20 Christmas Traditions With Surprisingly Odd Origins

In late November 1955, Colonel Harry Shoup was on duty at a U.S. air defense command post in Colorado Springs when the telephone rang. A local Sears store had advertised a phone number children could dial to talk with Santa Claus, but the child who called dialed Shoup’s number by mistake. Shoup had his aides look at the radar scope for signs of Santa and give regular status updates. The command found the concept charming and released a news story to the press about Santa tracking on December 23, 1955, beginning what has become a longstanding tradition.

Robert L. May, an advertising copywriter at Montgomery Ward, a department store chain in Chicago, wrote the poem that introduced Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1939 after Ward asked him to create an original storybook to help save money in the Depression instead of purchasing coloring books for children shopping with their parents. Reflecting his own experience of being a bit of an outcast as a child, May came up with Rudolph, and an artist added the reindeer’s features. At first, executives balked at the red nose due to its association with booziness, but they gave their approval.

Thomas Nast was a political cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, an American magazine of the 19th century, and in the 1860s he began drawing Santa Claus in a red suit trimmed with white fur, based on older European images of Saint Nicholas. In subsequent decades, artists like Norman Rockwell painted red-suited Santas like this as well. It was only in 1931 that illustrator Haddon Sundblom was commissioned by Coca-Cola to create their famous Santa Claus ads. Coca-Cola didn’t invent the look. It just made an image that already existed impossible to forget.

In the 1890s, the F.W. Woolworth department store chain imported glass vegetable-shaped ornaments from glassmakers in Lauscha, Germany. When the green pickle ornaments didn’t sell, retail marketers came up with a story about an old German Christmas tradition. Today, more than 90% of Germans have never even heard of it, according to a 2016 survey. The Christmas pickle, it turns out, is an American sales pitch in a German costume.

On Christmas Eve 1818, assistant priest Joseph Mohr discovered that his church’s organ in Oberndorf, Austria, was ruined by rust and flood damage from a nearby river. With no organ to play, Mohr gave the schoolteacher in town, Franz Gruber, a poem he had written two years before. Gruber put music to it on the spot for two voices and guitar, and “Silent Night” was born that evening. It is often said that mice caused the damage to the organ, though contemporary records indicate it was water.

Bob McCormack was a confectioner in Albany, Georgia. He sold straight sugar sticks, European treats at least a few centuries old, as well as crooked sugar “crooks,” which had adorned German trees for more than a century. The bending took a long time and the sticks often broke, so in the 1920s he and his brother-in-law, a priest named Gregory Keller, developed a machine to do it for them. It was that development that allowed red-and-white striped candy canes to be produced on an industrial scale and to become the shape we know today.

Erwin Perzy made surgical instruments in Vienna, Austria, and in 1900 was working to brighten dim early light bulbs for operating rooms. He came up with a simple solution: fill a glass globe with water, add some crushed glass and semolina, ground wheat, to scatter the light. The semolina settled down over time like falling snow, making it useless for surgery but oddly charming. He dropped a tiny model church inside and patented the snow globe. A souvenir industry was born.

In December of 1882, families were decorating Christmas trees with open-flame candles, and their houses were burning down. Edward H. Johnson, a vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company, saw a chance to prove there was a safer way. He wired up 80 electric light bulbs, fed by a private generator, on a revolving tree in his Manhattan apartment and showed them off to a crowd of journalists. It was a publicity stunt to show that indoor electric power wouldn’t set fire to your house. The lights were expensive for many years.

German guild bakers were making three-dimensional Lebkuchenhäuser (gingerbread houses) as early as the 1600s. In 1812, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the children encounter a house made out of bread, cakes, and sugar built by a wicked witch. Afterward, confectioners capitalized on the story’s popularity by selling decorated edible “witch’s houses” at Christmas markets. So no, the Grimms didn’t create the gingerbread house, but their slightly sinister fairy tale did help turn it into a holiday tradition.

American professor Clement Clarke Moore is traditionally credited with writing “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), which was published anonymously in a New York newspaper in December 1823, although some historians say it was written by the writer Henry Livingston Jr. Prior to the poem, stocking customs were mentioned only occasionally in European legends of St. Nicholas. One story describes the saint tossing gold down the chimney to be caught in stockings left hanging there. With Moore’s description of stockings “hung by the chimney with care,” the hodgepodge holiday tradition became widespread.

