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The huge holiday spectacle at Rockefeller Center in New York City has humble beginnings. According to The New York Times, the tradition started during the Great Depression in 1931, when construction workers put up a mere 20-foot tree in the plaza and decorated it with paper garlands, strings of cranberries, and tin cans. Today, a Norway spruce no taller than 100 feet is chosen every year, trucke

oncerned about the impact getting a fresh tree may have on the environment? Don't be. As Green America points out, the vast majority of cut Christmas trees come from tree farms, which "generally plant about two trees for every one they cut." If it's important to you to

It's a commonly held myth that Christmas trees are grown in all 50 states. According to a map published by NBC, there are no tree farms in New Mexico, South Dakota, or Wyoming. In fact, the country gets most of its trees from Oregon and North Carolina, the two states with the largest production of Christmas trees.

According to the National Christmas Tree Association (NCTA), 25 to 30 million live trees are harvested annually from a crop of about 350 million trees in farms across the United States. The total land needed for all those farms comes to 547 square miles—about twice the size of the greater Chicago area. Fortunately, these farms help preserve green space

These days, the most popular Christmas trees are Scotch pine, Douglas fir, Fraser fir, balsam fir, and white pine. However, in the early days before everyone settled on firs and pines, some Europeans used cherry or hawthorn trees as their Christmas greenery, according to Sandborn. The appeal of these trees was in their flowers. If you cut off a branch, br

Evergreen trees have been synonymous with Christmas for centuries. Early Romans used evergreens to decorate their temples for Saturnalia, a festival they celebrated in December. When Christians began associating the birth of Christ with these previously existing winter holidays, they picked up on the evergreen tree as a symbol of eternal life, e

One of the first Christmas tree-decorating ceremonies involved adorning a fir tree with paper flowers, singing and dancing around it, and then—brace yourself—lighting the entire thing on fire. According to The New York Times, that all took place in the town square of Riga, the capital city of Latvia, in 1510. (Although Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, claims it was the first to celebrate in 1441.

Some people say Thomas Edison himself did this, but let's not let Edison take more credit than he deserves. It was actually his colleague and friend, Edward Johnson, who first thought of putting electric lights on a Christmas tree instead of the traditional candles, according to the Library of Congress. However, the first bulb-lit tree did st

While it sounds ominous, this tradition is actually rooted in a heartwarming folktale about a poor widow who found a Christmas tree for her children. However, she had no money to decorate it, so on Christmas Eve, she went to bed crying. That night, spiders heard her tears and proceeded to cover the tree with delicate, glistening webs. S

Don't be alarmed if you see a tree hanging upside down from the ceiling. This trend actually originated in medieval times, according to The Spruce. Legend goes that a Benedictine monk used the triangle shape of the inverted tree to explain the Holy Trinity to pagans. But the idea really took off in the 1900s in Poland with podłazniczek, a custom where Polish people decorated the branches with fruit, nuts, and ribbons, then hung the tree from the ceiling!