Dreaming about
Christmas trees

A Christmas tree is one of the few dream images tied to a single week of the year, so the first thing to ask is when you dreamed it. In late December it's usually your day showing up at night. Any other time, dreaming about Christmas trees tends to be about family, about a celebration you're looking forward to or dreading, or about a stretch of your life you remember as warmer than now.

What decides the reading is what the tree looked like and who stood around it. A tall tree in a crowded living room isn't the same dream as a dry one dropping needles in an empty flat, and the presents (or the lack of them) say a lot. How you feel about the holidays counts just as much, because for some people it's the best week of the year and for others the hardest.

What dreaming about Christmas trees means

When you think about it, the Christmas tree is an odd thing to do: an evergreen cut down, carried indoors, covered in lights for a few weeks and then put out with the rubbish. Each part of that gives you a reading.

Family, and your place in it

The tree is where a family gathers, so the dream often comes down to the people around it. Was everyone there? Someone missing from the picture (a parent who has died, a sibling you've stopped calling, an ex who used to come every year) is often the real subject, and the tree is just the setting that brings them to mind. If you were outside, looking through a window at someone else's tree, the dream may be about feeling left out of a family or a group you'd like to belong to.

Something kept alive through a hard season

People brought evergreen branches indoors in winter long before Christmas, because a plant that stays green when every other tree is bare is easy to read as life getting through the cold. A full, healthy Christmas tree can carry the same idea about you. In a bleak few months, it can picture the part of your life that's still holding up.

Looking forward, or putting on a show

A decorated tree is also a display, half of it for the people who'll see it. So the dream can be about excitement, an event or a change you can't wait for, or about the pressure of making things look festive when you don't feel it. Which one it is usually shows in how you felt hanging the lights.

Dreaming about decorating a Christmas tree

Decorating is the most common version, and it tends to be about getting ready for something, like a new home, a relationship you're putting work into or an event coming up. Ornaments from childhood point back at your past and at what you still carry from it. And if the lights wouldn't work, or everything you hung kept sliding off the branches, the effort you're putting in somewhere isn't paying off the way you hoped.

Dreaming about presents under the Christmas tree

Presents are about what you're hoping to get from other people (attention, thanks, a sign that you matter) and from life in general. A pile of gifts with your name on them can be plain hope, while an empty space under the tree, or presents for everyone but you, points to feeling overlooked. If you opened one and it was empty or meant for someone else, ask where a promise has fallen flat lately.

Dreaming about a Christmas tree falling or catching fire

Trees really did catch fire often when people lit them with wax candles, and a falling or burning tree in a dream has the same feeling of a celebration going wrong. It tends to come before a family gathering you expect to be tense, or after one that was. A tree crashing down in the middle of a party can also be about a role you've been holding up for everyone (the host, the peacemaker) and are tired of carrying.

Dreaming about a dead Christmas tree

A brown tree dropping its needles, or one still standing in the corner in March, is about something that has outlived its moment. It could be a tradition kept out of habit, a relationship that ended but was never cleared away, or grief for a Christmas that can't happen the old way anymore. If the tree turned green again in the dream, that's a more hopeful picture, of the old warmth coming back in a new form.

Christmas trees and the time of year

The decorated tree comes from Germany, and it spread through Britain after 1848, when a newspaper printed an engraving of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's family gathered around one. In December, though, the plain answer is often the right one. Dreams follow what fills your days,^[1] and a week of shopping, wrapping and family phone calls is a lot to fill them with.

Dreaming about Christmas trees according to Jung and Freud

Jung: the tree that shelters the family

Jung's essay on the mother archetype lists a tree as one of the forms the mother can take, next to the earth, a spring and the cow.^[2] A Christmas tree is a tree carried into the middle of the home, where it shelters the presents, so it already comes with that sense of being held. Ask who in your dream kept the family together around it, and whether that was you.

Freud: the presents and the wish

Freud found a dream's images in the day before it,^[3] which makes the Christmas tree one of the easier dreams to trace. In his scheme the wish sits in the presents, and what they stand for is attention, thanks, a sign that you matter. His list of male symbols includes tree trunks, but he asked first for the dreamer's own associations, and a tree that stood in the living room every December has better ones than that.

Questions to ask about your Christmas tree dream

Every Christmas tree you've known feeds into the one you dreamed, so start with these questions.

• Whose home was the tree in, and who was standing around it?
• Was it full and bright, bare, dead or falling?
• Were there presents, and were any of them for you?
• How do you feel about the holidays this year, and about Christmas in general?
• Is anyone missing from your life who used to be there for it?

Oniri asks you about the people and the setting before it reads your dream, so a tree at your grandmother's and a tree in an empty flat don't get the same answer.