Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  The Celts believed that on October 31, all persons who had died in the previous year assembled to choose the body of the person or animal they would inhabit for the next twelve months, before they could pass peacefully into the afterlife. To frighten roving souls, Celtic family members dressed themselves as demons, hobgoblins, and witches. They paraded first inside, then outside, the fireless house, always as noisy and destructive as possible. Finally, they clamored along the street to the bonfire outside town. A villager, deemed by appearance or mannerism to be already possessed, could be sacrificed in the fire as a lesson to other spirits contemplating human possession.

  Halloween customs originated as a means of frightening away spirits eager to possess the living. The earliest American mischief night pranks: overturning outhouses and unhinging front gates.

  The Romans adopted Celtic Halloween practices, but in A.D. 61 they outlawed human sacrifice, substituting the Egyptian custom of effigies (called ushabti by the Egyptians, who buried scores of statuettes with a pharaoh in place of his living attendants, once entombed with their king). In time, as belief in spirit possession waned, the dire portents of many Halloween practices lightened to ritualized amusement.

  Irish immigrants fleeing their country’s potato famine in the 1840s brought to America with them the Halloween customs of costume and mischief. The favorite pranks played by New England Irish youths on “mischief night” were overturning outhouses and unhinging front gates.

  The Irish also brought with them a custom that New England agriculture forced them to modify. The ancient Celts had begun the tradition of a sort of jack-o’-lantern, a large turnip hollowed out and carved with a demon’s face and lighted from inside with a candle. Immigrants found few turnips in their new land but numerous fields of pumpkins. Whereas the Pilgrims had made the edible part of the pumpkin a hallmark of Thanksgiving, the Irish made the outer shell synonymous with Halloween.

  It was also the Irish who originated the term jack-o’-lantern, taken from Irish folklore. As the legend goes, a man named Jack, notorious for his drunken and niggardly ways, tricked the devil into climbing up a tree. Quickly carving a cross into the tree’s trunk, Jack trapped Satan until he swore he’d never again tempt Jack to sin. Upon his death. Jack found himself barred from the comforts of heaven for his repeated sinning, and also refused entrance to the heat of hell from an unforgiving Satan. Condemned to wander in frigid darkness until Judgment Day, he implored the devil for burning embers to light his way. Though Satan had embers in surplus, he allotted Jack a single coal that would last an agonizingly short time. Putting the ember into a turnip he had chewed hollow, he formed Jack’s lantern.

  Trick or Treat. The most widely accepted theory on the origins of trick-or-treating traces the practice to the ninth-century European custom of “souling.”

  On All Soul’s Day, Christians walked from village to village begging for square biscuits with currants, called soul cakes. The beggars promised to offer up prayers for the dead relatives of the donors, the number of prayers to be proportional to the donors’ generosity. The quantity of prayers a dead person amassed was significant in a practical way, for limbo was the penitential layover stop on the journey to heaven, and sufficient prayer, even by an anonymous individual, greatly shortened the stay.

  Thanksgiving: 1621, Plymouth, Massachusetts

  Though the Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving dinner, our celebration of the holiday today is due in large part to the tireless efforts of a nineteenth-century female editor of a popular ladies’ magazine.

  The 102 Pilgrims who sailed on board the Mayflower, fleeing religious oppression, were well acquainted with annual thanksgiving day celebrations. The custom was ancient and universal. The Greeks had honored Demeter, goddess of agriculture; the Romans had paid tribute to Ceres, the goddess of corn; while the Hebrews had offered thanks for abundant harvests with the eight-day Feast of Tabernacles. These customs had never really died out in the Western world.

  The Pilgrims, after a four-month journey that began in Holland, landed at Plymouth on December 11, 1620. Confronted with severe weather, and a plague that killed hundreds of local Indians, they had by the fall of 1621 lost forty-six of their own members, mainly to scurvy and pneumonia. The survivors, though, had something to be thankful for. A new and bountiful crop had been harvested. Food was abundant. And they were alive, in large part thanks to the assistance of one person: an English-speaking Pawtuxet Indian named Squanto, who was to stay by their side until his death two years later.

