Singing Christmas tree
vocal choir lined-up taking the shape as a Christmas tree
A singing Christmas tree, sometimes called a living Christmas tree, is an artificial Christmas tree filled with singers used as part of nativity plays.
Constructed of steel, the "tree" is actually a conical circular sector where between one-third and one-half of an actual Christmas tree is shown. Depending upon the tree size, they can accompany between 30 and 450 singers. These trees can be put up by churches or communities.
First appearing in 1933 at Belhaven University, they later made their debut indoors at West High School in Denver, Colorado, and then in 1957 in Sacramento, California. Since then, the singing Christmas tree concept has spread to Canada, the Philippines, South Korea, Switzerland and Sri Lanka. The most attended tree takes place in Knoxville, Tennessee, with 60,000 attendees in 2007.
History
The first Christmas trees came to the United States in the 1740s from Moravian (now part of the Czech Republic) settlers. In 1851, the first commercial tree lot in the United States was set up in New York City. President of the United States Franklin Pierce set up the first Christmas tree in the White House in 1856.
“Singing Christmas tree” enters the record as vocal choir lined-up taking the shape as a Christmas tree. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Singing, Christmas and tree can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Singing Christmas tree” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.