Although there is a long history of using red and green colors during the winter months and the Christmas holiday, it didn’t take off here in the United States until the early 1900s.

In past holiday seasons, Silvie Snow-Thomas, 35, has taken steps to go easy on the environment, baking cookies as gifts, and decorating mason jars with fresh holly and clippings from her Christmas ...

An 1896 article in the Indianapolis Journal, for instance, notes that "the Christmas colours, red and green, ... Norfolk, depicts saints on a red and green background, embellished with gold leaf.