  As a boy, Squanto had been captured by explorers to America and sold into slavery in Spain. He escaped to England, spent several years working for a wealthy merchant, and, considerably Anglicized, returned to his native Indian village just six months before the Pilgrims landed. He had helped them build houses and to plant and cultivate crops of corn and barley. In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims elected a new governor, William Bradford, and proclaimed a day of thanksgiving in their small town, which had seven private homes and four communal buildings.

  According to Governor Bradford’s own history, Of Plimoth Plantation, the celebration lasted three days. He sent “four men fowling,” and the ducks and geese they brought back were added to lobsters, clams, bass, corn, green vegetables, and dried fruit.

  The Pilgrims invited the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, Massasoit, and ninety of his braves, and the work of preparing the feast—for ninety-one Indians and fifty-six settlers—fell to only four Pilgrim women and two teenage girls. (Thirteen women had died the previous winter.)

  The first Thanksgiving Day had all the elements of modern celebrations, only on a smaller scale. A parade of soldiers, blasting muskets and trumpeting bugles, was staged by Captain Myles Standish, later to be immortalized in Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” The ninety Indian braves competed against the settlers in foot races and jumping matches. And after the Indians displayed their accuracy with bow and arrow, the white men, with guns, exhibited their own breed of marksmanship.

  Turkey, Cranberries, and Pumpkin Pie. The six women who prepared the first Thanksgiving Day meal worked with the meager resources at hand. But they produced a varied menu, with many of the elements that have since come to be traditional holiday fare.

  Despite popular legend, two major staples of a modern Thanksgiving meal—turkey and pumpkin pie—may not have been enjoyed at the Pilgrims’ banquet.

  Though Governor Bradford sent “four men fowling,” and they returned with “a great store of wild Turkies,” there is no proof that the catch included the bird we call a turkey. Wild turkeys did roam the woods of the Northeast, but in the language of the seventeenth-century Pilgrims, “turkey” simply meant any guinea fowl, that is, any bird with a featherless head, rounded body, and dark feathers speckled white.

  It is certain, however, that the menu included venison, since another Pilgrim recorded that Chief Massasoit sent braves into the woods, who “killed five Deere which they brought to our Governour.” Watercress and leeks were on the table, along with bitter wild plums and dried berries, but there was no apple cider, and no milk, butter, or cheese, since cows had not been aboard the Mayflower.

  And there was probably no pumpkin pie. Or bread as we’d recognize it. Stores of flour from the ship had long since been exhausted and years would pass before significant quantities of wheat were successfully cultivated in New England. Without flour for a pie crust, there could be no pie. But the Pilgrims did enjoy pumpkin at the meal—boiled.

  The cooks concocted an ersatz bread. Boiling corn, which was plentiful, they kneaded it into round cakes and fried it in venison fat. There were fifteen young boys in the company, and during the three-day celebration they gathered wild cranberries, which the women boiled and mashed into a sauce for the meal’s meats.

  The following year brought a poor harvest, and boatloads of new immigrants to house and feed; the Pilgrims staged no Thanksgiving feast. In fact, after that first plentiful and protracted meal, the Pilgrims neve
r regularly celebrated a Thanksgiving Day.

  A National Holiday. October 1777 marked the first time all the thirteen colonies joined in a common thanksgiving celebration, and the occasion commemorated the patriotic victory over the British at Saratoga. It, too, however, was a one-time affair.

  The first national Thanksgiving proclamation was issued by President George Washington in 1789, the year of his inauguration, but discord among the colonies prevented the executive order from being carried out. For one thing, many Americans felt that the hardships endured by a mere handful of early settlers were unworthy of commemoration on a national scale—certainly the brave new nation had nobler events that merited celebration. On this theme, President Thomas Jefferson went so far as to actively condemn a national recognition of Thanksgiving during his two terms.

