O Christmas Tree!
I was singing along to an English translation of “O Tannenbaum” the other day when the second line stopped me:
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
how faithful are your branches…
What does that even mean, really? Branches can’t really escape from the trunk to which they’re attached, right? So this dead tree I was looking at in my living room on December 20 left me pondering the branches—and the trunk to which they were attached. This trunk that had refused to drink any water. None. Not a drop. If the trunk cannot draw in this source of life, what hope do the branches have?
Where the trunk goes, the branches follow.
I had such high hopes for this tree. It was full and fluffy and fragrant, its needles super soft when we drove it home from the tree lot on December 9. We had the trunk freshly “cut” to make sure it would drink water. It was so green. Evergreen. It would be my tree of life through the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6—when the Magi arrived and laid eyes on the Christ child.
But five days before Christmas, even with an extra dose of “TreeLife” additive mixed into the water, our tree had given up the ghost. The green drained from its needles by the minute. They’d already become sharp, brittle, hostile to the touch.
My husband surveyed the situation over his coffee and said, matter-of-factly,
“That tree started dying the moment it was cut.”
I contemplated his words, and maybe because two of our sons seem ready to cut us off from their lives this Christmas for not agreeing to see the world their way, it made me consider something bigger than any of us.
Cut Off
On Christmas morning, we celebrate God’s entrance into our burned-out and broken world. The light of the Christ child, laid in a manger—an animal feeding trough—born in Bethlehem — whose name literally means “House of Bread,” a town that provided sustenance to the region, and the place from which God would offer Himself as the Bread of Life for the world. Just as foretold hundreds of years earlier by the prophet Micah:
“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” (Micah 5:2)
This Christ child was born for one purpose: to die in order to restore our connection to God and eternal life. Born so that death would no longer have the final word. Some thirty-three years later, He would be hung on a wooden cross—likely made from the same kind of wood as the trunk now standing lifeless in my living room.
How ironic. Profound.
My tree was dead because it had been cut off from its earthly roots. No amount of water could undo that. It stood before me as a quiet reminder that this world is still subject to death. We decorate it, light it, and celebrate around it, but beneath the beauty is the truth: what draws life only from its earthly source will not last.
The World Christ Entered
In the beginning, God gave our first parents everything needed for life. And yet, in the garden, Adam and Eve overreached, seeking to know everything God knows. Knowing good and evil on their own undermined trust; it turned them to a quest for self-reliance instead of divine reliance. This turning away—away from God and toward themselves—is what sin is really about. In reaching beyond God’s provision, they set themselves apart from the source of life. From that moment on, death entered the story.
Christmas doesn’t deny that truth. It confronts it.
Christ came into a world already dead—not dead in appearance, but rooted in soil that cannot sustain life indefinitely. Fully human, He entered a world governed by hunger, thirst, suffering, and death. Fully divine, He carried within Himself the eternal life that death could not extinguish. He came to beat death by restoring life to its true source… He came to make my tree—and me—Evergreen.
Evergreen Life
A Christmas tree shows us both realities at once. Cut off, it slowly dies before our eyes. Yet that same tree, when rooted, grows—miraculously—from a tiny seed into something living and strong, year after year. Life flows where roots remain. On earth, even the deepest roots will eventually dry, but in Christ, we tap into living water that bears everlasting life.
This tree can’t be stuck back into the ground and made to live again. But Christmas proclaims a deeper truth: the One who enters our world does not play by death’s rules. What is cut off here is not lost forever when God Himself becomes the source of our life.
Faithful Branches
And so now, looking at this dead tree, I see the light. If I am a faithful branch, I am attached not to a trunk subject to death, but to the Trunk that will carry me home to new and everlasting life.
Where the trunk goes, the branches follow…
Christ calls us to abide in Him, to drink of the living water, and to be Evergreen.
