Since I have written or published nearly three dozen articles on this subject, I shall not be going over much old material today - those who want to know the emet (truth) can find out for themselves - you'll find a list at the end of this article. Rather, my purpose today is to shock those of you who are still in denial about the satanic foundation of this winter solstice festival about an aspect of the season you may not possibly be aware of.

This time of year I tease my Christmas-celebrating environmentalist friends, who are so instistant about protecting the environment and the ever diminishing wilderness, about the annual Christmas Massacre they uncritically partake in. Everywhere you go, you see some of the millions of tree corpses that people buy, take into their homes, and then discard as worthless refuse.

According to a study made by the University of Illinois, in America alone, 31.3 million trees are cut down to fuel this pagan pagentry each year in the USA alone. Wikipedia puts it down at 34 million trees. At 2007 prices, that's $1.3 billion to slaughter helpless trees.

This compares to the average destruction of trees of all sorts by forest fires per year in the USA of around 3 million, according to one estimate.

It would be one thing if the wood was going to be used for fuel, furniture or something useful but these trees are just thrown away in an orgy of destruction to celebrate the winter gods. 98% of Christmas trees are grown on farms as sustainable crops like corn or pumpkins with 2% being cut from the wild. More than 2,000 trees are usually planted per acre and on average 1,000-1,500 of these trees will survive. In the northern part of the USA, perhaps 750 trees will remain. Almost all trees require shearing to attain the Christmas tree shape. At six to seven feet, trees are ready for harvest. It takes six to ten years of fighting heavy rain, wind, hail and drought to get a mature tree.

How many trees this would add up to internationally, including Canada, Europe and Russia in particular, one can only guess at, but I am roughtly estimating 100 million trees. It's probably a lot higher.

Though there are some Christmas tree recycling facilities in the USA, where they are used to make sand and soil erosion barriers and are placed in ponds for fish shelter, the trees thus used only represent a tiny fraction of the whole. The rest are simply discarded.

The first decorated Christmas tree was in Riga, Latvia in 1510 and is first mentioned in literature in Germany in 1531. Thomas Edison's assistant, Edward Johnson, came up with the idea of electric lights for Christmas trees in 1882. Christmas tree lights were first mass-produced in 1890. President Coolidge started the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony on the White House lawn in 1923. At least American President, Teddy Roosevelt, banned the Christmas tree from the White House for environmental reasons, Franklin Pierce being the first US President to start this tradition in 1856.

Artificial Christmas trees were developed in Germany during the 19th century and later became popular in the United States. These 'trees' were made using goose feathers that were dyed green and attached to wire branches. The wire branches were then wrapped around a central dowel rod that acted as the trunk. In 1930 the U.S.-based Addis Brush Company created the first artificial Christmas tree made from brush bristles. The company used the same machinery that it used to manufacture toilet brushes, but they were dyed green. Artificial Christmas trees made largely from aluminum were manufactured in the United States, first in Chicago in 1958. Today, most artificial Christmas trees are made from PVC plastic. PVC trees are fire-retardant but not fire-resistant. Eighty percent of artificial trees worldwide are manufactured in China. In 2011, 63% of U.S. households surveyed planned to purchase a live tree, while 37% planned to purchase an artificial tree, 9.5 million of which were purchased in the United States in 2011. Artificial trees will last for about six years in a home, but for centuries in a landfill.

Of course, my Christmas-celebrating environmental friends aren't too keen on hearing these statistics though a few of them do without trees or rent live trees with roots for replanting later. Conservationally-minded celebrants can even grow their own ones in advance called 'Yule Trees-To-Be':

When the festive season comes, all rationality seems to go out the window. This is a time to destroy trees, spend money you can't afford on things you don't need and support greedy commercialism. The only real beneficiaries are, of course, businesses, but nothing useful is being done.

I suppose, to be fair, you could accuse Jews and Messianics of not being particularly environmentally friendly at Sukkot when branches are assembled to construct tabernacles. However, you don't need to destroy trees to build these, as my family did not when we first started observing this festival of Yahweh. You just strip a few branches here and there. Now we construct with artificial branches and flowers which we have been using for the last 13 years. They will probably last us the rest of our lives. When Sukkot is over, most go back into other year-round decorations in the house anyway so nothing is ever wasted.

But this isn't really what I wanted to talk to you about today - I am not trying to encourage Christmas celebrants to go ecological even though I do have strong feelings about the environment which Yahweh placed into humanity's stewardship. No, what I want to actually do is to remind people what trees actually symbolise and what the Yule Tree represents.

Trees in the Bible always represent people when used symbolically. So I want to ask you a question: who do you suppose the Christmas tree originally represented and still represents today? To answer that question we must dig into a little history and learn about the things Christmas celebrants claiming to be Christian don't want to know about or want to gloss over because the Emet (Truth), incarnated by Yah'shua (Jesus), is offensive to them.

"A stone of stumbling and a rock of offense" (1 Peter 2:8, NKJV).

