Alex Floyd
Local Columnist
In December of 1850, the 29-year-old opera singer Jenny Lind was concluding a nationwide tour organized by showman P.T. Barnum with a stop in Charleston, South Carolina. Her voice has charmed all of Europe and sells out theatres across the United States. Two galleries are added to the Charleston Theatre for the sold-out crowd. Much like celebrities’ private planes are tracked today, people read the steamship lists in the newspapers to see when she would arrive from Baltimore. She arrives on the 23rd and has three days to recover from the trip before her first of three performances.
On Christmas Eve, a group of ladies is treated to the 19th century equivalent of “backstage passes” and has tea with Lind at the Charleston Hotel. Crowds loiter on the sidewalk of Meeting Street outside the hotel to see the “Swedish Nightingale” but instead are confused by what they see in the window. The Charleston Courier writes “A Forest Tree was placed at her window, decorated with variegated lamps, which attracted much attention.”
Newspapers and magazines since the 1840’s had published Christmas stories, songs and poems from Europe, especially Germany and Russia, that included Christmas trees.
That same month a popular magazine “Godey’s Lady’s Book” had featured an engraving of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert around an illuminated evergreen tree (The young royals, who like Lind were popular in the American South, had decorated an evergreen tree with candles and gingerbread in Windsor Castle since 1848) but few if any Southerners had actually seen one before.
The Charleston article was printed in the following weeks’ Savannah papers and the Lowcountry was formally introduced to the German, and by extension British, tradition of the Christmas Tree. Today it’d be difficult to find a Lowcountry shopper who has heard of Jenny Lind, but some of the most beautiful traditional trees in America can be seen in the store windows of King Street in Charleston and Broughton Street in Savannah.
Mrs. Floyd, however, puts up a tree that I bet puts Charleston’s finest to shame. It’s a masterpiece of the decorative arts made even more impressive by the fact that it shares a living room with a cat, two wild boys and a hurricane of relatives. Although I enjoy looking at it throughout the season and there’s nothing like it on Christmas morning when the boys wake up and find it half-buried in Santa’s loot, I like to think of the tree as a symbol of steadfastness, a gathering place for God’s creatures, a hope for the future. As a family with generations in the timber industry and conservation, the value of a tree goes beyond tonnage or board feet. A tree will serve as a meeting point, a reference, a place with roots.
I hope this year finds you with a tree you and your loved ones can rally around. It may not be decked with finery or Lind’s “variegated lamps”, but may it stand as a symbol of your love and commitment for each other this Christmas season.
My love and commitment go out to you as well as my thankfulness for the opportunity to serve as your Commissioner.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Floyd is a member of the Bryan County Board of Commissioners, representing District 1.