  The establishment of the day we now celebrate nationwide was largely the result of the diligent efforts of magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale.

  Mrs. Hale started her one-woman crusade for a Thanksgiving celebration in 1827, while she was editor of the extremely popular Boston Ladies’ Magazine. Her hortatory editorials argued for the observance of a national Thanksgiving holiday, and she encouraged the public to write to their local politicians.

  When Ladies’ Magazine consolidated with the equally successful Godey’s Lady’s Book of Philadelphia, Mrs. Hale became the editor of the largest periodical of its kind in the country, with a readership of 150,000. Her new editorials were vigorous and patriotic, and their criticism of dissenters was caustic.

  In addition to her magazine outlet, over a period of almost four decades she wrote hundreds of letters to governors, ministers, newspaper editors, and each incumbent President. She always made the same request: that the last Thursday in November be set aside to “offer to God our tribute of joy and gratitude for the blessings of the year.”

  Finally, national events converged to make Mrs. Hale’s request a reality.

  By 1863, the Civil War had bitterly divided the nation into two armed camps. Mrs. Hale’s final editorial, highly emotional and unflinchingly patriotic, appeared in September of that year, just weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, in which hundreds of Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives. In spite of the staggering toll of dead, Gettysburg was an important victory for the North, and a general feeling of elation, together with the clamor produced by Mrs. Hale’s widely circulated editorial, prompted President Abraham Lincoln to issue a proclamation on October 3, 1863, setting aside the last Thursday in November as a national Thanksgiving Day.

  Since then, there has been one controversial tampering with that tradition. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt shifted Thanksgiving back one week, to the third Thursday in November—because store merchants requested an increase in the number of shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  This pleased the merchants but just about no one else. Vehement protests were staged throughout the country. Millions of Americans, in defiance of the presidential proclamation, continued to celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November—and they took the day off from work. Protests grew even louder the following year. Not wanting to go down in history as the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving, in the spring of 1941 Roosevelt publicly admitted he had made an error in judgment and returned the holiday to the last Thursday in November. The merchants countered by offering sales and discounts, thus beginning the annual practice of promoting Christmas earlier and earlier.

  Christmas: A.D. 337, Rome

  As a holy day and a holiday, Christmas is an amalgam of the traditions from a half-dozen cultures, accumulated over centuries. A turkey dinner and a decorated tree, Christmas cards and Santa Claus, yule logs, mistletoe, bells, and carols originated with different peoples to become integral parts of December 25, a day on which no one is certain Jesus Christ was born.

  The idea to celebrate the Nativity on December 25 was first suggested early in the fourth century, the clever conceit of church fathers wishing to eclipse the December 25 festivities of a rival religion that threatened the existence of Christianity.

  It is important to note that for two centuries after Christ’s birth, no one knew, and few people cared, exactly when he was born. Birthdays were unimportant; death days counted. Besides, Christ was divine, and his natural birth was deliberately played down. As mentioned earlier, the Church even announced that it was sinful to contemplate observing Christ’s birthday “as though He were a King Pharaoh.”

  Several renegade theologians, however, attempted to pinpoint the Nativity and came up with a confusion of dates: January 1, January 6, March 25, and May 20. The latter eventually became a favored date because the Gospel of Luke states that the shepherds who received the announcement of Christ’s birth were watching their sheep by night. Shepherds guarded their flocks day and night only at lambing time, in the spring; in winter, the animals were kept in corrals, unwatched. What finally forced the issue, and compelled the Church to legitimize a December 25 date, was the burgeoning popularity of Christianity’s major rival religion, Mithraism.

  On December 25, pagan Romans, still in the majority, celebrated Natalis Solis Invicti, “Birthday of the Invincible Sun God,” Mithras. The cult originated in Persia and rooted itself in the Roman world in the first century B.C. By A.D. 274, Mithraism was so popular with the masses that Emperor Aurelian proclaimed it the official state religion. In the early 300s, the cult seriously jeopardized Christianity, and for a time it was unclear which faith would emerge victorious.

