Idolatree by Courtney Miller Santo

I.

The trick to cleaning up the lyrics of a song about sex, like Ariana Grande’s “Love Me Harder” is to swap the words and/or phrases about copulation for ones about singing. The family-friendly company that spells kids with a z did just that by changing the question, “Can you feel the pressure between your hips?” to “Can you hear the singing in my heart?”

There are variations on this sleight of hand: champagne becomes milkshakes, bad bitch becomes good friend and fuck you becomes boo hoo. In each of these instances, the so-called adult lyrics are replaced, which creates a song that is packaged and sold to children, or at least to the parents who believe that the mere mention of sex, drugs and/or violence will act like a Siren’s song and corrupt their kidz.

We make sense of our world by naming the objects, people, and behaviors that are a part of it. Young children experience great relief when they can correctly identify things—a named feeling becomes real when it can be talked about. And yet, to adults, the power of a name isn’t always a comfort. When I was in first grade, I found my parents’ stash of condoms and took them to my mom for identification. Her reaction is one of my earliest memories.

It’s a balloon, she said.

A balloon, I repeated, looking at the circular disk in my palm.

Put it back.

I didn’t put it back. I recruited my younger brothers and sister to help inflate all of the slippery balloons. Then, we played with them until we were discovered and yelled at. Years later I learned the true name of the object when in high school I saw a condom unrolled over a banana as a demonstration of safe sex practices. Context complicates vocabulary.

II.

Five miles above the Red Sea, on the outskirts of the resort town of Eilat, where tourists swim with captive bottlenose dolphins, archaeologists discovered the trunk of a 6,500-year old juniper tree surrounded by flagstones. The ancient site also included several graves, and as artifacts were uncovered and cataloged, it became clear that the juniper stump and its surrounding altar had likely been consecrated to celebrate life—specifically female fertility. It is one of only a half-dozen surviving remnants used in a tree worship ceremony connected to the goddess Asherah.

Tree worship is present in the histories of almost all cultures. In Celtic traditions, the oak tree, forest and fruit are central to druid rituals. For others, a copse may serve as a temple, as with the Yoruba in Nigeria, who established sacred groves outside their settlements so their goddess of fertility had a place to abide. Individual trees are sanctified as homes for spirits and other nonhuman entities, as is seen in the nymphs of Ancient Greece. Additionally, branches, oils, and the bark of particular species of trees are often incorporated into worship rituals. Even in our modern world, trees hold a place of reverence. Doctors in Japan prescribe tree bathing (or spending time in the woods) as preventative medicine. 

Tree worship is almost always deeply connected to feminine deities. This is the case with the juniper stump found in Eilat. This sacred wood is thought to be one of four surviving examples of Asherah or an Asherah pole. This goddess is of particular importance to the Canaanites, who revered her as the mother of seventy other gods and the consort to their main god, El. She may also have been worshiped as a mother goddess and consort to Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, but by the time the King James bible shows up, Asherah (and her rites) have been demonized as lascivious.

III

I have forgotten that my parents no longer celebrate Christmas. It’s been nearly fifteen years since we’ve spent the holiday together. For most of my adulthood, they’ve lived 2,000 miles away from me in a place where the winter is one long, cold, wet and dreary affair. We chose to visit in summer, and because I hadn’t been there to partake in its absence, quitting Christmas hadn’t registered in my long-term memory. Now, they live less than ten miles from my house, and I’m in their kitchen asking about where we should hold the festivities—my place or theirs.

“Do whatever you’d like,” my mother says. “We don’t do Christmas.”

“Wait, what?” I glance around the kitchen at my dad and brother who are standing in front of the refrigerator taking out sandwich supplies.

My ninety-one year old grandmother sighs heavily and crosses one leg over the other. She’s lived with them for the past decade.

“No tree?” I say.

“Idolatry,” my dad says.

“The devil’s dick,” my brother says and waggles his eyebrows at me.

“We do gifts,” my mom says, and as she speaks, the defensive tone of her voice pulls up the vague memory of a similar conversation we’d had when they first told everyone they were quitting Christmas.

About eight years earlier, as part of their falling out with organized religion, they went on their own faith journey that took them through all the religion videos on youtube and then through the bible in various translations and with various books outside of the traditional canon. It is hard to describe where they’ve landed in terms of God and belief, but among the choices they’ve made is to demonize Christmas—most specifically the pagan imagery and idols that the early Christian leaders adopted in an attempt to convert the world to their way of worshiping.