James Lloyd writes:

"[Yahweh] says "my spirit will not always strive with a man," so we should be earnest in our efforts to submit everything to God lest we eventually cross some undesirable spiritual threshold. The Old Testament book of Jeremiah explicitly tells us "Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain; for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the ax; They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not." (Jeremiah 10:2-4)

"In ancient Babylon, the goddess figure Semiramus was the mother of the Sumerian deity Tammuz. Other surrounding cultures have differing names for Tammuz. He is Attis to the Phoenicians, and Adonis [1] to the Greeks, etc. In each legend, he dies young and his birth and death are honored on his birthday which coincided with the Winter Solstice. This was celebrated on December 25th. Part of the religious ritual involved cutting down a young green evergreen tree (which kills the tree) as a way of commemorating the premature death of Tammuz.

"This tree is then decorated in the fashion Jeremiah described. A corollary to the Tammuz tree was the rite in which the women cried for the dead god. Shortly after Jeremiah's time, we find the idolatry has penetrated the Jewish temple where we see Sun worship and "women weeping for Tammuz." (Ezekiel 16:14) The sun worship is closely related to the end of the Winter Solstice when the sun begins to stay in the sky longer.

"The boughs of holly and related accouterments are descended from Celtic and Druidic rituals associated with the Wiccans in short, witchcraft. Even the Yule log that's placed on the fire is a Babylonian word. Obviously, the concept of a jolly immortal fellow dressed in red leaving gifts under the tree has a serious occultic flavor, but naming him a saint seems to make him acceptable...

"By the way, Christmas is but one of the pagan holy days that have infiltrated the Christian calendar and replaced the holy days that God ordained. Easter, which is derived from the name Ishtar, is actually closely related to the Tammuz tree. Indeed, the common Christian practice of a sunrise service originates with an early morning worship service in which the penitents face East at the dawn - precisely what was seen during Ezekiel's time when the women wept for Ishtar's son Tammuz.

"'Christians' routinely defend the sunrise Easter service as honoring the discovery of the resurrection of JESUS that occurred 3 days after Passover with many of them not realizing they are honoring the ancient pagan holy day of Easter that predated Christianity by many centuries. In fact, the New Testament clearly shows the Apostles honored Passover while the evil king Herod honored the Easter celebration. (Acts 12:2)" [2]

"The refusal of Christians to recognize the importance of relinquishing such demonic associations is a powerful indicator the church has gone astray. Following a pagan practice is sin, but the more dangerous sin is the steadfast refusal to recognize the Bible tells us to present our bodies as "a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is (our) reasonable service" (Romans 12:1). This conflict illustrates the very real problem of how we interpret works versus grace.

"Most 'Christians' continue to buy the lie they can routinely choose their own path & the Lord will honor these ungodly choices under grace. These have been mesmerized into believing that if they even try to keep any day holy they are somehow being legalistic. They continue to reject the leading of the Holy Spirit & accordingly they have quietly become "the children of disobedience" (Colossians 3:6). The Bible tells us for this cause God will send them a strong delusion because they love not the truth. That delusion has now inundated the 'church' with the mystery of iniquity.

"But the Word of God is pure and always true. God is not mocked, thus we would do well do take to heart the already cited passage concerning the Tammuz Tree and what will happen to those that refuse to hear His warning: "Learn not the way of the heathen...in the time of their visitation they shall perish." (Jeremiah 10:2,15) [3]

Each time you cut down a Christmas tree (or someone else does it for you, it amounts to the same thing), bring it into your house and decorate it, you are symbolically killing the pagan deity Tammuz, bringing it into the Temple of Yahweh (your home as it is supposed to be) and then commemorating its coming back to life. You are establishing a shrine in your home to this blasphemous copy of the resurrection of Messiah Yah'shua (Jesus) and to the rebirth that comes through trusting in Him alone.

Tammuz is also known as Bacchus (Greek god of wine, drunkenness and orgies), Nimrod (the first antichrist) and Osiris (Egyptian god of the afterlife, underworld and the dead). By bringing a cut-down Christmas tree into your home and then decorating it, you are participating in one of the rites of the most ancient wicked death cults known to man and celebrating a false besorah (gospel). The fact that you may have been ignorant does not absololve you from being a transgressor but once you know the emet (truth) and continue in the lie, it is not a good place to be spiritually with Yahweh.

If you don't believe me, get a copy of Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons: Proof the Roman Cathoicism's Practices and Beliefs Came From Pagan Babylonian Religion...Not From Christ and the Bible [4]. This classic, originally written in 1853, is an invaluable reference tool for those who want to know how the Besorah (Gospel) became paganised by Rome and how many of these paganised traditions still linger on in Protestantism. Or you can read the book online.

To participate in the Christmas tree ritual (or any part of this pagan winter solstice festival deceptively wrapped in Christian language) is to acknowledge a fake resurrection, reincarnation and the incestuous union between Nimrod and his mother - hardly a way to honour Christ, don't you think? Do the right thing, abandon this and all corrupt festivals not ordained by Yahweh, and observe the festivals Yahweh has commanded us to observe "forever" and "throughout your generations". Amen.

Endnotes

[1] From which the Hebrews anciently loaned the word 'Adonai' which Talmudic Jews and many Messianics substitute for the Divine Name, YHWH (Yahweh). It because of this pagan origin that we do not use 'Adonai' in this ministry.
[2] James Lloyd, Santa And The Tammuz Tree
[3] James Lloyd, ibid.
[4] An inexpensive reproduction is available from Chick Publishers, P.O.Box 3500, Ontario, CA 91761-1000

Acknowledgements

[1] Christmas Tree Facts

Essential Reading