In 1847, Tom Smith, a London confectioner, had some French-style wrapped sweets that weren’t selling. Watching the sparks flying out of his shop fireplace, he got an idea. With the help of a chemist, he inserted a strip of paper coated with a friction material between two cardboard tubes, so that when the tubes were pulled apart, the paper would pop and create a spark. Smith called the product “Bangs of Expectation,” the first-ever Christmas crackers. The paper crowns and jokes were added by Smith’s son, Walter Smith, a couple of decades later.

The original eggnog, known as posset, was a British drink made from curdled milk, eggs, and expensive imported sherry. Fresh milk was rare and expensive in medieval Britain, and spiced wine was equally luxurious, making the posset a luxury beverage for the wealthy. When colonists brought this popular drink to the American colonies, they adapted it by using their own fresh milk and the cheaper Caribbean rum instead of imported sherry. The substitution of milk and rum for sherry is what transformed posset into eggnog. George Washington served his guests at his Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, a particularly potent multi-spirit variation.

In December 1843, Sir Henry Cole, a British civil servant who would later establish London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, found himself overwhelmed with holiday correspondence. Instead of addressing each one individually, Cole commissioned John Callcott Horsley to create a printed card that depicted a family toasting Christmas surrounded by images of charitable acts. He printed 1,000 cards, took what he required, and sold the remainder at a shilling each, creating the first Christmas card.

Domestic servants, footmen and tradespeople in both feudal and Victorian Britain had to work on Christmas Day preparing and serving food for their employers’ holiday feast. Employers gave them the next day, December 26, off to see their own families, handing out wooden “Christmas boxes” full of money, food leftovers, and small gifts as thanks. Churches also distributed their alms boxes to the poor on that day. The name has nothing to do with the sport of boxing. It comes from those boxes.

In the German village of Lauscha, a community of generations of skilled glass workers, families had long decorated their Christmas trees with actual apples, nuts, and marzipan. In 1847, a master glassblower named Hans Greiner made glass into hollow spheres and fruit shapes, then coated the inside with a reflective silver lining to make them a permanent substitute. It’s rumored that he couldn’t afford real fruit that year, and indeed, 1847 was a bad year for crops in the area. Decades later, Woolworth discovered them and shipped them over to the U.S.

In about 1610 in Nuremberg, Germany, a city known for its silversmiths, craftsmen invented machines to hammer silver into fine threads, which were hung from trees to reflect the light from candles. Because silver was costly and easily tarnished by smoke from fireplaces, tinsel remained a luxury item for several hundred years, until cheap foil made from lead and tin was introduced in the early 1900s. In the 1970s, lead tinsel was phased out in the United States due to safety concerns. Plastic became the preferred choice.

When Gerhard Lang was a child in Germany, his mother sewed tiny cookies onto pieces of cardboard so he could eat one each day before Christmas. Later, as a publisher in Munich, Lang in 1908 used the memory of his childhood to produce the first commercially made Advent calendar with images to glue on each day. He later created ones with small flaps to lift. The chocolate versions were introduced much later.

In Taxco, Mexico, a plant known as Cuetlaxochitl in the region’s native Nahuatl language was used in nativity plays by Franciscan monks in the 17th century. The first U.S. Minister to Mexico, and also an amateur botanist, Joel Roberts Poinsett, saw the plant flower bright red in December of 1828, and shipped cuttings to his greenhouse in Charleston, South Carolina. He sent samples to botanical gardens throughout the country, which propagated it from there. Its red “petals” aren’t actually petals at all, but modified leaves.

There was no fresh fruit in winter in medieval Europe. The bakers’ solution was to soak fruit in tons of sugar, honey, and alcohol, and bake it in dense cakes with expensive imported nuts and spices. Sugar, dried fruit, and spices were all expensive items, so serving fruitcake at Christmas was a way to demonstrate one’s wealth and generosity. The sugar and alcohol meant that it could last for weeks without refrigeration, so people could continue to serve it throughout the Christmas period.

In 1891, Captain Joseph McFee was a Salvation Army officer in San Francisco. He wanted to offer a free Christmas dinner to 1,000 poor people and sailors, but he had no way to pay for it. Then he recalled seeing a charity collection pot on a wharf in Liverpool, England. He put a large iron pot outside the Oakland Ferry Landing, a dock on the San Francisco waterfront, with a sign that read, “Keep the Pot Boiling.” He managed to raise enough to provide dinner for all the people he’d been hoping to reach, and the concept caught on across the country.

This content was created with the help of AI.