From satellite, you can spot them in the green speckles.
Christmas Tree Farm.
Christmas Tree Farm. Christmas tree far- Actually, that's Mount Rushmore.
Christmas Tree Farm. Let's get to it.
Why do people have Christmas trees in their house?
They aren't in the Christian Bible.
And it's such a new tradition that only one of these four guys had one in the White House.
The real story of Christmas trees involves a lost Grand Duchy, 1840 influencers,
and the unlikely birth of a custom you can see from space.
Christmas tree like stuff has been going on for a while,
as imagined in this picture of the pagan Roman Saturnalia.
But by the 1500s and 1600s, it had become a Germanic custom
that included this song about how awesome fir trees are. (O Tannenbaum plays)
It was
big in northern states, including the Duchy, where Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was from.
Charlotte was a princess from a relative backwater, but that didn't stop her from marrying Britain's King George
the Third, the guy who most Americans know for losing to America.
With her, Charlotte brought the German tradition of hanging a yew branch in the living room.
And later she also put up a Christmas tree.
But Christmas trees were still mainly a weird German thing.
It took a new era to bring the Christmas tree mainstream.
This is a diary entry from Charlotte's granddaughter, Queen Victoria, when she was a 13 year old girl.
If you can't read it, it says “all the presents being placed round the tree.”
That entry is from 1832.
So the Christmas tree was a royal custom already, thanks to Charlotte, but it was reinforced
by Victoria's 1840 marriage to her German cousin, Prince Albert.
This kicked off perfect conditions for the Christmas tree to go worldwide.
In America, booming German immigration in the 1840s added a huge German cultural influence to the United States.
At the same time, in England, Christmas was becoming a more significant holiday with Charles Dickens’
“A Christmas Carol,” some of the first Christmas cards,
and publishers like the Illustrated London News defining mass Media with huge circulations.
In 1848, they printed this illustration of Albert and Victoria around their beautiful Christmas tree.
This picture was like a match to the spread of German Christmas around the world.
In America, it even showed up in an influential women's magazine two years later, albeit with some 1840s
Photoshopping.
See how Albert's mustache and Victoria's tiara are gone?
As early as 1850 in America, the Christmas tree trade
was profitable, as traders brought them from the country into the city.
The Christmas tree didn't have a flawless ride.
Teddy Roosevelt, for one, didn't like them because they were a waste of trees.
His son had to sneak one into a White House closet.
but it became a tradition in houses big and small.
It's a custom that Queen Charlotte from Mecklenburg-Strelitz brought with her to England.
And it goes on today.
Just outside Charlotte, North Carolina, in Mecklenburg County, you'll find Christmas tree farms
that you can see from space.