The Real Stories Behind Christmas Traditions and Songs - Holiday Bonus Episode

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Today, on something you should know, another Christmas bonus episode about holiday traditions. Have you ever stopped to wonder where these traditions came from?

Some traditions didn't start out having much to do with Christmas at all.

I think the mistletoe tradition is fascinating because it really goes back to over a thousand years when the early missionaries were going to reach the Vikings, and the Vikings looked upon the mistletoe plant as this incredible plant.

When these people converted to the Christianity, what they did was they brought the mistletoe plant with them and put it over babies' cribs and other things to represent their faith.

They also wanted their bride and groom to be married under a symbol of faith and so they were married underneath a mistletoe plant.

Today, we're going to explore the stories behind some of the most familiar Christmas traditions. And once you hear them, you may never look at these traditions the same way again.

On this bonus holiday episode of Something You Should Know.

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Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi, and welcome to our final holiday bonus episode of Something You Should Know this year.

These are so much fun to do. I love putting these episodes together.
And I want to start with a question. Have you, or maybe it's your kids, ever tracked Santa on the NORAD Santa tracker?

Every Christmas Eve, millions of people all over the world check the NORAD Santa tracker to see where Santa is at that moment. And it all started with a typo.

Back in 1955, a Sears department store ran a newspaper ad telling kids to call Santa directly. But the phone number was printed incorrectly.

Instead of reaching Santa, kids were calling the Continental Air Defense Command. That was the Cold War military operation that later became known as NORAD.

Well, rather than hanging up on disappointed children, the officer who was taking the calls answered the phone and played along. telling them that Santa was already on his way.

Well, the idea caught on and the military began officially tracking Santa using radar and satellites.

So what began as a Cold War accident has turned into a beloved annual tradition that's been running for nearly 70 years. And that is something you should know.

Every year around this time, people in the U.S.

as well as people all over the world engage in their favorite holiday traditions, the same ones their parents engaged in, as did their grandparents, and on and on.

We also listen to and sing the same Christmas songs every year over and over again. So where did these songs and traditions come from?

In many cases, the backstories are really interesting, and someone who's researched and written about them is Ace Collins.

Ace is the author of many books, including Stories Behind the Great Traditions of Christmas, and Stories Behind the Best Love Songs of Christmas. Hi, Ace.
Welcome.

So let's dive in here because there's a lot to cover. Let's start with the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe.

Where did that come from? Well I think the mistletoe tradition is fascinating because why

do we have this plant during Christmas that's essentially a makeout plant? I mean, you know, why do you have that?

And it really goes back to over a thousand years when the early missionaries were going to reach the Vikings. And the Vikings looked upon the mistletoe plant as this incredible plant.

It was able to grow out of dead wood in the wintertime because they believe trees died in the wintertime and spring back to life.

And the early missionaries actually just kind of used that as a religious symbol where the mistletoe plant represented Christ being crucified on the cross, came back to life.

The green represented eternal life. Red represented blood of the sacrifice.
And the white represented the purity of Christ.

Well, when these people converted to the Christianity, what they did was they brought the mistletoe plant with them and put it over babies' cribs and other things to represent their faith.

Well, they also wanted their bride and groom to be married under under a symbol of faith, and so they were married underneath a mistletoe plant.

Well, what happens at the end of a marriage, even a thousand years ago? People kiss. Well, today, the only thing we remember about the mistletoe plant is the kissing part.

So today we think of Christmas as pretty much a religious celebration with a lot of commercialism thrown in, but that ultimately it is about the birth of Jesus and it is a time for being thankful and helping and giving.

But it wasn't always like that, right? Before the 1830s and 40s in the United States and England, Christmas was Mardi Gras and steroids. It was a drunken party where men would,

gangs of men, would roam the streets singing the carol, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and they would plug in whatever they wanted in the verse.

It wasn't figgy pudding, it would be ale or money or whatever. And it was kind of like trick or treat.
If you didn't give it to them, they would do damage to your home.

And so, New York Police, Boston Police, and others actually had extra forces out at that time to protect people. What happened?

Well, in the United States, a man wrote a wonderful poem for his children celebrating the Eastern European family Christmases. And that poem he called A Visit from St.

Nick, and it was published in newspapers locally first and then around the country. And it turned the focus on children in the United States.
And in particular, St. Nick visiting children.

