A fir tree mounted in the living room and decorated with electric lights, glass balls, wicker and paper ornaments and maybe a cranberry string and some tinsel is really the central figure of Christmas celebrations nowadays. But Christmas trees as we know them have not been around very long in comparison to the roughly 2,000 years since Christ’s actual birth.

Evergreens were used as symbols of renewal in winter solstice rituals long before Jesus was born. The celebration of his birth in December (rather than spring, the season in which scholars believe he actually was born) probably began sometime in the 300s A.D. to accord with the rituals. By about 1100, when the church had taken its mighty grip on virtually every aspect of European life, Advent celebrations in northern Europe included a play in which a fir tree represented the Tree of Knowledge and came to symbolize spiritual renewal through Christ.

About 400 years later, when Renaissance philosophers, scientists, explorers, artists and religious reformers were reinventing ideas of our place in the world, the first records of Christmas trees in homes appear. According to several Internet sources, the first known decorated Christmas tree was in Riga, Latvia, in 1510, and the tradition probably was under way in Germany about the same time.

One legend depicts the German church reformer Martin Luther walking home on a crisp December evening and seeing stars twinkle through fir boughs. The beauty of it struck him, and so he cut down a tree, brought it into his house, and put candles on it to re-create the Christmas sky. According to several sources, by the 1530s the “Tannenbaum” was so widely used in Germany that trees were being sold in markets. In the 1600s and 1700s, a tradition of hanging fir tops from the ceiling and decorating them with fruits, nuts and paper was widespread in Germany and Austria.

By the 1700s, German glassblowers were making lightweight glass balls to replace the heavier decorations, and it’s thought that Germans brought the Christmas tree traditions with them to North America. By the time a tree was set up in Windsor Castle in 1834, the practice was catching on among English-speaking people. The first U.S. lot for selling Christmas trees appeared in New York City in 1851, and Franklin Pierce had the first tree brought into the White House in 1856. Christmas tree lights were being mass produced by the 1890s.

Until recent decades, most trees were cut wild. Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “Christmas Trees” depicts a stranger driving up to his house in Vermont and offering to buy all his full-boughed, saleable firs. In “the trial by market everything must come to,” it works out to about 3 cents a tree for Frost and 97 cents a tree for the stranger. Frost declines the deal.

According to several sources, by 2003, 23.4 million real Christmas trees were sold in the U.S., while just under half of all trees are artificial. Most popular among the natural trees are the Scotch pine, Douglas fir, Fraser fir, balsam fir, and blue spruce. Europeans like the Norway spruce. About 98 percent of U.S. trees are produced by 15,000 growers, 12,000 of which provide cut-your-own service.

This year you can cut a tree in the White Mountain National Forest. A permit can be had from the U.S. Forest Service for $5, giving access to 796,000 acres from which to pick a tree.

In our area, natural trees cost from about $25 to about $60. Early this month our family chopped, or rather, sawed our own balsam fir for $29. Any way you cut it, the season is cheered by the scents and colors of this deep-rooted tradition.