Our favorite Christmas tree is a blue spruce. The needles are super poky, yes, but the branches are sturdy enough to hold pretty much any ornament…and I have some heavy ones! Because of my love for the spruce family, I perked up when I saw spruce on a list of Christmas words with surprising history. And I was definitely surprised!
Did you know that Spruce used to be an English name for the country of Prussia?? I didn’t! Apparently, it was an alteration of Pruce…which now begins to make sense. 😉 Pruce and Prussia have some clear similarities, and adding the S to the front had something to do with it meaning “from Pruce.” Up until the middle of the 1600s, English speakers called the country Spruce, and hence, goods exported from Prussia bore that name too–spruce canvas, spruce iron, spruce leather…and spruce trees, which were very tall and straight, their trunks desirable for ship masts. By the time we began calling the country Prussia in the mid-17th century, spruce was such a common name for the tree that it stuck
Do you get a real tree for Christmas or use an artificial one? If you get (or have ever gotten) a real one, what variety is your favorite?
Regardless of your choice of conifer, I pray you have a very Merry Christmas!
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.