Why Queen Charlotte really deserves the credit for bringing the Christmas tree to Britain

Prince Albert and Charles Dickens often hailed for establishing seasonal customs but precedent actually dates to 18th century monarch from Mecklenburg-Strelitz

The Christmas Tree in Trafalgar Square, London (PA)

Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, is often wrongly credited with being the first to introduce the Christmas tree to Britain.

The Prince Consort, hailing from Schloss Rosenau near Coburg in central Germany, certainly encouraged the import of his homeland's Yuletide traditions and helped popularise them among the metropolitan aristocracy of Victorian England but he was not the first.

Bharat Nalluri's recent film The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) heavily implies in its title that Charles Dickens had a hand in it but, again, while he did much to establish the importance of the season as a time for reflection at the year's close through the popular success of A Christmas Carol (1843), he does not deserve the credit for introducing specific rituals either.

The real innovator was Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, who installed the first indoor tree to mark the festive season at Queen's Lodge, Windsor, in December 1800.

She had left the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761 to marry George, bringing with her the legend of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, who, it was said, wandered through a pine forest one winter's night in 1536 and looked up to see the stars sparkling through the trees like ornaments adorning their branches, a spectacle inspiring him to bring a pine tree into his home at Eisleben and illuminate it with wax candles to recreate the sublime effect.

Germans had imitated Luther since the early 17th century, bringing trees into their houses and decorating them with paper roses, dangling apples and confectionery.

In Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the custom Charlotte had grown up with involved installing a single yew branch in the parlour. She sought to make it a more public novelty in England, inviting her ladies-in-waiting to help dress the festive bough with wax tapers at Kew Gardens and Windsor Castle before gathering around them to sing and distribute gifts and sweets.

Replacing the branch with a complete tree was an invention entirely of her own devising, brought in and lavishly adorned as the centrepiece for a royal Christmas party to mark the end of the first year of the new century. To the children in attendance, the result was as close to fairyland as they had ever seen.

Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (Rex)

Britain's aristocrats quickly sought to imitate Queen Charlotte and a tradition was born, the custom ubiquitous by her death in 1818.

Prince Albert's innovation in 1840 was to ship spruce firs in from Coburg, before which any hard-wearing tree had been up-rooted and dragged inside.

A century later, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Norway began gifting Britain a spruce from its forests every year as an expression of gratitude for its support in the fight against Nazi Germany. That tree stands in London's Trafalgar Square today, as it has every year since 1947.

In the intervening decades, a superstition has arisen that the Christmas tree and other decorations must be brought down before Twelfth Night (January 5) or the household at fault risks incurring a run of bad luck.