  Church fathers debated their options.

  It was well known that Roman patricians and plebeians alike enjoyed festivals of a protracted nature. The tradition was established as far back as 753 B.C., when King Romulus founded the city of Rome on the Palatine Hill. Not only the Roman observance of Natalis Solis Invicti occasioned December feasts and parades; so, too, did the celebration of the Saturnalia, in honor of Saturn, god of agriculture. The Church needed a December celebration.

  Thus, to offer converts an occasion in which to be pridefully celebratory, the Church officially recognized Christ’s birth. And to offer head-on competition to the sun-worshipers’ feast, the Church located the Nativity on December 25. The mode of observance would be characteristically prayerful: a mass; in fact, Christ’s Mass. As one theologian wrote in the 320s: “We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of him who made it.” Though centuries later social scientists would write of the psychological power of group celebrations—the unification of ranks, the solidification of collective identity, the reinforcement of common objectives—the principle had long been intuitively obvious.

  The celebration of Christmas took permanent hold in the Western world in 337, when the Roman emperor Constantine was baptized, uniting for the first time the emperorship and the Church. Christianity became the official state religion. And in A.D. 354, Bishop Liberius of Rome reiterated the importance of celebrating not only Christ’s death but also his birth.

  Mistletoe: 2nd Century B.C., British Isles

  The custom of embracing under a sprig of mistletoe, if not actually kissing under it, originated in ancient Britain around the second century B.C., among the Druids, the learned class of the Celts.

  Two hundred years before Christ’s birth, the Druids celebrated the start of winter by gathering mistletoe and burning it as a sacrifice to their gods. Sprigs of the yellow-green plant with waxy white berries were also hung in homes to ensure a year’s good fortune and familial harmony. Guests to a house embraced under the auspicial sprig. Twigs of the evergreen outside a house welcomed weary travelers. And if enemies chanced to meet under a tree that bore mistletoe (a parasite on deciduous and evergreen trees), they were required to lay down their arms and forget their differences for a day.

  The Druids named the parasitic plant omnia sanitatem, meaning “all heal,” and prescribed it for female infertility and as an antidote for poison. Gathering mistletoe was an occasion for great ceremony, and only s
prigs that grew on sacred oak trees were collected—by the highest-ranking priest, and with a gold knife; an event later dramatized in Bellini’s opera Norma.

  Mistletoe was a plant of hope, peace, and harmony not only for the Celts but also for the Scandinavians, who called it mistilteinn. Its name derived from mista, meaning “dung,” since the evergreen is propagated by seeds in birds’ excrement. For the Scandinavians, mistletoe belonged to Frigga, goddess of love, and the kissing custom is thought to be rooted in this romantic association.

  In the ancient world, mistletoe was also a decorative green. During the Roman feasts of Natalis Solis Invicti and Saturnalia, patricians and plebeians bound sprigs into boughs and festively draped the garlands throughout the house. With the official recognition of Christmas on December 25 in the fourth century, the Church forbade the use of mistletoe in any form, mindful of its idolatrous associations. As a substitute, it suggested holly. The sharply pointed leaves were to symbolize the thorns in Christ’s crown and the red berries drops of his blood. Holly became a Nativity tradition.

  The Christian ban on mistletoe was in effect throughout the Middle Ages. And surprisingly, as late as the present century, there were churches in England that forbade the wearing of mistletoe sprigs and corsages during services.

  Poinsettia. The adoption of the poinsettia as the Christmas flower is relatively recent, dating from 1828.

  Native to Mexico, the plant, a member of the spurge family, has small yellow flowers surrounded high up by large, tapering red leaves, which resemble petals and are often mistaken for them. At least as early as the eighteenth century, Mexicans called the plant “flower of the blessed night,” because of its resemblance to the Star of Bethlehem. This is the first association between the plant and Christmas.