It’s not Vicksburg’s first Christmas tree, but it sure looks like it.

Nearly every year, the Old Court House Museum chops down and hauls a cedar tree into the courtroom in honor of Mahala Roach, who put up Vicksburg’s first Christmas tree in 1851 at her home on Depot Street.

Last year, the museum went with an artificial tree, curator Bubba Bolm said, but this week, museum employees harvested a 20-foot cedar donated by Tommy Skinner.

“Today’s trees are so electric and mechanical. I do believe that’s the prefect tree up there,” Bolm said. “There’s no chrome tinsel or lights on the tree. It’s all natural.”

Skinner said he donated the tree because it was taking up space in the orchard he planted across from his log cabin on Gibson Road Circle.

The artificial tree was tried for a year because “it’s rather difficult to get these trees into the courtroom,” Bolm said, but something was missing.

After chopping this year’s cedar down to a more manageable 16 feet, the tree made the difficult journey up the museum’s iron staircase installed in 1859. Fresh needles fell along the way, but cleanup was worth it for the smell of fresh cedar to fill the historic courtroom, Bolm said.

Old Court House Museum advisory board member Miranda McCaskill will decorate the tree this weekend in the fashion that Roach started here 163 years ago.

“She does it with a more traditional theme,” Bolm said.

Roach’s Christmas tree was decorated with handmade paper cornucopias, toys, wax candles, red bows, ribbons, miniature fans, cookies and small baskets of candies. The Old Court House also adds Confederate flags for the annual re-enactment of the Balfour Ball, which is set for a week from today.

Tickets to the ball are $25.

People must have thought Roach was crazy as they saw her family bringing an evergreen tree into their home.

“I had read of the German custom and thought it would be fun to try a tree of my own for my children’s pleasure,” Roach wrote in her diary that is now part of the University of North Carolina collection.

Germans started the Christmas tree tradition in the 16th century, but it didn’t catch on in America until much later. German soldiers in the American Revolution brought the tradition with them, but it was considered an oddity. Later, immigrants brought the Christmas tree customs with them from Europe and by 1850, trees were commercially available in major cities on the East Coast.

Even then the tradition that modern people can’t imagine Christmas without slowly spread across the county in an age where news took weeks rather than seconds to travel from east to west.