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! 

Native Contempt For Appalachian Culture

Ever since I was a teenager in Upward Bound, I have known that a great deal of contempt exists among a misled segment of native Appalachians for both Appalachia and Appalachian Culture.  I was recently reminded of it again personally and locally. While at a medical visit with my wife, we ran into someone we had known for the past 25 years.  They asked me what I was reading which happened to be "Black Earth The Holocaust As History And Warning".  She asked me something or other about why it had that title and I explained that the warning portion was due to ongoing public events in the world.  As the conversation progressed, we talked about our travels over the last few years and I said that we would be meeting new friends we had met in Austin, Texas, last year for lunch in May and they would then be driving on to Chattanooga, Tennessee, via Jenkins, Kentucky.  The woman then responded that the trip "through Jenkins will be a shock for them".  I said "No, I don't think so, they are world travelers".  Her response to that was "I don't ever want to go to Jenkins.  It is just too App-a-lay-shun", using one of those contrived Eastern mispronunciations of the word Appalachia.  I responded "It can't ever be too App-uh-latch-un", using the correct pronunciation as it is always done by natives and those who care enough to pronounce proper names as they should be according to the world wide rule of thumb which says that the possessor or a proper name or a native of a place knows the proper name best along with the correct pronunciation.  It is interesting that my early post on this blog, "Appalachia What's In A Name" discusses this concept at length, and in the time this blog has been online, has consistently been the highest viewed post on the blog with more than 63,000 page views as of today, April 21, 2018.  It is equally interesting that this woman has lived nearly her entire life about 2 miles from my home in Morgan County, Kentucky, which might not be the most Appalachian county in the region but is beyond a shadow of a doubt very Appalachian.  She is also a graduate of Morehead State University, one of my alma maters, also holds a masters degree, and spent her professional career in the field of education.

I have no idea which of her former professors or friends she was trying to please when she began to mispronounce the name of her homeland.  I have no idea where she became convinced that Appalachia is a place to be despised or belittled but I have no respect for any native of the region who exhibits that contempt and derision.  But at some point in this woman's education, she must have been strongly negatively influenced by someone from outside the area who knew little about Appalachia and did not care to learn to pronounce the word correctly.  I am appending the opening paragraph from my aforementioned post "Appalachia What's In A Name" since it makes my point much better than I have in the introduction to this post.

"The general rule of thumb in pronouncing proper names is that the owner of the name sets the rule.  In the case of place names, the rule is to pronounce the place name as the majority of residents of a place pronounce it.  We Appalachians generally pronounce the word Ap Uh Latch Uh.  Appalachian writer and song writer Billy Ed Wheeler said that his mother always said, "Billy, if you don't quit, I'm going to throw this Apple AT Cha."  Those two ways are correct.  All The Others are Wrong.  Several non-Appalachian place names provide illustrations of names which are pronounced somewhat differently than they are spelled and would include Mackinac, Michigan, which is pronounced Mack-uh-naw, and Poughkeepsie, NY, which is pronounced Puh-kip-see. The area of New York state which includes Poughkeepsie has several local place names which are Native American in origin and not pronounced anywhere near how they appear based on spelling.  There is also Apalachicola, Florida, which is pronounced Ap Uh Latch Uh Co Luh which is an amazing coincidence. Or is it? It is also interesting that the very same people who mispronounce Appalachia generally do not mispronounce Apalachicola."

I could not resist, as the discussion went on, touting my bruised nativism and saying to the woman, "I am an expert on the subject of Appalachia with several published articles which are frequently quoted in books.  Google my name and you will find some of my writing on the subject."  I realized full well that did not impress her but I cannot, will not, and  have never allowed anyone to exhibit that contempt and derision about Appalachia without confronting it.  I literally despise the kind of native Appalachians who do that kind of thing as much or more than the Eastern missionaries who have tried to change and assimilate us and our homeland ever since long before I was born.  I realized more than fifty years ago that we will never stop this kind of ignorance, contempt, derision, and othering from either the outsiders or the natives they influence.  But I will never stop confronting them and neither should you.  I know full well that nothing I said, could have said, or have previously written will ever change that woman's mind.  It is a sad state of affairs that there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of native Appalachians like her who are too ignorant to bother to learn about and come to cherish and protect the culture and history of this region.  But that does not mean that the rest of us ever should fall prey to their ignorance.