In the years afterward, they would be vandalized or ignored as they decayed. Bucklow suggests that these colors were part of a representative barrier-separating the more earthly parishioners from the more spiritual altar and sanctuary.īy the time of the Reformation in England, rood screens had largely fallen out of use. And colors.Īccording to Bucklow, popular combinations of colors were red/green and blue/gold, with one pair of colors being watery (blue or green) and one fiery (gold or red). Their purpose was to separate the nave (where the congregation sits) from the chancel (around the altar, where the clergy would be) and were intricately designed with local saints, donors, or other figures. Rood screens were an integral part of Western churches up until around the time of the Reformation. That red and green is in our psyche because of the Victorians, but it was in their psyche because of the medieval paint that we can still see on 15th- and 16th-century rood screens.” recognize holly as being a quintessentially Christmas plant. In 2011, Cambridge University’s Spike Bucklow commented, “We. Evelyn Simak via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 This one is from St James's Church in Great Ellingham, England. Candidate 2: HollyĪn example of the red and green paint found on ancient rood screens. (Not holly, but cherries.) Some historians argue that this shows an association with red and green and Christmas that dates back centuries. One of the gifts presented to an infant Christ in the story is a bob of cherries. One of the most famous is the Second Shepherds’ (or Shepherd’s it’s unclear) Play, which combines a comic farce about sheep-stealing with a nativity story. Paradise Plays weren’t the only Biblical plays being performed in the medieval period. A view exists that the red of the fruit and the green of the tree linked the two colors in popular imagination with the Christmas season. It’s widely thought that as the Paradise Play died out, the tree remained-and turned into the modern Christmas tree. You also need a fruit to hang from it-say, a red apple or a pomegranate. The story can’t be recreated without a tree, so surviving stage instructions from one circa-12th-century play say that “divers trees be therein” (and since it was winter, any good-looking tree was probably an evergreen). Probably the most obscure of the hypotheses suggests red and green may go back to Paradise Plays, which were a traditional play performed on Christmas Eve about the Fall of Man and Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden. While there may be no definitive consensus on how this color scheme came to be, there are a few interesting candidates for the official answer. The Christmas colors, red and green, prevailed." For instance, an 1896 newspaper mentions, "The decoration of the hall was as unique and effective as anything ever attempted. Red and green were Christmas colors well before Coke was being sold as Santa’s favorite beverage. Sadly, these stories should be taken with a lump of coal. These images were enough to solidify red, green, and Christmas in our shared consciousness. The legend goes that when the soft drink icon was advertising around the holidays in the 1930s, the company produced images of a red-clad Santa alongside a green fir tree. Look around the internet for why red and green are classic Christmas colors and one usual suspect immediately pops up: Coca-Cola. The Christmas season is inextricably connected to this color combination-but why? The two colors fill malls and living rooms around the world, and adorn nearly every decoration, strand of lights, and ugly sweater on store shelves. As the last Thanksgiving leftover is consumed and the calendar flips to December, the unmistakable red-and-green flood of the Christmas season comes into view.
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