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Sacred Trees and Colonizers
Originally published in my Facebook post December 26 2020.
I learned recently that during the European winter solstice celebrations, Indigenous tribes in Northern Europe worshipped a particular evergreen tree. Some tribes considered the tree to be a goddess. They would go into the forests where the sacred trees grew, bring candles, offerings, say prayers while kneeling before those sacred roots that gave life even in the dead of winter.
When the Christian missionaries and colonizers came along centuries later, they coopted that tradition by cutting that sacred tree down and calling her a CHRISTMAS TREE (because Jesus who lived his entire life in the Middle East was going to have any connection to a Native evergreen tree from Northern Europe). The idea of a Christmas tree only became popular in England when Queen Victoria and her consort the German Prince Albert, imported the idea from Germany, where it came from. Queen Victoria and her government greatly expanded the British empire, by the way. They cut down trees everywhere for profit.
White European descendants: A sacred tree that was worshipped by your Indigenous ancestors was turned, by colonizers, into a tree that the Europeans grew solely for the purpose of cutting down and exploiting.
