As dark and heavy as plum pudding

Dressed up as a child-friendly, pocket-sized hardback, just the right size for a Christmas stocking and with a pretty front-cover illustration of two dear little children in a snowy fir forest, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale, £12.99) is actually a learned 90-page thesis on the history of the Christmas tree by the German author Bernd Brunner, who has also written monographs on bears, the moon and snowmen.

As it’s translated into American, we have gray, color, luster, skeptics and travelers. But rather than reading it in an American accent, I read it in a German one. The bibliography lists such formidable sounding books as Der Weinachtsbaum: Botanik und Geshichte des Weinachtsgrüns, seine Beziehung zu Volksglauben, Mythos, Kulturgeshichte, Sage, Sitte und Dichtung, and this book is in a similar vein.

And why shouldn’t it take itself seriously? If you really want to do justice to the cultural history of the Christmas tree, why should there be a limit to what is interesting and relevant? Brunner devotes a whole page to candle-holders. One section is called ‘Solid Footing: A Diversity of Christmas-Tree Stands’. In the pages on the history of the bauble, we learn that in 1870 Justus von Liebig developed a coating of silver nitrate which ‘provided the same visual effect as lead, with a much lower health risk’. (See what I mean? Are you saying ‘with a much lower health risk’ in a German accent?)

It’s all deliciously Teutonic, especially the humour. In colloquial German, Brunner tells us, tinsel is known as ‘silver-plated Sauerkraut’. As I read this I imagined being a Berlin housewife who would find that very funny. We have an anecdote about Schiller being discovered nibbling the tidbits hanging from a tree in 1793. The book widens its scope towards the end and mentions Charles Dickens, Brooklyn, Trafalgar Square, Nazis, cloning and plastic.