Halloween is long over, Thanksgiving will soon come and be done with, and Christmas is just on the horizon.
For many of us, we will often simply skip the part where we deal with Thanksgiving and combine both Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons into one – usually under the umbrella of Christmas.
This is certainly for the benefit of young children in families, who are eagerly awaiting the festivities and the fun things they bring.
Mostly fun and games with their cousins who they hardly meet, good food, and most importantly for children, presents!
As you may already be familiar with, there are certainly plenty of traditions that come into play during this holiday season.
Many of these may be family traditions, such as what kind of foods are brought to the dinner table, what sort of activities that are performed, what stories are told to the children, so on and so forth.
Other traditions are more cultural and often are part of participating with the spirit of the season, such as hanging up socks and decorating the Christmas tree as a family.
Traditional ornaments that everyone deals with often include baubles and fairy lights, but some families also consider the pickle as part of this tradition!
This may sound odd, and it is likely you may have not heard of it.
Surprisingly, hiding a pickle somewhere on the Christmas tree is a common tradition among many American families come time to decorate the tree.
Rest assured that no, it is not a real pickle that gets hidden in the boughs of the Christmas tree – that would be a mess to clean up! Rather, it is an ornament.
An adult will usually hide this pickle ornament somewhere in the tree, with the intention of making it hard for it to be found.
Then, the children are to go hunting for it! It is said that the first child to find the vegetable ornament is traditionally blessed with good luck for the upcoming year.
The question then arises – where did this tradition come from?
An automatic assumption you may have is that this tradition was inherited from elsewhere, via immigrants bringing their culture over to America.
Surprisingly, however, this is not the case. While it may have possibly had influence from German culture, this tradition otherwise is found nowhere else.
Rather, it originated from an all-American marketing campaign by Woolworths in the 1890s!
At the time, Woolworths, a retail giant, began importing a large variety of Christmas decorations from Europe.
The imported glass ornaments became incredibly popular in America.
This is understandable, considering just how gorgeous glass ornaments can be.
What is less understandable is that ornaments in the design of the humble pickle became popular as well!
As it turns out, people loved hanging the odd-looking food-based ornament.
They found hanging something both salty and tart from the tree equal parts fascinating and hilarious!
Many people jumped on the bandwagon to do this as a result.
In a way, you can say it was a meme of the time, except now it has unexpectedly evolved to be a tradition for many families!
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People Who Put Up Christmas Decorations Early Are Happier And Healthier
