O Christmas Tree: A Song History
“O Christmas Tree” is the English form of the German “O Tannenbaum,” and it began as a love song rather than a carol.[1][2] Songs about the fir tree already had a long history in Germany by the 1800s; a pamphlet printed in Munich in 1642, for instance, carried a sacred song about a fir tree.[1] Around 1820 the Potsdam educator August Zarnack published a version in his collection of folk songs for schools, setting the tree’s faithfulness against an unfaithful sweetheart.[1][2]
Winslow Homer, The Christmas Tree, from Harper’s Weekly, wood engraving, December 25, 1858 (detail). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
A few years later the Leipzig teacher Ernst Anschütz kept Zarnack’s opening stanza and reworked the love song into a Christmas song for children, printed in his Musikalisches Schulgesangbuch (1824).[1][2] This was the same period in which the decorated Christmas tree was finding its way into middle-class German homes.[1] Zarnack and Anschütz both sang their words to the melody of a song toasting the journeyman carpenter in the widely reprinted Mildheimisches Liederbuch.[1][2] The tune is also known from the old student song “Lauriger Horatius.”[2][3]
That same tune has carried many other texts. In the United States the best-known example is “Maryland, My Maryland,” a pro-Confederate poem written by James Ryder Randall in 1861 and sung to “Lauriger Horatius”; it served as Maryland’s official state song from 1939 until the legislature repealed it in 2021.[3]
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