News Desk
On the longest night of the year, long before Christmas existed as a word or an idea, people in what is now Afghanistan watched the sun disappear and waited for its return.
In ancient Bactria and across regions that include today’s Balkh and parts of Baluchistan, winter was not a season of candles and nostalgia. It was a threat. Fields lay dormant. Crops failed. Food stores thinned. Cold meant hunger, and hunger meant death. When the winter solstice arrived, it marked something precise and urgent: darkness had reached its limit. From this point on, the days would grow longer. Life, however fragile, would move again.
This moment mattered deeply in the Zoroastrian world, where light was not a metaphor but a moral force. The return of the sun affirmed order over chaos, truth over decay. And in that landscape of fear and endurance, people turned their attention to what survived the winter intact.
They turned to trees that did not die. Evergreens, especially the cypress, held a singular place in this worldview. Known in Persian as the sarv, the cypress remained green when orchards emptied and fields browned. It stood tall, upright, and unchanged by the season’s brutality. In Zoroastrian thought, the cypress came to represent endurance, moral strength, and resistance to darkness itself. Not triumph. Resistance.
The tree was not simply admired. It entered ritual life. On solstice nights associated with Mitra, a divinity linked to light, truth, and renewal, people decorated what was known as the Mitra tree. Offerings were placed on its branches. Young girls wrapped silk cloth, precious and deliberate, around the limbs, tying wishes for health, fertility, and survival. Gifts were placed beneath it, not as indulgence but as affirmation. The structure was clear: a living tree, brought into focus at the darkest moment of the year, surrounded by hope.
Centuries later, that structure would reappear thousands of miles away. The decorated Christmas tree, as a household tradition, emerges in German-speaking Europe in the 1500s, shaped by medieval paradise plays and local custom. Evergreens were brought indoors, decorated, gathered around. Gifts were placed beneath them during winter. In northern Europe, pine replaced cypress simply because it was abundant. The tree changed. The logic did not.
What looks like a Christian invention is better understood as the latest chapter in a much older human story, one that stretches back through South Asia and into the moral imagination of ancient Afghanistan.
That imagination left its mark not only on ritual but on literature. The cypress appears again and again in Persian poetry, nowhere more clearly than in the work of Saʿdi of Shiraz, whose Gulestān and Būstān, remain foundational texts across the Persian-speaking world. Saʿdi was not a philosopher in the academic sense. He did not construct systems or argue metaphysics. He wrote about how people actually live: how power corrupts, how dignity is preserved, how desire misleads, how moral failure begins quietly.
In his work, the sarv becomes an ethical measure.
“If the cypress does not stand straight in the earth,” he writes in the Būstān,
“it will never rise above the garden.”
The line is deceptively simple. Height without integrity means nothing. Moral stature comes from firmness at the root. Saʿdi dresses ethics as nature, using the tree not as decoration but as instruction.
Elsewhere, the cypress becomes a lesson in freedom.
“If you desire freedom,” he writes,
“stand like the cypress, upright and self-possessed.”
Freedom, for Saʿdi, is not escape or rebellion. It is the refusal to bend inwardly. The tree stands alone, not tangled, not bowed. It survives winter by remaining itself.
In Afghanistan, where Zoroastrianism was born and Persian literary culture took early shape, these ideas were not abstract. They grew from land, weather, and survival. The association of the cypress with paradise in Zoroastrian belief predates Islamic literature by centuries. Saʿdi inherits that symbolism and sharpens it, turning a sacred tree into a moral argument.
That inheritance matters. Afghanistan rarely appears in modern holiday narratives except as absence or aftermath. But long before it became synonymous with war or loss, it was a centre of religious imagination and ethical thought. Kabul itself appears in ancient texts as a settled city on major trade and intellectual routes, a place where ideas, rituals, and languages moved as freely as goods. The region was not a cultural periphery but a crossroads, shaping religious practice and moral language that travelled far beyond its mountains.
Those ideas travelled. They crossed languages, religions, and centuries.
The Christmas tree did not begin as a Christian object, not even in Europe. It began as a human response to fear, hunger, and the longest night of the year. That response took shape in lands that are now called Afghanistan, where ideas about light, endurance, and moral uprightness were forged long before they travelled west. Remembering that history restores Afghanistan to its rightful place in the human story: not only as a site of suffering, but as a source of meaning, imagination, and resilience that continues to echo far beyond its borders.
This interpretation draws on the research of Shabnam Naseemi, an Afghan researcher whose work traces the cultural and ethical roots of Afghanistan.
