Brandi Miller-Parrish of Cranberry Township places handmade bird seed ornaments on the branches of a pine tree Saturday at Jennings Environmental Center. Miller-Parrish is an environmental education specialist and was one of three lecturers Sunday at the Tree Traditions program, an informative presentation on the history of the Christmas Tree. After the presentation these bird seed ornaments were made and hung.

BRADY TWP — The Christmas tree is so common and comforting that few people stop to think about the science of the trees or their long history.

However, the program Tree Traditions at the Jennings Environmental Education Center on Sunday aimed to change that while leaving visitors with new ideas for decorating their annual trees.

Brandi Miller-Parrish, an environmental education specialist who helped present the program, said this was the second year Jennings held an event like this.

“It's quite a nice little activity for a family to do,” Miller-Parrish said.

Eleven people attended the program, which was split into four parts. Participants discovered that evergreens are able to stay green and keep their needles all year because they are designed differently than broad-leaved trees.

Evergreen needles are filled with an “antifreeze” and retain as many of their nutrients as possible, allowing them to stay green all year long. Miller-Parrish said the first evergreens date back nearly 300 million years ago.

A pine tree named Methuselah in the White Mountains in California is the oldest at 4,842 years old. The history of evergreens in Christmas celebrations also was on the program's agenda.

“The use of evergreens has gone on for thousands of years, way before Christ,” Miller-Parrish said.

She said Egyptians, Romans and Druids originally used evergreen trees in seasonal festivals.

The first documented Christmas tree was used in Latvia in 1510, and it did not become universal until the early 1900s.

The first Christmas tree in the United States was recorded in 1747 in Bethlehem, Pa. Trees were not decorated with electric lights until 1882.

In another part of the program, visitors got a lesson in creating natural tree ornaments.

Some of the ornaments included a star made of milkweed pods and garland made of cranberries, hickory nuts and hemlock cones.

The participants also were to be given “critter cookies,” ornaments that double as bird feeders made out of items like dried fruit and bird seed.

They were allowed to hang the cookies on one of the trees at Jennings or they could take them home.

In an interview before the event, Miller-Parrish discussed some of the most common trees used for decorating.

She said her favorite is the Canaan fir, which has soft bristles and a pleasant scent.

“It just has that Christmas smell,” she said.

Other popular trees are the Concolor, which has a citrus scent; the white pine, which is flimsy, but common; and the blue spruce, which is prickly but has a blue tint when seen from a distance.

She also said it is illegal to cut down a tree in a state park.