Can we not celebrate Christmas without trees being cut down?
A question that kept turning in my mind when I began to wonder about the source of this custom, which has grown rampant of late and has taken on such importance among us that it has nearly threatened to drain our forest wealth dry and to stand in the way of the efforts being made to reforest Lebanon and plant its mountains with trees.
There is no doubt that this custom is an intruder upon our land. Our forefathers did not know it, nor did the generation before last, and its age here is no greater than the age of the Friends of the Tree Association. It is as if it came into being to demolish what the Friends of the Tree build, and as if the members of this association, by their part in the cutting of holiday trees, were taking back with one hand what they give with the other.
I go back in memory to a day when children prepared for Christmas by planting grains of wheat, lentils, and broad beans in small round dishes, sprinkling water over them every day, so that they grew in a way that dazzled the eye, their green waving in windows and on balconies, a herald of good and an omen of blessing. The little ones would gather around them rejoicing, and receive beside them first lessons in the secrets of plants and the wonders of nature.
Nor did their activity stop at this point. Some of them would turn to preparing the figures of the manger scene themselves: they would go out to the edge of the village, where they gathered lumps of clay and kneaded them with deft hands to make rough, artless statues of Mary, Joseph, the Child, and the shepherds. Others had for their share the making of sheep from wood covered with cotton, or from wool wound about pieces of cardboard or stuffings of straw. And on the appointed day they would all gather to build the manger whose materials they had made ready, relying on themselves, practicing in art personal methods they had never been taught in kindergarten.
That was before there assailed us from the West the flood of toys, ornaments, figures, ribbons, and glittering balls, and with them the imitation of the
Christmas tree, whose use was confined at first to a few houses; then the thing spread, imitation did its work, and getting hold of a tree became indispensable to celebrating the holiday — because it is a prevailing fashion that enslaves us like all the other fashions.
In vain do the government and the Friends of the Tree Association try to regulate the cutting: they are powerless to prevent the destruction, the theft, and all the other acts of trespass into which this profitable trade tempts men.
One well-informed man told me that a certain person obtained a license from the government to cut a thousand trees from one of the woods — and cut ten thousand. And those who follow his example are many. Not to mention the trees that are carried off and sold by smuggling, and those in whose cutting no agricultural law and no rule of the craft is observed.
The custom of cutting trees for Christmas has been brought in from lands thick with woods and rich in forests — like the countries of northern Europe — where cutting does not affect the density of the trees or the speed of their growth. Not so the countries of the Mediterranean, where woods are few and trees grow with difficulty because their enemies are so many: torrents that sweep the soil into the sea, drought that lasts through most of the months of the year, and then the herds of goats that ravage the plants before they can grow.
It is, in short, a custom with no tie to our land or to our traditions. And beyond this it carries no spiritual meaning and no religious value. It is rather (according to the inquiry of Dr. Anis Frayha) a custom pagan in origin, adopted by the ancients when they believed in gods of evil and feared their unseen spirits roaming about them in the long winter nights; so they would cut branches, hang upon them the amulets that drive away evil spirits, and set them on the doors and inside the houses.
But if we must have a tree for the holiday, why do we not plant one in our homes — in a tin or a wooden box that we set on the balcony or in a corner of the house — so that the tree grows with the children year by year and becomes the Christmas tree we planted with our own hands, and we are spared disfiguring the woods and violating their sanctity?
In this way we teach the children to plant instead of cutting, and we perform a humane act that redeems our attachment to a custom carrying nothing of the spirit of Christmas.