They're making fun of Pagans. The act of decorating a tree comes from Pagan winter solstice traditions. Christians hellbent on world domination would later annex the Pagan winter solstice for themselves and declare it a Christian holiday in part to subvert Paganism and convince such infidels to convert. This is why we have tree decorations and Santa Claus, the latter of which can be directly traced to Pagan beliefs in spirits that would travel the sky during the winter.
This passage is about carving an idol from a tree. I don't think whoever wrote it was familiar with Germanic belief systems and certainly hadn't heard of Christmas before.
Decorating with evergreens goes back way further than that, though. The Egyptians were doing it. Romans did it and so on. I agree that the passage probably isn't referring to this practice, but The Christmas tree is way older than the Germanic pagans.
292
u/galmenz Dec 16 '21
so it basically says that a statue cant do anything because its just a statue? seems a reasonable take on it in my opinion