Chances are knowing the following information is never going to be a life-changer, but who knows, one day, you might be tied for the lead in a trivia contest and the next category is “Random Christmas Propaganda”. And Boom! Knowing this stuff would be the ticket that shoots you to first place…
- Mark Carr, became the first logger to have a Christmas tree lot. In 1851 he paid $1 to rent space on a New York City sidewalk to sell his trees. He had such a successful first run that the landlord of the sidewalk raised his rent the next year to $100!
- The Christmas tree in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center is, on the average, 65 feet tall, 500 pounds or so, is strung with 30,000 LED lights and costs the city of New York over $1.5 million. To find the perfect tree every year, the city sends out tree hunters in helicopters that fly all over New England to find the perfect tree to adorn NYC.
- Okay, all you Seinfeld cult members, Festivus is a real deal. The holiday includes traditions like using a stark aluminum pole instead of a Christmas tree, and the Feats of Strength, where someone had to wrestle the head of the household, was written for the show by Dan O’Keefe. But O’Keefe’s father actually invented it when he began researching obscure European holidays and put them all together as an excuse to gripe about his magazine job that he worked for, Reader’s Digest. According to Dan, the family was forced to attend the celebration for years and was much stranger than anything he could put on the show.
- Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas is loosely based on Suess himself. The day after Christmas in 1956, Seuss (a.k.a. Theodore Geisel) determined that he really just didn’t enjoy the holidays. He wrote the book in hopes of reminding himself about the true spirit of the season. According to his stepdaughter, there is a little Seuss in all of his characters. She said, “ I always thought the cat was Ted on a good day, and the Grinch was Ted on a bad day.”
- Christmas pickles; WHAT? They were never supposed to be a thing. The “idea” comes from a German tradition where families hide a dill in their Tannenbaum’s branches. The lucky kid that finds it the next morning gets an extra gift from St. Nick. But that story is a big fat lie. Before F.W. Woolworth, Americans used to trim trees with candy, fruit and paper, but on a trip to a little town in Germany, Woolworth noticed an opportunity. People had started to make and use glass ornaments. Once he started importing the glass trinkets, the Woolworth’s team made up the pickle tradition story to boost sales of the latest, greatest Christmas décor.
Merry Christmas to you and yours! Bye-Bye 2020!!!.