England. The first year he was in England, he obtained a fir tree and had it decorated for his family. The people of England were so impressed by this, that the idea caught on rapidly, and soon everyone in England wanted their own “Christmas tree” in their homes.
This custom slowly spread to the new world. Originally, the Puritans who founded our country banned Christmas worldly celebrations. In 1851, a Cleveland minister allowed a Christmas tree in his church and nearly lost his job because of it. During that same year, the tradition became part of the free market economy when a farmer named Mark Carr harvested and hauled two sleds of evergreen trees to New York City. In spite of the Puritans’ early resistance to the tradition, the idea of Christmas trees flourished in the United States. By 1900, one in five American homes had a Christmas tree. Christmas tree farms sprang up and farmers could barley meet the demand.
In 1890, a man by the name of F.W. Woolworth introduced to the United States the idea of decorating a tree with glass ornaments. Blown glass ornaments had long been a tradition in Europe. From 1870 to the 1930s, Germans made the finest glass ornaments of that time. German glass blowers were reported to have had nearly 5,000 different molds for variations and different styles of Christmas ornaments. At the turn of the century, there were over one hundred small glass blowing shops in Europe that were all producing Christmas ornaments. Today there are only two German glass-blowing factories that are capable of producing the precision required for popular ornament collections such as Christopher Radko.
The popularity of the Christmas tree continues to grow. The National