Easter Trees In Appalachia

With this being Holy Week and tomorrow, Friday, April 19, 2019, being Good Friday, I have finally decided to write about a topic which pops into my head every year about this time and has for at least the last twenty years.  That topic is the fairly recent practice all over Appalachia of people creating Easter trees in their yards and houses.  They have been more common in Europe for about forty or fifty years.  One famous Easter tree is known as the Saalfelder Ostereierbaum, an apple tree in the garden of Volker Kraft in Saalfeld, Suringia.  Mister Kraft and his family have been decorating the tree since the early 1960's, starting with about a dozen and a half plastic eggs tied to the branches of the tree. Mister Kraft has stated in interviews that he had wanted to have an Easter Tree ever since he saw his first one near his home in 1945.  

The Kraft Easter Tree with about 10,000 Easter eggs.  Photo by Wikipedia.

But the general practises I have seen in Southern and Central Appalachia is to use much smaller trees than the Kraft apple tree and to use far fewer plastic Easter eggs.  I have seen them in nearly every state in Central and Southern Appalachia in yards of homes ranging from old mobile homes and sharecropper's shacks to mansions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to perhaps even a few million.  Often these trees will be comprised of only a few spindly branches with about a dozen or so plastic eggs.  But they may also hold a variety of other objects ranging from crosses to crowns of thorns to toy ducks and toy rabbits. They are also often created in flower pots and other containers both inside and outside the home.  Below is a photo of an Easter tree in a flower pot inside a home.  

Small Easter Tree In A Flower Pot Indoors--Photo by www.picturesso.com

The amount of variety in Easter trees is nearly as great as we see in Christmas trees and many of the people who create one also create the other.  They often claim that the Easter tree is a manifestation of their Christian faith.  I have no idea how they come to that kind of conclusion but I realize it can be a convenient excuse for someone who just loves gaudy objects in, around, or near their home.  I tend to think of these people as being somehow related to crows or lyre birds which gather glittering objects and carry them home to their nests.  Below is a particularly pitiful attempt at an Easter tree.  

A Pitiful Easter Tree--Photo by HubPages

This particular Easter tree leaves a great deal to be desired in my mind before it should ever be considered either an expression of religiosity or an objet d'art.  And that brings me to my own opinion of Easter trees.  I consider them to be one of the silliest and least justifiable wastes of time and resources I have ever seen.  You will never see one in my home or yard.  You will never hear me praise one no matter how gloriously its creator has endowed it with their wasted resources.  I do not consider them to be an expression of any form of religiosity worth supporting with one's belief.  In some ways, I am appalled at myself for even wasting fifteen minutes to write about them and search for photos of them to post along with this blog post.  I do not consider them to be anymore justifiable than I do those equally silly, but well meant, memorial stickers posted for the dead in the windows of a car which the owner is not likely to drive more than a year or two before trading it.  Saints, preserve me from Easter trees!