A great tree attracts awe as well as wind and caterpillars. The great tree in the main railway station at Rome attracts orisons. For the Romans are sticking their prayers and thank-you messages on their principal civic Christmas tree. So it is covered with more rolled-up msgs than candles. The requests are to do with lifestyle in the changes and chances of this wicked world: “Please may I get a new job in the new year”; “May my wife never find out about my mistress.” These are an older form of public self-expression than weblogs. They are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, addressed to Father Christmas, the presumed guardian of the tree.

Are we here witnessing the birth of a new folklorist tradition? Or irony? No. Pinning one’s hopes on a tree represents a much older and stranger tradition than sending one’s wish list to Santa Nikolaus, the Disneyfied patron saint of wishful thinking. In As You Like It Orlando hangs his verses of love for Rosalind on the trees of the Forest of Arden. The giant redwood trees of California represented the oldest native tradition for the settlers in the New World. They became virtual religion. People still leave their written requests in churches around the Mediterranean. They have been doing so since trees were churches. The poet Horace claimed to have hung up his dripping clothes to the gods as a prayer that he had been cured of the shipwreck of love for Pyrrha. Old trees were rooted before the temples. The modern Romans are merely following the tradition of our ancestors. And the ancient practice of pinning one’s hopes to a tree is still a mortal way of comfort — and of procrastination.