Ep 187: Toilet Brush Christmas Trees
The Toilet Brushes that Gave us Christmas Fakes
The halls are decked, the peppermint drinks are flowing, and the seasonal gastrointestinal distress has begun.
But this year, instead of covering Catalonian pooping logs or reindeer on psychedelic mushroom pee, we’re talking technology — specifically, the kind of technology that prevents your living room from turning into a flaming pile of yuletide regret.
Yes, friends:
Today we unwrap the sparkling, bristly history of the toilet brush Christmas tree.
When Is a Tree Actually a Christmas Tree?
People like to argue about the origins of the Christmas tree, and most of those arguments are wrong.
Egyptians decorated greenery?
Romans hung stuff on trees?
Celts honored evergreens at solstice?
Cool, but unless they were doing it for Christmas, they were not Christmas trees.
Same way that painting rocks does not make them “Easter rocks.”
A decorated object is only a Christmas decoration if you’re sitting there on a cold December night thinking, “I bet Mary and Joseph would love this.”
Once Christianity spread through Europe, people did what humans always do:
Repurposed whatever traditions weren’t nailed down and stuck a Jesus sticker on them.
The Germans Did It First (like most Christmas things)
Germany gets the real credit. Early Christians there decorated evergreens with apples, wafers, and sweets — like if Willy Wonka had a liturgical season.
One of the earliest written references comes from Riga, Latvia, where merchants decorated a tree with roses, danced around it, and then lit the tree on fire to conclude the festivities.
Yes.
They burned the tree.
Because apparently fire safety was taking the century off.
This recklessness will come up again. Frequently.
Martin Luther Saw Stars… and Nearly Burned Down Christmas
The legend goes: Martin Luther took a winter walk, saw the stars twinkling through the branches of an evergreen tree, and thought:
“Wow! I should recreate that… indoors… with actual fire… dangling from increasingly crispy tree branches!”
German engineering did not apply to this moment.
Skepticism is justified because even modern, well-watered Christmas trees become crunchy death torches after about 12 days. And Luther? He was out here raw-dogging candles onto pine branches like he was trying to speedrun a house fire.
Eventually, people realized apples were slightly less likely to kill them, and the ornament industry was born.
Deforestation, Fire Hazards, and the American Need to Chop Everything
As Europe (and later America) adopted the “go into the woods and chop a random tree” tradition, two problems emerged:
Deforestation.
Homes going full Ghost Rider every December.
By the late 1800s, newspapers were begging — begging — someone to invent a fireproof, reusable indoor tree.
Spoiler: Somebody did.
And it wasn’t a lumberjack or a professor or a theologian.
It was… a brush company.
Enter: The Toilet Brush Tree
Let’s talk ducks, feathers, and brushes.
Early artificial trees in Germany weren’t plastic — they were goose-feather trees. Literally dyed feathers wired into shape.
But the real leap happened when the Addis Brush Company of England — makers of fine household brushes, including toothbrushes and toilet brushes — upgraded their equipment for the World Wars.
They needed long, durable wire brushes to clean gun barrels.
From there, the leap to long wire “branches” wasn’t huge.
Sometime mid-20th century, Addis produced a prototype tree structured exactly like a giant toilet brush.
Green bristles.
Wire core.
Fluffy and conical if you squinted hard enough.
Glorious.
It wasn’t mass-marketed, but the design stuck. It was practical, adaptable, and — best of all — not made of kindling.
When America Saw a Toilet Brush and Said, “We Can Do Better”
In the 1950s, the Addis tinsel-tree operation fizzled, and an American machinist named C. Spiegel showed up to shut the whole thing down.
Instead, he looked around and said:
“These trees don’t suck. They just need better machinery.”
Respect.
He improved their design, sped up production, and transformed the operation into the American Tree and Wreath Company, which would produce nearly 800,000 trees a year — approximately one tree every four minutes.
Where Addis waddled, Spiegel sprinted.
Where Addis had a goose-feather dream, Spiegel had an assembly line.
And thus, the modern artificial Christmas tree — our beloved fake pine — was born from the humble lineage of cleaning brushes and toilet wands.
Real vs. Fake: The Eternal Holiday Debate
Team Real says:
“It smells good and feels authentic!”
Team Fake says:
“I’d like to avoid burning my house down, thanks.”
Here at Privy, knowing the fake tree’s DNA includes the noble toilet brush — a scrubber of unmentionables, a warrior against the brown, a soldier of sanitation — we salute the artificial tree.
It is, quite literally, the bathroom hero of Christmas.
Can You Turn a Christmas Tree Back Into a Toilet Brush?
This question has popped up online, mostly from artists or AI weirdos:
Can the cycle be reversed?
Can your Christmas tree be reborn as a toilet brush?
Short answer:
No.
Long answer:
Absolutely not.
But the symmetry is satisfying to think about.
Final Flush
As we kick off Privy Christmas, raise a mug of cocoa to the innovators who gave us fire-safe, reusable, bristle-based holiday joy:
The goose-feather pioneers
The brushmakers of England
The war-era machinists
And the good folks at American Tree and Wreath
Because without them, December would be a lot more… flammable.