We settled on Christmas dinner at their place. Later that day when my grandmother and I are at the nail salon, she looks around at the lively (but fake) evergreen boughs that line the walls. “I miss the tree,” she says.

IV.

My father hands me a branch of cedar that is about as large as my forearm. The rich, loamy smell is one I associate with trousseaus and shoe stretchers. For the last few months, he’s been clearing the overgrowth from his new property and, in doing so, has identified dozens of different trees. The cedar is his latest find. He’s excited about the prospect of truffles at the base of the tulip poplar and has new hopes for the health of the two oak trees he’s cleared of ant colonies. 

There are two qualities about my father that drive much of his decision making. The first is that he believes he is smarter than everyone else—or rather that he sees what others cannot see. At times, he has described this quality as “having the gift of discernment.” Sometimes this means he knows the name of every tree we see when walking through the state park along the Mississippi River, and other times it means he has insight into how the new world order is moving to control our day-to-day existence. As a child, it meant that he was always preparing us for the potential end of civilization. 

My conflict with this particular approach isn’t that I think it is bad to prepare, but that if I disagree with him, he tells me it is because I am being tricked, just like all of the other “sheeple” in the world. My father, a man born on April Fool’s Day, abhors nothing more than being played for a fool. 

V.

Sex as worship is a controversial topic—especially when it comes to ancient practices in the Near East. There are some accounts that describe performative intercourse as part of a creation or fertility rites and other salacious accounts that describe paid intercourse as an offering to deities. Whether or not those who worshiped Asherah practiced so-called shrine sex, it was widely believed that they did, and it became the main reason for the deliberate erasure of Asherah and worship practices associated with her from the Old Testament.

In almost every instance Asherah is mentioned in the King James bible, her name is replaced with grove or pole. I wonder if this is intentional—if the priests kept her name from us, in the hopes that she and her rites would cease to exist. Or maybe it was about erasing her name to remove a temptation. In some ways it has worked, the Christmas tree, with the exception of dark corners of the internet, is mostly associated with the commerce of the holiday instead of female fertility.

Arguing the meaning of the tree with my father is a finger trap. Is the tree a pagan sex symbol that tricks Christians into worshiping the devil, or has it been appropriated and assimilated into Christian theology to represent the eternal life promised by the birth of Jesus? Consider the lyrics to the German carol O Tannenbaum. The original German makes no mention of Jesus. It’s an ode to the beauty and power of the evergreen tree. Christmas trees as we know them began as a Germanic custom. Modern translations of O Tannenbaum, add the narrative of Christ to the carol and in the case of Aretha Franklin’s exceptional version the names of Santa’s reindeer. The result of these combinations is a melding of the three Gods of Christmas—Asherah, Christ and Santa (the God of American capitalism). You cannot separate them. I just want my dad to relax, so we can get out of the trap. 

Yesterday I sent my nearly adult children to my parents’ house with a small potted fir tree to put in my grandmother’s room. They decorated it with colored glass balls. We bought these particular ornaments the year my husband and I got married. We were at the Target in Richmond, Virginia, and I explained that I wanted the gem-colored glass balls because they were like the plums and oranges that people used to decorate before glass became cheap and mass produced. 

The convolution and co-opting of symbols is not a phenomenon unique to Christmas. Consider the recent adoption of the okay hand sign by the far right. But the symbols associated with Christmas have a unique insight into the way pagan, Christian and commercial ideologies overlap. The evergreen branches have always been used in tree worship as a symbol of renewal—a bright spot of green in the dark of winter. Aretha’s version of O Tannenbaum is the perfect example of how our worship practice has internalized and conflated Santa, Jesus, and the Pagan. 

To me, superimposing all three on top of each other creates compromise and it is in compromise that hope arises. Let the tree be everything to everyone and let us take from it hope for our country, hope for a new year, hope for all of us trying to survive the long, dark, wet winter.

Courtney Miller Santo is an essayist and novelist. Her nonfiction work appears in Best American Essays 2024. HarperCollins published her debut novel, The Roots of the Olive Tree, and its successor, Three Story House. She teaches at the University of Memphis, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Pinch.

10 April 2025