Brian Earl always loved Christmas and podcasts, but in 2016 he came up empty when looking for a combination of the two. Undeterred, Earl decided to start his own: “Christmas Past.” In his accompanying new book “Christmas Past: The Fascinating Stories Behind Our Favorite Holiday Traditions” (Globe Pequot), Earl shares instructive stories about the Yuletide practices experienced “at the most wonderful time of the year.”
A surprising number of those holiday traditions are not at all family-friendly, including exhumed skulls and spousal murder, illicit bribes and drunken brawls, or the “Porky’s” movie franchise playing a large part in one of this country’s most beloved yuletide films.
Read on:
The threat of mince pies
Mince (or mincemeat) pies are a mixture of spices; dried fruit such as currants, raisins and dates; and, sometimes, shredded meats. Traditionally the crust was made from just water and flour, resulting in a pastry layer that was more packaging than food. As for its taste and texture, mince pie wasn’t for everyone. One preacher included into his holiday homily a description of it as “very white and indigestible upon the top, very moist and indigestible at the bottom, with untold horrors in between.” Woman’s Home Companion editorialized in the early 20th century that “positively no stomach can digest mince pie without injury.” And a rule of thumb from the American Midwest was that to prepare the body for digesting the infamous Christmas foodstuff, one should “eat sand from the shores of Lake Michigan.”
In addition to being unpalatable, mince pies were rumored to lead to bad dreams or hallucinations. One husband in New Jersey in 1909 even claimed those savory pies made him kill his wife: “I ate three pieces of mince pie at 11:00 and got to dreaming that I was shaking dice. The other fellow was cheating, and I tried to shoot his fingers off. When I awoke, I was holding a pistol in my hand, and my wife was [dead].” As a defense, though, the “mince pies made me do it” did not hold up in court.
But mince pies weren’t all bad, especially during Prohibition. Earl writes that at a time “when many people were looking for ways to get [liquor] in ways that weren’t technically legal,” a store-bought tin of mincemeat had an alcohol of 14.12%. That was as much as wine, meaning that at its worst, mincemeat pie could provide Christmas revelers with a dose of holiday cheer.
A non-existent fruit
While “Sugar plums” are mentioned in “’Twas the Night before Christmas,” they’re not a specific fruit but a catch-all name for plants like the bilberry or American persimmon. The first time the term was ever seen was in 1608 England, when a pamphleteer used it to define under-the-table hush money. Earl writes, “He used the word to describe a bribe given to keep someone quiet.”
The religious significance of candy canes
One myth about the candy cane was that it was less a simple sweet than a way to pay homage to God. The white color supposedly represented purity and the red, the blood of Christ, with the peppermint included due to its mentions in the Old Testament. The candy’s shape was meant to honor the son of God — “J” for Jesus. This is a nice story, but apparently the reality of the candy cane’s origin was rooted in practicality: In 1670, a German confectioner first made them per the request of a local priest, who wanted to shut up the kids in his church who wouldn’t stop making a Sunday fuss.
The Enduring Legacy of “It’s A Wonderful Life”
The cherished tale of George Bailey — a bereft man who tries to take his own life on Christmas Eve because he believes he’s failed his friends and family — began as a failure itself. Writer Philip Van Doren Stern originally penned Bailey’s tale in a short story called “The Greatest Gift,” but not a single publisher wanted anything to do with it. Stern then included the story in his annual Christmas cards, and one made it to the desk of Frank Capra.
The legendary director had already made one movie about a man attempting suicide on the night before Christmas — “Meet John Doe,” starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck — but he saw the cinematic merits in George Bailey’s inspiring saga. Capra was obviously right, with elements of “It’s A Wonderful Life” — Zuzu’s petals, the song “Buffalo Gals,” the idea that ‘every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings’ — remaining a part of the culture to this day.
Porn and Christmas
Another beloved cinema classic of the Yuletide genre is “A Christmas Story,” which plays 24-hours straight every year on TNT. While the film portrays a young boy’s innocent quest for a BB gun, it actually resulted from “Playboy” magazine excerpts of the 1966 book, “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash,” by Jean Shepherd. Meanwhile, the primary producer of the film was able to get it made because of his recent successes with the risqué “Porky’s” movie franchise.
Bloody snow globes
Surgery in the 1850s was performed in round theaters under the watchful eyes of curious physicians, but it was hard to light those scenes. Gas lights were too warm and fouled the air, while using mirrors to reflect at the patient got too hot. Edison’s light bulb might’ve solved the problem but was too dim, so one Austrian medical supplier tried improving on it by aiming its rays through a water-filled globe seen at a local shoemaker’s. When that was unsuccessful the would-be inventor added tiny crushed mirrors to the globe’s water, hoping they might further illuminate the theater.
The mirror bits were too heavy to float so that plan ultimately failed, but a friend of the medical supplier who ran a souvenir shop thought the concept might help sell more tchotchkes — he replaced the tiny mirrors in the water with a substance that looked like wintery precipitation and so was born the snow globe.
Drunken Revelry
The term “eggnog” is likely a combination of either “egg” and “grog” (the rum that was often added to the drink); “egg” and “nog” (a strong ale in England in the 17th century); or “egg” and “noggin” (a wooden mug that held alcoholic drinks centuries before that). The original recipe called for curdling milk with alcohol and flavoring it with spices, resulting in a drink that was frequently used as a cold medicine. The spirited concoction that George Washington served to Mt. Vernon guests included eggs and milk but also brandy, sherry, whiskey, and Jamaica rum — not to mention a direction in the recipe to “taste frequently.”