We know that poem now as Twas the Night Before Christmas. Within 10 years,

department stores had caught on the fact that, hey, we can make money by advertising Christmas gifts for children, encouraging people to give gifts

to children at Christmas. What did that lead to?

It led to churches, which usually stayed closed on Christmas Day, opening up their doors and having Christmas celebrations because the violence was gone, the drunken revelry was gone.

And the other thing it did that I think was absolutely fascinating, Congress quit meeting on Christmas Day, and the government started to shut down on Christmas Day.

So it was in the 1840s in the United States when we finally had that old-fashioned Christmas that everyone longs for today.

Wasn't Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, wasn't that instrumental in helping revive and put the spirit into Christmas? I think Dickens, you can give him credit.

You know, he wrote that as a synopsis of what was going on socially in England at the time with children being abused and working and

there being this great divide between the rich and the poor. And so it was a social book for him, a social commentary, if you will.
He wrote that book and tried to bring back some of the,

I guess, the fun of Christmas that existed in the 1500 and 1600s in England.

And it just so happened that that book came out about the same time that Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and he brought those Eastern European traditions to England as well.

So the marriage of those two things certainly did help in spreading the traditions of Christmas.

But I think that Dickens should get credit for something that we see every day, and that's Santa's on street corners raising money for Salvation Army or other organizations, the charity giving that takes place at Christmas.

I think Dickens with the Christmas Carol opened up the window to showing greater compassion and charity at Christmas than had before he had done that.

Because to a large degree, being poor was a tough, tough lot in England, particularly at that time, and there was not much compassion from the other classes.

Dickens opened up the door for, in a modern term, I guess, some social justice. So when did it become common for people to bring pine trees, fir trees into the house for Christmas?

Well, you can take it back to the Middle Ages. It was the 1500s before they started hanging them upside down.
The Latvians were some of the first that did that.

And it moved from being what they called the creation tree, which was used in churches to represent the tree in the Garden of Eden, to being an actual Christmas tree, a Christmas celebration.

The greenery was brought in. You know, they would clip the tree and then make reeves, and that's where the starting of making reeves took place on doors is using the extra clippings.

Germany was very, very big in making the Christmas tree in the 1516 and 1700s an integral part of the Christmas holidays, hence the song Otanenbon.

It was probably the French who had a great deal with starting to put more elaborate decorations on it. In America, Christmas trees were not really embraced until the 1840s and 1850s.

And the first Christmas tree lot did not show up in New York City, which was the first lot that we know of anywhere until the 1870s.

And it was actually called, the man who ran it was named Carr, so it was also the first car lot, I guess you could say. It was just selling Christmas trees.

And did people put ornaments on them right away or some kind of decorations on the trees once they were brought into the house?

Probably the Vikings did some.

They were also hanging carvings of the nativity scene on trees in the 1500s, and the nativity scenes in people's homes go back to 300 and 400 and 500 AD.

So those were probably the very first ornaments. But it was glass ornaments made in Germany that were the first ornaments that were sold to actually hang on trees.

Before that, there were homemade pieces of paper or popcorn or strung berries. And so it was about 250 years ago when the glass ornaments started to really take root in Germany.

And it was after the Civil War when they started selling glass ornaments in the United States. They were imported at first.

Then companies like Shiny Bright brought them out in the 1900s in a more cheaply packaged mix where the people in middle class could buy them. Before that, it was strictly for the wealthy.

What's the origin of poinsettia plants and its relationship to Christmas? It's a plant that the Aztecs and others used for years and thought of as magical. And there was

a story, a fable, if you will, in Mexico about a Christmas Eve service in which a young girl, and this is going to be reminiscent of a song that was written later, Little Drummer Boy, who had a similar experience when that song was written in the late 30s and early 40s.

But this was a little girl who had nothing to give for the babe in the manger.

And so she brought in this plant, and when she set the plant at the base of the crib, the plant magically turned red, the leaves did. And that was the legend.

And then the ambassador to Mexico heard that legend, saw the plant. His name happened to be Poincaré, and he brought it back to the United States and started marketing the plant

after growing it in nurseries. And so it was in the mid-1800s was when the poinensero really took off as being an important part of Christmas.
And it's one of the few.

traditions, by the way, that was actually born in North America. All the rest mainly come from Europe.

