The Story:
The staff at Vote.net wishes a Merry Christmas to all of those of our readers who celebrate this holiday, and we would like to add our mite to your festivities with a brief account of the origins of one of the most common Christmas-tree ornaments.
Apple Sized Globes:
The vigil of Christmas, December 24, is also known in the Roman Catholic tradition as the feast day of Adam and Eve.
According to the biblical narrative (Genesis 3: 1-13) Adam and Eve sinned by eating a forbidden fruit from a tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden. Without further biblical specification, oral tradition has long made that fruit out to have been an apple.
The Thing to Know:
Many of our readers surely have elaborately decorated fir trees in your homes right now. On those trees there are bound to be apple-sized glass globes. What you may not know is that at an earlier stage in the development of the decorative tradition, those globes would have been apples, and that they were/are there as a reminder of the sin that (Christian theology tells us) made the Incarnation necessary.
Merry Christmas!
