Question: This may seem like a silly question, because Christmas trees are Christmas trees, at least that's what I thought until I started hearing the term "holiday tree." Is nothing immune from the PC bug? But maybe they haven't always been "Christmas trees," either, in which case I can try and keep an open mind. So what are the facts? If I start a campaign to "preserve the original name of the Christmas tree" am I barking up the wrong tree?Answer: As far as we can tell, Christmas trees have always in the past been "Christmas trees." They were never, for example, known instead as "yule trees." "Yule" and "Christmas" are both very old words, but just about the time trees were getting popular in England and America, "yule" was beginning to sound a little quaint, even in England where it predominated.
Christmas trees did exist in America as early as the 17th century, long before they were introduced in England. German immi-grants would have brought the custom from their country, where the trees had been popular since the early 16th century. But the trees didn't even begin to catch on here among a wider population until the end of the 18th century. At first they had no particular name. A Mrs. Papendick wrote in her journal in 1789, "This Christmas Mr. Papendick proposed an illuminated tree according to the German fashion."
The term "Christmas tree" doesn't seem to have gained widespread use until close to the middle of the 19th century. In fact, indirect references like Mrs. Papendick's are all we find in print until 1830, when the actual term "Christmas tree" is first known to have appeared in black and white. And in those early days "Christmas tree" was frequently enclosed in quotation marks, if not couched in a phrase such as "what he termed a `Christmas tree.' " But by the end of the Civil War the Christmas-tree custom had been so widely adopted by Americans that the term was almost universally known. As one publication put it at the time, "the stocking hanging system has exploded in favor of the Christmas tree."
The occasional substitution of "holiday tree" for "Christmas tree" goes back at least 20 years. The term predominates in, but is not exclusive to, references to publicly displayed trees; it has even (though rarely) been used in referring to the National Christmas Tree in Washington, D.C., as the "National Holiday Tree."
Question: Could you please explain the origin of the word "tawdry"?
Answer: It's a complicated story. There was a queen of Northumbria in the 7th century named Etheldreda who renounced her husband and her royal position to become a nun. As the abbess of a monastery in the Isle of Ely, she was renowned for her saintliness. Tradition has it that she died from a swelling in her throat, which she attributed to a judgment on her fondness for wearing necklaces in her youth.
Following her death, a shrine was dedicated to Etheldreda, who eventually became known as St. Audrey, and it became one of the principal sites of pilgrimage in England.
Every year on Oct. 17, a fair was held in St. Audrey's honor. Sold at these fairs were all sorts of cheap trinkets, toys and jewelry, as well as a type of necklace called "St. Audrey's lace." By the 17th century, this name had become shortened to "tawdry lace." Eventually, "tawdry" came to be applied to the various other cheap articles sold at these fairs and so developed a noun sense of "cheap showy finery," as well as the more familiar adjectival use to mean "cheap and gaudy in appearance and quality."