“The title being a joke riffing on last week’s blog post title “Czech Christmas Traditions,” and… ope they’re gone”
Hey. I’m on vacation this week, spending time with family and friends! So here’s a shorter post I wrote several weeks in advance. As it is the end of the year and I don’t really have a yearly thing that I “do” for the last post of the year or anything, I’ll just do whatever I feel like. Just like always. There’s no “top ten list of best games of the year” or anything like that. No list of best movies or books. I don’t read enough or watch enough movies to do that, anyway. I am a problem.
But if you read last week’s post (or if you want to read it now), you might know that I’ve been doing some research into European Christmas traditions as a part of my job. And I know Christmas is “over” (though technically most traditional European cultures consider Christmas as ending on January 6th, with the feast of the Epiphany) by the time you’ll read this, but I’ve been doing a lot of research. Like, a lot of research. An unreasonable amount of research, perhaps. Into the traditions of European immigrants to America in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Mostly it’s about walnuts. I did a lot of walnut research and I don’t have shit to show for it, except that Czech traditions post. But I do have a fun story to tell about another side of my family heritage, the good ol’ lovable and definitely-not-dangerous Germans. Specifically, the supposed German tradition of the Christmas Pickle. And how it has been fooling us for generations.
The Germans get a lot of American Christmas tradition. Christmas markets, lots of Christmas carols, the Christmas tree itself, the Feast of the Epiphany, and like a handful of other things that feel so commonplace in American Christmas that one would barely think to stop and wonder where they came from. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Christmas Pickle was one such tradition, too. Especially when the story of the Christmas Pickle specifically claims to be from Germany. But I suppose the story itself is kind of niche already, so I’ll fill you in on some background.
The Christmas Pickle is a Christmas tradition where, after you’re done decorating the Christmas tree, the very last ornament to go on is a glass pickle. It’s green and small so hides well amongst the tree itself. Supposedly, whoever is the first to find the Christmas Pickle will have good luck in the coming year. And, also supposedly, it comes from Germany, because Germans are known for fermented things, like pickles, beer, sauerkraut, and infinite rage. It’s a fun little game to play with friends and family, especially younger folks, and I remember my mom putting up the Christmas Pickle when I was little. She still has a pickle ornament, and I, too, have one on my own Christmas tree. But here’s the thing: none of it is true.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate to say; putting up the Christmas Pickle is a veritable tradition. Americans have been doing it since we first started importing blown-glass ornaments from Germany in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Several generations of people have grown up celebrating Christmas with the Christmas Pickle. But the part that’s a lie is the German aspect. This tradition doesn’t actually come from Germany. It’s entirely an American invention, and according to most sources, no one in Germany is familiar with it. So it’s an American tradition practiced by German-Americans who adopted it because it claims to have a real German background. Right, got it.
The story goes, at least as far as I can tell, that when glass ornaments first started to become popular in the late 1800’s, most of them came from Germany and later France. Ornaments of fruits and vegetables were quite popular, and sold pretty well. However, for whatever reason, someone started marketing the pickle specifically as a “German Tradition” instead of just another glass ornament. To borrow a theory from my coworker Zach, he suspects that someone ordered a bunch of ornaments from Germany and wound up with an “oops, all pickles” box of them, and had to figure out a way to sell them. So he created this fake story in order to market an unappealing Christmas ornament. If that isn’t the most American way to start a tradition, I don’t know what is. Marketing and Capitalism. Those are the real American traditions.
There’s some other origin story about how a prisoner of war during the American Civil War begged his captors for food on Christmas was gifted one single pickle. This pickle supposedly gave him the strength to survive ’til the end of the war, and he commemorated it every year by putting a pickle up on Christmas tree. That’s one big pile of shit, if you ask me. I don’t believe that happened in the slightest. I think someone cooked it up to try and explain the Christmas Pickle because no real origin exists for it. Somehow, their origin story is worse than pretty much anything else they could have come up with. I’d much rather stick with the “oops all pickles” story.
The weirdest part of this whole thing to me, though, is that the glass pickle is now one of the best-selling ornaments from Germany. There are towns that still do traditional glass-blowing or make ornaments that look like the traditional glass-blown ornaments, and they export thousands upon thousands of these things every year. It’s gotten to the point where German families are now adopting the Christmas Pickle as a quirky American tradition. If you want to talk about everything coming full circle, a tradition with no clear beginning that’s labeled as German but in reality is American then becoming German by proxy of America is full circle. You can almost say that the Christmas Pickle really is a German tradition because some people in Germany really do practice it now. That’s of course ignoring the fact that it began in America and has no ties to any deeper cultural tradition, but, you know, you get the idea.
The whole thing is just such a bizarre little glitch in culture. It’s like one of those urban legends that gets passed around so much no one knows where it really comes from. It’s like an SCP infohazard, or for a more grounded comparison, it’s a perfect embodiment of Meme Theory (not the minions images your grandma shares online, but the original definition of the word), which studies how ideas spread among people with the slight subtext that ideas themselves “desire” to spread, just like successful genes spread from an evolutionary approach. This would be a great example of that. This one stupid fake tradition has spread itself around so much that it is now firmly cemented in a hundred years of actual tradition and is spreading to other countries. It is a highly successful memetic agent. Natural selection has chosen for the Christmas Pickle.
The whole thing is just mind-boggling. And mind-bogglingly stupid, in some ways. I mean, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, doesn’t it make you want to walk off into the ocean and return the primordial ooze? Humanity has gone too far, and our great sin in the Christmas Pickle. But you know what? On the other hand, why does it matter? It’s harmless. It’s fun. It’s stupid, but it’s fun. It takes up one brain cell of my memory. It does what traditions are supposed to do; it brings people together and it sparks joy and celebration for the season. It is a goofy gag that I have zero qualms about celebrating and participating in. And, honestly, knowing the story behind it almost makes me love it more. I mean, what dumb fucking story. I find it deeply endearing for its pants-shitting madness, like a dog with eyes that pop out of its head every other fart, but the thing is too damn cute to put down. I have fond memories of the Christmas Pickle, and I’m sure thousands, if not a few million, of other Americans do, too. Not a ton of memories, mind you. It’s still a pretty minor tradition. But a tradition it is nonetheless. And it’s our tradition, at that.
Back off, Germany. This one’s strictly American.
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