Before it carried lights and ornaments, the Christmas tree carried a story, one that has profound implications for the shitstorm we live in today. Medieval Christians had a legend that on the night Jesus was born, every tree on earth sprang into life. They said winter broke open and creation itself woke up to greet its maker.

The earliest version appears in the Pseudo-Matthew, a seventh or eighth-century text, where nature bows in reverence at holy moments. Later storytellers expanded the idea until it became a cosmic celebration. Sap rose in the tree. Frozen branches loosened. Barren limbs pushed out green shoots as if the whole world had been waiting for this birth.

Across Germany, families watched their orchards on Christmas Eve to see if any branch would bloom. In Bohemia and Moravia, people claimed ancient oaks cracked open at midnight to reveal fresh growth. In Scandinavia, fir trees were believed to stand in bright glory, already touched by Christ’s light. In England, the hawthorn blooming in winter became a sign that heaven had whispered to the soil.

These stories were never meant to explain biology. They were theology in the language of ordinary people. They were what Isaiah was talking about when he said a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse and that the desert would rejoice and blossom. The legend turned those words into a living sermon. The evergreen became a symbol of life that refuses to die when the world is cold.

That is how the Christmas tree became more than decoration. Long before it ever stood in our living rooms, it stood as a proclamation. It told the world that hope can outlast winter. It told us that life can return in the places we stopped checking. It told us that God has a habit of bringing renewal where nobody expects it.

And that is where the legend becomes a call.

The trees in these stories do not stay frozen. At the first sign of Christ, they shake off the ice and burst into life. They wake because light has come.

We could use that clarity this Christmas.

The trees of our current political reality have frozen over. The religion that once had the power to bring new life and new perspectives has dripped into icecicles. 

It’s unquestioning allegiance to political dogma that has brought a deep winter. It’s the coopting of faith by christian nationalists that has added layer upon layer of ice weighing down the limbs to the edge of breaking. Our actions have iced over our compassion, our imagination, and the world we know is possible. That ice is killing us.

We need the courage of the ancient Christmas trees in this legend. 

We need to recover the hope of a child boor to a poor, brown immigrant family to save the world. The hope that in the darkest night of occupation by an unholy force one child could change everything. We need that hope.  We need that power.

We need to harness it to give us the strength to put cracks in the ice of outrage, shatter the ice of infighting, shake off the ice of political hearings built for soundbites, and warm the ice of loyalty to party until it drips off revealing hope, partnership, and courage. It’s time to Spring forth with the buds of compassion that heals, justice that restores, truth that frees, and love that makes us whole. The new buds that grow from the deep roots of a nation of immigrants, the dream of freedom, and the hope that all people are created equal.

Because, if the trees could wake at Christmas,
we can too.