I want to talk to you about how Santa Claus came into the picture, and we'll do that in just a moment. It's a busy time.
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So Ace, talk about where Santa Claus came from. You can pray Santa's roots to St.
Nicholas of Baria, Nicholas of Baria, who was a Catholic priest, then later a cardinal.

He wore red, obviously, as a cardinal, so that's where the red connotation comes from.

And he actually spent all of his ministry ministering to the poorest of the poor. And he would bring gifts to

young girls who didn't have money for a dowry so they could get married. And he would leave those gifts, ironically enough, most times in stockings that hung by the fire anonymously.

And so they would get up in the morning and they would find this change and realize they could get married, which before they couldn't without that dowry.

And hence, there is the beginning of putting gifts in stockings by a fireplace. Now, the only reason the stockings were at a fireplace, it was a convenient place to leave the gift

because they only had one pair of stockings. Most people did.
They washed them and hung them up by the fire to dry overnight. If there weren't stockings there, he left coins in shoes.

He had such a dramatic impact on children that they started celebrating St. Nicholas Day not long after he died, and that was

1600, 1700 years ago. The Santa Claus we know today looks very different than the Santa Claus that you're talking about from years ago.
So I want to talk about that in a moment.

I'm speaking with Ace Collins, and the name of his book is Stories Behind the Great Traditions of Christmas.

So Ace, the Santa Claus we know today, the jolly old soul with the red hat and the red coat and the long white beard, he first appeared, as I understand it, he first appeared in a Coca-Cola print ad

some time ago when Coca-Cola commissioned this illustrator, and I think his name was Sunbloom,

to create this image.

But Santa Claus was looked at and imagined as very different prior to that, right?

Before that, Santa Claus was pretty much pictured as being more of a tall, thin man in kind of maroon

or

earthen tones. That's how Nast drew him in Harper's Bazaar and other magazines back in the 1800s.
So Sunbloom definitely created the Santa Claus that we celebrate and see everywhere today.

And that was done within the last hundred years.

So why is the Nutcracker Ballet so associated with Christmas?

It's funny.

It was an adult story when it began and failed miserably and then was passed along through several different classical composers' hands until one person realized, hey, we can save this thing if we turn it into a children's story.

And it was performed and became this wonderful piece of childhood magic, took root in Russia and probably took off because it was brought to the United States right after World War II when the Russian ballet came over here and performed it.

And then it took off here and in England because of that tour. Before that, it was just kind of an Eastern European celebration.

But once again, I think it took off because it's so fascinating to children.

You know, when you look at traditions and you look at songs, there's obviously been thousands of both. Why do certain things take off and certain things don't?

I think in the United States, when it came to the Nutcracker in England, it just happened to be introduced on a large scale after World War II and people were looking for ways to celebrate and feel good.

Just like the three songs of World War II, White Christmas, I'll Be Home for Christmas and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

We still embrace those today, but I think we embrace them probably because they were released during World War II when the words and the message found in those songs

was much more meaningful when families were separated in a conflict that

involved people who may or may not come home, a life or death conflict.

If those three songs had been introduced at another time, would we still be singing them today? I don't know.

I think the timing had a great deal to do with why those three songs still mean so much to us.

And by the way, Irving Berlin, when he wrote White Christmas for the movie Holiday Inn, he took it to Bing Crosby and said, Bing, the other songs in this movie I've written are really good, but I don't think this one's very good.

I'm going to play it for you, and then I'll go back and write you something better. And after Bing Crosby heard White Christmas, he told Berlin, he said, nah, man, this is perfect.

Don't change a word. Candy canes are odd in the sense they're one of the few candies that are so associated with the Christmas holiday.
Where did they come from?

Candy canes were originally introduced to the Christmas celebration to keep children quiet. There was a choir master in Cologne, Germany in 1630 who had a real problem.

Every year when they gave the Christmas celebration at the church, and the service was a couple hours long, it was the children's choir that began everything.

And then they had to sit for the next hour and a half up there in the choir loft and behave, and they never did. They were just like children are today.
They got fidgety.

They started kicking each other. They started passing notes or whispering.
He was trying to come up with some way to keep them quiet.

