Tate Britain’s Christmas tree is an annual treat.

Branching out: Tate Britain trees through the years

The art world rarely flirts with festive fare, but at Tate Britain, Christmas is taken very seriously. Every winter for the past 22 years the gallery has honoured an artist with a golden invitation to decorate their Christmas tree.

The tree’s function is not merely to brighten up the gallery’s grand crypt-like entrance. Rather, it must make a defining statement: about the world, about art – and, you might argue, about where a secular institution like the Tate places itself in relation to Christmas.

“A Christmas tree is something that everybody is familiar with,” says Clarrie Wallis, the gallery’s curator of contemporary British art, “so this work provides a meeting point between conceptual art and the world at large.”

The Tate tree commission was originally the idea of Nicholas Serota. Shortly after he was appointed director of the Tate in 1988 he chose sculptor Bill Woodrow, whose work was known for its political dimension, to come and hang decorations on the gallery’s tree. The result, a towering pine groaning with eco-friendly cardboard objects, maps and topped with a globe, set the radical tone for future artists.

Invariably, artists see this commission as a way to either reject the materialism of a commercial Christmas or rebel against tradition. In 2001, Yinka Shonibare, of Nigerian descent, explored the possibility of a multicultural Christmas by wrapping the branches of his tree in West African batik. In 2002, Tracey Emin donated the tree to an Aids charity and nonchalantly deposited a scruffy notice board in its place.

From Michael Landy’s forlorn specimens dumped in a rubbish bin (1997), to Bob and Roberta Smith’s fairy lights powered by gallery visitors on pushbikes (2008), there is one thing that almost all the tree artists to date have had in common. They have revealed themselves reluctant to embrace the magic of Christmas.

But hold your “Humbug!”. This year, I’m told, the Tate tree by British artist Tacita Dean, kept closely under wraps until its official unveiling this Thursday, will do just that. “I can’t tell you much but it’s unbelievably ambitious,” says Wallis, “and it’s going to be beautiful.” She also lets on that the tree will engage, thrillingly, with the austere architecture, to make maximum use of the building’s crescendo: the domed octagon at the head of the Tate’s neoclassical sculpture gallery.

Going by Dean’s previous work, we can expect elemental minimalism, fragility, elegiac meditations on history – and ghosts of Christmas past.