Many holiday traditions that are not explicitly religious often wind up attributed to pagans.  Easter eggs, Easter rabbits, mistletoe, jack o’lanterns… all these modern symbols of religious holidays that have pagan roots.  The Christmas tree also gets this association, but that isn’t entirely true. There are pagan forerunners to the Christmas tree.  A pagan tradition from pre-Christian Poland involved suspending evergreen branches from a house’s ceiling and decorating them with fruit, nuts, wafers, cookies, and other decorations.  This was thought to suggest and inspire good luck and prosperity. While this does sound a bit like our modern concept of the Christmas tree, this tradition is not thought to be the inspiration of the iconic holiday decoration that we think of today.  Evergreen has long figured into the season, though. Ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia (a festival that occurred during modern Christmastime) with wreaths of evergreen branches, whi...

The Ghost of Christmas Future shows Ebenezer Scrooge his own gravestone.  Happy holidays! Ghost stories have a long association with Christmas.  Of course we all know Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol , which dates all the way back to its first publication in 1863.  That was 175 years ago, but the tradition of the Christmas ghost story goes back much further than that. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol , he knew he had a hit on his hands.  The idea for the story came to him in the spring, and he got it all down on paper fairly quickly.  In truth, Dickens was drawing on a long tradition of Christmas ghost stories. Dickens’ ghosts were menacing only to the fictional miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who was only menaced by warnings the ghosts brought of Scrooge’s own future.  The story has a moral to it, and it gives Scrooge a chance to mend his ways before it’s too late. The four ghosts who visit Scrooge in the book are only terrifying to a man who, on so...

Once a year, tradition dictates that we head out into the forest and seek out mistletoe, which we then hang in our houses somewhere so we can trick people into kissing us by leading them to a spot underneath the plant.  This is great news for people with chronic halitosis or a compulsive affinity for garlic or some other condition that makes us less likely to get kissed, but for the rest of us, it’s maybe not such a boon. But how did all this start? Let’s start by defining just what mistletoe is.  Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant that grows in trees, usually.  The term hemiparasite means that it gets part of its nutrients from the host plant, but still provides some of its own nutrients through its own means.  Like other green plants, mistletoe can perform photosynthesis, turning sunlight into nutrients. It just can’t do that enough to sustain itself.  Though the mistletoe tradition comes from Europe, there are literally hundreds of different varieties o...

Dr. Johannes Hofer In 1688, young Swiss physician Johannes Hofer announced he’d identified a new disease.  He introduced this disease as mal du pays , but also referred to it as mal du Suisse and Schweizerheimweh .  The term mal du pays is still used in modern French, but it has come to mean homesickness .  What Hofer was trying to identify was something a little different, which was the earliest use of what we now call nostalgia . The word nostalgia was coined from two Greek words: νόστος (/nɔsˌ tos/ or NOS tos), meaning homecoming , borrowed directly from Homer’s Odyssey , and ἄλγος (/alˌ ɡos/ or AL gos), meaning ache .  The other two terms, mal du Suisse  and Schweizerheimweh applied to Dr. Hofer’s definition because they translate specifically as “sickness for Switzerland”.  The idea wasn’t that Switzerland made anyone sick, but rather, it was being away from Switzerland that was the root of the problem.  Hofer used this term to desc...

Of the 44 men who have so far served as President of the United States, Historians generally agree that the term of William Henry Harrison, which lasted from March 4, 1841 to his death on April 4, 1841, was the shortest.  “But wait!” says the trivia collector at the end of the bar, ready to take bets from all patrons, because he knows that’s wrong.   “I can name a president who held the job less than that!”   “No!” respond the other customers, sure that the old souse doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  But he does—sort of.   So when the bar patrons place their bets, the old souse offers up a name, and the arguing begins. The name, of course, is David Rice Atchison, a Democratic senator from Missouri, and the storied “president for a day.”  Your school textbooks and restaurant placemats with the portraits of all the presidents might never have mentioned him, but he was real, and quite popular in his day.  He was popular enough in the Senate for his c...

When you think of croissants, what country comes to mind? If you’re like most people, you probably thought of France, and indeed, the French do make great croissants. They even gave us the word for them. But as famous as the French are for them, the croissant is not a French invention. The origin of the croissant is actually a ways to the east, in Austria. Specifically they were invented in Vienna, in 1683. That year, the city of Vienna was under siege by a massive Ottoman army composed of approximately 140,000 soldiers. To put this in perspective, the population of the Ottoman Empire at the time was somewhere around 11 million, which meant that more than one out of every hundred Ottoman citizens were in Austria for the siege of one city. Less than 300 years later, the United States would deploy roughly one out of every 100 citizens to fight World War II, across Europe and the Pacific, over a four-year span. The Ottoman Empire was investing the equivalent in blood and money t...

Remember the sitcom Roseanne ?  In case you don’t, Roseanne was a popular show about a working family in a small town in downstate Illinois, struggling on the edge of poverty.  It starred the popular comedian Roseanne Barr in the title role, with the already-popular actor John Goodman as her husband.  The show ran for nine seasons, from 1988 to 1997, and frequently appears on lists of the greatest television shows.  After twenty years, you can still catch marathons of the show running in syndication, and an eight-episode tenth season is planned for 2018, so fans can catch up with the lives of these fictional characters.  It had a good eight years, but that ninth season… that’s when the grumbling among the fans began. Working hard in middle America: Roseanne and her TV family before the lottery ticket—and well before Roseanne backed the Trump ticket. In the first episode of the ninth season, the Connor family, played by Barr and Goodman and several...