Maybe under a thick tree
I will find my own home
Saying goodbye to bitter fate
And I may not come to you again …
It is believed that decorating a dead tree is an old Russian tradition. In fact, the New Year tree is of German origin and appeared on Russian soil recently.
1. In Russia, New Year was celebrated in the spring, on the day of the vernal equinox - the beginning of the rebirth of Nature. The birch (tree of life, love and prosperity) was the New Year's tree. The birch is the first to bloom in the spring, and is considered the focus of life-giving forces, scares away evil and brings health. After the baptism of Russia, the New Year began to be counted on March 1 according to the Julian calendar.
2. With the spread of Christianity, the basis for the holidays was not Nature and agricultural work, but "Holy Scripture", therefore, from the XIV-XV centuries, the New Year was postponed to September 1 (Orthodox New Year / Semyonov Day). It is believed that they began to decorate cherries, which were grown in special tubs for the New Year.
3. In Peter's era, the basis for the holidays was not Nature and not "sacred scripture", but the traditions of the West. Therefore, in 1699, Peter 1 replaced the Russian calendar with the Julian one, and ordered to celebrate the New Year as in Europe - January 1. Spruce becomes a New Year's tree.
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Peter adopted this innovation from Protestant Germany. Severely and for a long time he planted a new tradition (Christmas tree), since the Slavs have a spruce - a tree of death, funeral rituals are associated with it (spruce paws are thrown on the floor in the house of the deceased, they line the road to the cemetery, wreaths are made of spruce branches) By order of Peter, everyone had to decorate with whole conifers or branches - gates, streets, roads, roofs of taverns.
Thus, the tree became the main detail of the New Year's cityscape. After Peter's death, his recommendations were largely forgotten. The trees were left only to indicate drinking establishments. They tied the tree to a stake and set it on the roof or at the gates of the tavern, leaving it until next year, then the old trees were changed to new ones.
In the people, the taverns began to be called "Christmas trees". “Let's go under the tree” means going to a tavern, “raising the tree” means getting drunk, “Yelkin” means a state of alcoholic intoxication, etc.
Christmas tree
In 1818, St. Petersburg Germans began to install dead trees in their homes, like a Christmas tree. By the middle of the 19th century, the "German habit" began to spread rapidly among the capital's nobility, which was facilitated by the fashionable works of German writers "The Nutcracker" and "Lord of the Fleas".
The Weihnachtsbaum tree itself began to be called “Christmas tree” (tracing paper from German), and then simply “Christmas tree”. In the USSR, they fought against religion, so in the 20s, Christmas and the tree were banned. Christmas Day has become a regular working day.
In 1935, they decided to make the children a holiday in the Soviet style, the Christmas tree was turned into the New Year's tree familiar today, crowned with a pentagram, with which they met the New Year 1936. There was an eight-pointed star of Bethlehem on the Christmas tree.
One gets the impression that the New Year is a memorial service for Russian culture. Ends with the general chant of Jingle bells "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way!" and the removal of the body of the deceased Christmas tree. Soviet tree (New Year)
In the Russian Empire, the calendar New Year was only an echo of the great holiday of the Nativity of Christ, and the tree was originally an attribute of Christmas. In the USSR, the atheist authorities banned Christmas Day, made it an ordinary working day, and the New Year became one of the main Soviet holidays along with October and May Day.
In 1918, the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian one. Christmas has shifted from December 25 to January 7
In 1922, Christmas (December 25) was transformed into "Komsomol Christmas" or "Komsomol". On the first day, they read reports, staged anti-religious performances. On the second day, street processions were organized. On the third - a masquerade and a Christmas tree, which was named "Komsomol Christmas tree". They held processions with torches and the burning of "divine images" (icons)
In 1925, the "Komsomol Christmas" was criticized as not playing a significant role in anti-religious propaganda. A planned struggle against religion and Orthodox holidays began.
In 1929, Christmas Day was finally canceled, it became a regular working day, like January 1. The Christmas tree, which was once opposed by the Orthodox Church, has now been declared a "priestly" custom and banned.
In the evenings, the attendants walked around and peered into the windows of the apartments to see if the lights of the Christmas trees were shining there. In 1935, it was decided to rehabilitate the tree. On December 28, 1935, the newspaper Pravda published an article by P. P. Postyshev, a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. “In pre-revolutionary times, bourgeois officials always arranged a Christmas tree for their children for the New Year.
Children of workers with envy through the window looked at the Christmas tree sparkling with colorful lights and the children of the wealthy having fun around it. Why do we have schools, orphanages, nurseries, children's clubs, palaces of pioneers depriving the children of the working people of the Soviet country of this wonderful pleasure? Some, not otherwise than "left" bendingists, denounced this children's entertainment as a bourgeois venture …
So, let's organize a merry New Year party for children, arrange a good Soviet Christmas tree in all cities and collective farms. "On December 31, 1935, a new holiday appeared with the wording:" New Year tree is a holiday of a joyful and happy childhood in our country."
The Christmas tree has become not just an attribute of the Soviet New Year holiday, but also of the entire Soviet life. In 1947, January 1 again became a holiday and a day off.
Soviet tree
The “Christmas tree commission” was tasked with turning the Christmas tree into a New Year tree, “filling it with Soviet content”. If at the Christmas tree the main event was the Nativity of Christ, which filled everything with meaning and determined the scenario, then for the New Year tree new "traditions" had to be invented, and the desire to ideologize the new Soviet holiday knew no bounds.
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Spruce was traditionally considered by Russians to be a tree of death, about which there are many testimonies. There was a custom: to bury those who had strangled themselves and, in general, suicides between two trees, turning them face down.
In some places, a ban on planting food near the home was extended for fear of the death of a male family member.
It was forbidden to build houses from spruce, as well as from aspen.
Spruce branches were and are still widely used during funerals. They are put on the floor in the room where the deceased lies (recall in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades: "… Hermann decided to go to the coffin. He bowed to the ground and lay for several minutes on the cold floor strewn with fir trees."
Spruce branches line the path of the funeral procession:
A spruce tree poured sutra along the way. It is true, someone is being taken to rest!.. a dark, abundantly scattered spruce forest Along the dull road, under the weight of the grog of the silent …
Spruce twigs are thrown into a pit on a coffin, and the grave is covered with fir paws for the winter. “The connection between ate and the theme of death,” writes T. A. Agapkina, “is also noticeable in Russian wedding songs, where the spruce is a frequent symbol of an orphan bride”.
(Compare in the folklore of the Ostarbeiters, Soviet people driven to work in Germany during World War II: The time of the emergence (or assimilation from the southern Slavs) of the custom to cover the road along which the deceased is carried to the cemetery with coniferous branches (including juniper) is unknown, although references to him are already found in the monuments of Old Russian writing:
"And so Solomon began to work in the courtyard: revenge covers both with sand and spruce trees everywhere and along the passages as well" ("The Tale of Solomon", XVI-XVII centuries)
For a long time, it was not customary to plant trees near graves in Orthodox cemeteries. However, this already happened in the middle of the 19th century. “… Two young trees were planted at both ends,” writes Turgenev in Fathers and Children about Bazarov's grave.
The mortal symbolism of spruce was mastered and became widespread during the Soviet era. The spruce has become a characteristic detail of official burial grounds, first of all - Lenin's mausoleum, near which silver Norwegian spruces were planted: