of a Christmas tree printed in the United States appeared
in 1836 in Boston in the book "The Stranger's Gift."  It shows a
tree shining with lit candles.

To which David G Anderson adds:

Among the massive refugee group of those who remained loyal to Great Britain during the
American Revolution were the provincial soldier families of Sir John Johnson's King's Royal
Regiment of New York. Driven from their lands in the Mohawk Valley of New York Province, they
took refuge around the village of Sorel at the confluence of the Richelieu River with the St
Lawrence in the 14th colony of American known as Quebec.

There, in the year 1781, the Baroness Frederike von Riedesel, the high-born wife of one of King
George's Prussian generals decorated the fir tree in front of the Governor's cottage on Christmas
eve with lighted candles, which (and here we presume) would have given joy to the Mohawk-
Deutsch refugee families, my own ancestors among them, as well as the Baroness's infant
daughter, America. The Riedesels had already established a prior friendship with the Marquis de
LaFayette and Thomas Jefferson, the details of which were recounted in her missive of 1800
entitled "Auszuge aus den Briefen und Papieren des General von Riedesel und seiner Gemalinn,
gebornen von Massow..." later translated in 1827 to English and finally in a better edition by
William Leete Stone as "Letters and Journals relating to the War of the American Revolution,
and the Capture of the German troops at Saratoga" (Albany, 1867).

Archivists are in a good position to appreciate the force of the argument that Sorel, Quebec in
1781 was indeed America, and that the great public Christmas tree there belit in 1781 was the
first so recorded in the land.

Loath to leave off a good point, I hasten to speak of other Christmas icons such as: "Santa
Klaus," and his Ren (deer) Donner (Thunder) und Blitzen (Lightning) not to mention R...

Merry Christmas, one und alle...




David & Delande Anderson
Bethune-Thompson House (1784)
Williamstown, ON  K0C 2J0 Canada
   613 347-7192
(an historic property of the Ontario Heritage Foundation)

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