It's always struck me as a strange, even surreal thing to do: to drag a living tree into your house once a year and set it up for worship. Ever since I can remember, we had a "real" Christmas tree, sitting in the corner of a room from mid-December. It might as well have been the same one each year, reincarnated in the same place, dressed in the same collection of baubles annually excavated from the loft. First would come the gold-painted fir cones that my mother made during the war, and drilled for wires in the factory where she was supposed to be turning out machine-gun parts. Then there'd be the faded green and red paper rope, and plastic 1940s' stars that slot into one another; and then fragile blown-glass balls, fewer each year.

I still maintain the same ritual, in the same house, though there are modern additions: a spouting silver glass whale, which an artist friend sent me; a slightly mouldy pastry carp from Prague sent by another friend. And a clear Perspex bauble containing a plastic cockroach, a "Christmas card" from John Waters  a sly reference, perhaps, to one of the most blasphemous scenes in cinema in his Female Trouble (1975), when a spiteful Divine, denied the cha-cha heels she was promised for Christmas, trashes the family tree. Our suburban tree is a hotchpotch. But somehow, when the strings of lights are turned on, the whole thing assumes an almost eerie appearance, like a Victorian fairy hovering a foot off the ground.

Bernd Brunner has a written a slender but fascinating book on the Christmas tree, in the manner of his previous studies of bears, the moon and aquaria. In wry tones, playing with cultural and scientific contexts, he lays out the provenance of the festive tree and its first appearances.

There were reports of decorated trees in Freiburg in 1419, Tallin in 1441, and Riga in 1510  this is a distinctly Germanic phenomenon, although an Epiphany banquet for Henry VIII, held in Richmond, was graced by a "tree of golde". It was also a Protestant habit, particularly associated with Martin Luther, who is said to have been the first to light a candle on a Christmas tree. As such, it was the Protestant alternative to the Catholic crib (an Italian invention, ascribed to St Francis of Assisi).

But it wasn't until the rise of the bourgeois family in the 18th century that the custom flourished. Goethe sentimentalised it in The Sorrows of Young Werther, "the appearance of the marvellous tree with its wax candles, sweets, and apples would put them in heavenly rapture." Early trees were not necessarily set on the floor; there was a fashion for hanging them from the ceiling, even upside-down (thus predating Shirazeh Houshiary's inverted tree for Tate Britain in 1993).

By the 1840s, the fashion had spread to Britain via Prince Albert, although Brunner convincingly suggests an earlier route, citing a description of a German Christmas tree written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. Yet the tree was slow to catch on in the new republic of the United States. The stern mindset of New England rejected such furbelows: "The Puritan blood still flows too briskly in my veins to allow me to relish over much the Christmas tree," observed the progressive writer, Lydia Maria Child, in 1845.

But American commodification  and sentimentalism  meant the tree was eventually adopted with abandon and ingenuity. Seeking a safer alternative to "live" candles (which had already resulted in many domestic fires), a gas-lit, cast-iron version was devised: "The Improved German Christmas Tree", complete with hissing blue flames  more like an overgrown oven than a festive installation.

The 19th century went completely over the top when it came to decorations: glass ornaments, blown and pressed (some silvered with a dangerous lead alloy), clockwork angels, tinsel "baby Jesus's hair", and cardboard animals containing sweets dangled on every sagging branch. I enjoyed Brunner's account of the adult Schiller, the poet of the "Ode to Joy", discovered by his tree, munching every sweetmeat he'd hung on it.

This book is as eclectic as any Christmas tree. It even dares to step into politically charged territory  Nazi trees topped with swastikas and red baubles daubed with the words, "Heil Hitler". Given its largely northern European focus, I was surprised to find no reference to Caspar David Friedrich, whose Romantic paintings seem haunted by the Christmas tree. Nor is there a mention of my favourite Christmas tree creation myth: that tree-worshipping Druids draped evergreens with intestines from animal or even human sacrifices. But there are enough surprises here to keep anyone entertained on Christmas Eve. I liked the story of the unsold trees being acquired by zoos for feeding to polar bears and elephants, as they're rich in vitamin C.

Christian or pagan, Philippine palm or Rockefeller Center's uber-tree (Brunner names New York as the "world capital of the Christmas tree"), this is a tradition worthy of preservation, a residual folk art. It is a timeless gesture to a festival that somehow still succeeds in suspending reality for at least 24 hours. At the bottom of my garden lies a graveyard of old trees, their spiky stems reduced to tapering masts, waiting for the Spirit of Christmas Past to resurrect them, along with all the other trees, all reaching back into the dark forest of our collective childhood imaginings.

 Philip Hoare's The Sea Inside will be published by Fourth Estate in June 2013.