On the surprising origins of the advent wreath

Sunday night we had our church carol service, with considerably more candles than any Scottish Baptist of a previous generation would have approved of outside of a power cut. Front and centre was our advent wreath, four red candles now of differing heights burning, a central larger candle waiting until Christmas morning to be lit.

It was a good service; later that evening, whilst certain other members of the family were watching The Apprentice final, I noticed some tweets about the origins of advent wreaths. The Anglican mission society US (once USPG) had tweeted a picture of a pink candle alight, and linked it with the theme of remembering Mary on the fourth Sunday of advent; others had responded querying the link and suggesting that the pink (sic, ‘rose’) candle properly belongs to the third Sunday, and the celebration of Gaudete Sunday, when in Roman tradition rose vestments are worn. Which was the original tradition, and when did it start? asked Julie Gittoes, residentiary canon at Guildford Cathedral.

It struck me as an interesting question, certainly more interesting than a business tycoon being gratuitously rude to sycophantic idiots. Plenty of internet sites – and plenty of books, I have since discovered – talk about the ‘ancient custom’, some proposing pre-Christian pagan origins. There was nothing concrete, though, and in my experience claims about pagan origins of Christian customs unravel fairly quickly more often than not.

One of the joys of a modern university library is how much material is electronic, and so available from home late on Sunday night. I turned up a fascinating paper by Mary Jane Haemig, ‘The Origin and Spread of the Advent Wreath’ (Lutheran Quarterly, XIX (2005), pp. 332-343).

Haemig proposes a startlingly specific origin for the tradition: Johann Heinrich Wichern, head of the Rauhe Haus, a Hamburg city mission, created the first advent candle arrangement (not yet a wreath) in 1839, with the greenery added in 1860. This is all documented in D. Sattler (ed.) Der Adventkranz und seine Geschichte (Hamburg, 1997), and it is clear that Wichern believed he was doing something new.

Haemig points also to research done for the ‘Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde’ around 1930, which demonstrated that advent wreaths were largely confined to Protestants at that time, and were much stronger amongst the upper classes. This makes it more likely that Wichern’s innovation, or at least some similar Lutheran invention, is the origin of the tradition: an ancient tradition would presumably have been remembered by Catholic families not just Protestant ones. The Lexicon fuer Theologie und Kirche (a Roman Catholic publication) affirms the origin of the wreath amongst Protestants, but notes its adoption by Catholics after 1945.

Haemig goes on to look at the arrival of the wreath in the USA, finding it proposed as something new in the Lutheran Standard magazine in 1939. She suggests that the wreath moves from home to church sanctuary in the late 1950s, and then discusses the colours and significance of the candles, which are clearly not fixed. Her evidence suggests two things: an assimilation to liturgical colours, and an identification of the candles with the lectionary themes of the four advent Sundays.

The first of these led to the introduction of the rose/pink candle for Gaudete amongst the purple/violet set; the second to the identification of the fourth candle with Mary. The last piece of the journey is not hard to trace: confronted with an odd pink candle, and not knowing the tradition of rose vestments for Gaudete, and inculturated with the modern obsession that pink is somehow feminine, moving the rose candle from Advent 3 to Advent 4 and linking it with Mary is an obvious move.

When and how did this German/US custom reach the UK? Very recently would seem to be the answer. Google ngram can find no use of ‘advent wreath’ in its British English corpus before 1955, and I suspect (from poking around the data a little) that the early incidences are mostly down to US books being misidentified as from the UK in the Google dataset. 1973 looks like the year we really first started talking about advent wreaths over here, at least in print. (In the US dataset the big jump is in 1939, which fits with Haewig’s data above.)

Anne Peat, who had been a part of the Twitter conversation, confirms that the 1980 Alternative Service Book of the Church of England makes no mention of advent wreaths (the ECUSA 1940 Book of Common Prayer does, under ‘Additional Directions’ for Morning and Evening Prayer). Finally, Paula Gooder offered a recalled comment from Michael Perham, the former Bishop of Gloucester, who wrote on liturgical customs, to the effect that ‘the Advent wreath dates to the 1950s coming over from Scandinavia via Blue Peter!’ (For non-UK readers, Blue Peter is a very long-running children’s TV show.)

Given the data above, the Scandinavian link seems plausible, fitting with the Lutheran origins of the custom; those of us of a certain age will remember John Noakes wrapping fire-resistant tinsel around wire coathangers… And the dates from the ngram database fit pretty well with Blue Peter in  the 1970s being the key populariser of the custom. I am not sure how many other liturgical innovations can be laid at the door of kids TV; this may be unique…

 

Two take homes from all this: 1. the pink candle isn’t, it’s rose, and it has nothing to do with Mary; 2. next year we need a black and white candle to be lit in memory of Shep.