The time eggnog went most sour occurred at West Point in 1826, when cadets smuggled a boatload of the spiked drink on to a campus that was supposed to be alcohol-free. So heartily did the officers-to-be enjoy their holiday libation that chaos ensued. The besotted cadets brawled, attacked a patrolling officer, and even fired a gunshot into another superior’s door. On the direct orders of President John Quincy Adams, 70 of the cadets were ultimately expelled for their participation in what would go down in the annals of American military history as “the Eggnog Riot.”
All Wrapped Up
In the early 1900s, the Hall brothers ran a stationery store in Chicago. Each year at Christmas they would sell gads of tissue paper used to wrap gifts, called “gift dressings.” When in 1917 they ran out, brother Raleigh poked around the store and found a “stack of fancy, brightly colored paper sheets imported from France that they had planned on using as the inner linings of their envelopes.” The Halls’ customers loved the heavy paper and “Christmas paper” was born. As for the Hall brothers, the company they formed to sell those holiday wrappings has a name that may jingle a bell: Hallmark.
Silent Night, Exhumed Skull
The holiday classic “Silent Night” was first performed in 1818 in Austria’s St. Nicholas church. A poem originally written by the parish priest, Joseph Mohr, the song had to be performed that Christmas Eve when the church’s organ was flooded by raging river waters. Mohr instead asked a friend to sing his poem and accompany it on guitar, even though that instrument was frowned upon then due to its association with local taverns. The song soon became a Christmas staple, and by the time of his death in 1848 Mohr was known world-wide.
The man’s eternal rest was interrupted, however, when a sculptor who wanted to carve out a likeness of the famous priest had the man’s body exhumed to look at his skull. The skull was never re-interred though, instead being embedded into a brick wall of the church, where tourists today can still view the macabre memento.
Christmas Conflagrations
Before there were electric bulbs, people decorated their Christmas trees by attaching lit candles to the limbs. It might’ve been Martin Luther’s fault; the 16th century Augustine monk and founder of Lutheranism was said to want his tree to sparkle like the winter sky. Almost unbelievably, the concept caught on, and soon it was commonplace to add fire to fir trees. That the idea was flawed could be seen in an 1896 issue of Good Housekeeping, which suggested during tree trimming that a bucket of water be kept close at hand, in case adding flame to the dead foliage in a living room unexpectedly resulted in a raging inferno.
Traveling Turkeys
In England the Christmas goose was the ultimate holiday meal in the 19th century, even if many families couldn’t afford one. After turkeys were introduced to English cuisine from North America, that type of fowl became even more desirable — especially as infant mortality rates were dropping and families needed more food. Amusingly, as country folk in England began sending their city friends more turkeys as gifts at Christmas-time, the birds were sent via stagecoach. Often so many turkeys were sent to London-town on those horse-drawn conveyances that there was no space left for human passengers.
How to Get Rich Writing Rudolph
In 1939, Robert L. May was a disillusioned Dartmouth grad and thwarted Great American Novelist. He worked instead as a copywriter for the Montgomery Ward department store, where he barely made enough money to support his family. When the company asked May to pen a holiday story for its promotional hand-out, the copywriter chose a reindeer protagonist (because his daughter loved the ones at the Lincoln Park Zoo) and a foggy night (inspired by heavy weather off Lake Michigan). He wrote the classic tale still remembered fondly today, an underdog story about a reindeer first named Rollo . . . then Reginald . . . and finally Rudolph.
Montgomery Ward handed out more than 2,000,000 copies, but the book’s popularity didn’t help the salaried May. But the next year Montgomery Ward wanted a new story so gave Rudolph’s copyright back to May, and by his death in 1978 the story’s residuals had made the dissatisfied novelist a wealthy writer.
The Growth of Ole’ St. Nick
The fat, jolly Santa Claus so beloved by all is a changed man. In the beginning he was St. Nicholas, a real-life cleric who lived in Turkey around the 4th century A.D. That St. Nick was said to be rich and generous, handing out money and gifts to the needy and poor. Initially, the man was portrayed with a dark beard, but some people saw a similarity between him and the white-bearded Norse god Odin, so going forward Christmas’ patron saint was imagined with that facial hair.
By the Middle Ages in the Netherlands, the Feast of Sinterklaas in early December featured a red-robed bishop who doled out gifts to kids, marking the first appearance of “Santa Claus.” Around the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation put an end to the worship of saints, so the legend of St. Nicholas was forgone to instead celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, or Christkindl, a.k.a. “Kris Kringle.”
In the Dutch colony of New York, the legend of “Santa Clause” grew. In 1809 Washington Irving wrote a satirical “History of New York” that included Santa flying in a wagon pulled by horses. In 1823 a newspaper poem that would later be called “’Twas the Night before Christmas” had a sleigh being pulled by reindeer.
By the mid-19th century the writer Thomas Nast first mentioned the North Pole and Mrs. Clause. But the end of Santa Clause’s 1700-year growth didn’t come until the 1930s, when the legend of jolly St. Nick was finalized by none other than the Coca Cola company, who portrayed him in their advertisements as a “more or less the ‘official’ Santa Claus: a full-sized adult man, and fully human, with no mythical physical features.”
And that, it might be argued, began the beautiful friendship between Christmas and capitalism!