And he walked by a candy store and saw these sticks, peppermint sticks, if you will, and was wondering, maybe I can use this.

But he knew that the church would frown upon him giving candy to children to keep them quiet.

So what he did was he had the sticks shaped into a staff by the candy maker and took them back and explained to the people that this candy in its shaft form represented the Good Shepherd and told them the story of the Good Shepherd and that once their choir had finished performing, they could lick these candy sticks and that kept them quiet throughout the entire service.

So when did people start sending Christmas cards to each other? When did that catch on?

Well, it caught on in the United States in the 1880s and 90s when it became cheap to mail letters, but it was actually introduced about the time that Christmas turned into a family celebration in England.

And there's a man who was just way too busy to answer his mail during the Christmas season.

And old Henry knew that if he didn't answer that mail, Henry Cole did, that he was in trouble because it was a bad slight not to answer mail in Victorian England.

I guess it's kind of like not responding to a text today. People start wondering, well, are they mad at me? You know, what did I do? Well, he couldn't respond to all the letters he'd gotten.

So he went to an artist and had them paint a Christmas scene of a group of people around a table with a goose on the table and all the things that you think of as Dickens.

And then he took that, put it on cardstock, folded it, and had printed in on the inside another picture and also greetings for the holidays.

And he sent that to all of his friends who he didn't have time to answer their mail personally that Christmas season.

Within the next year, eight or ten of those friends went to the same printer and had those same cards made again for them.

And suddenly, Christmas cards became a way that the wealthy for the next 40, 50 years corresponded with each other during the Christmas season.

With the advent of cheap color printing in the 1880s and 1890s, you ultimately had people of all sorts sending Christmas cards during the holidays. And it really took off about 1900.

We're talking about the interesting backstories of Christmas traditions and some Christmas songs with my guest Ace Collins.

He's author of a couple of books, including Stories Behind the Great Christmas Traditions of Christmas and Stories Behind the Best Love Songs of Christmas.

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Let's talk about Christmas music. And, you know, one of the things that interests me about Christmas songs is there aren't a lot of new ones.

I mean, every once in a while, you know, like Paul McCartney or the Eagles or Wham kind of sneaks into the mix and people start listening to that.

But year after year, it's the same Christmas song sung by the same people, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee, Bobby Helms. It's all the same Christmas songs every year, year after year.

Yeah, I think in the last, if you look at the songs that were introduced in the last 30 years, Marius Carrie's All I Want for Christmas is You, will probably stick around.

Mark Lowry, when he wrote Mary, Did You Know, it was such a unique viewpoint song, you know, a brilliant concept, will stick around. But you're right.
Very few do.

You know, when you look at the nature of Christmas music, the song that we sing still at Christmas that

goes back in a complete form to performing it just as it was performed 1,200 years ago is Ocama Come Emmanuel. So that's our oldest complete carol.
It probably

wouldn't have stuck around, but it was discovered in the 1800s

and reprinted at that particular point and people

caught on to it. It was so easy to sing.
You look at other songs like Silent Night.

It was a stopgap measure when a priest had an organ that died and he had based his entire service around music, went to his friend, the school teacher, and Joseph Moore told Franz Gruber,

I have nothing. And Gruber offered to play guitar for the service, but the music they had picked out didn't work with it.
Moore had written the song two years before,

not as a song, but as a poem. When he had been visiting his uncle, he found that.

They set it to music and Silent Night became known as the song that saved Christmas in Obendorf, Austria, about, you know, really about 200 years ago.

Joseph Moore used that song as a stopgap measure.

When the organist, when the man who fixed the organ came by and then was playing the organ later, when he got it working, he asked, Moore, what did you do for Christmas?

Well, Moore sat down at the organ and played him Silent Night and sang it to him. The man who fixed the organ jotted down the words and remembered the melody, and that was it.

Silent Night should have gone away. It should have never been heard again.

But 30 years later, this priest, Moore, is walking by a church in one of the large cities in Germany and hears his song that was performed as that stopgap measure, wondering, how in the world did these people hear my Silent Night?

Come to find out, this man who fixed the organ had become the Johnny Apple seed of Silent Night and had taken it all across Europe, every place he was fixing organs, and taught it to everyone.

And so here's a song that should have been heard once and put away that has become the most sung song at Christmas. The best-selling song, by the way, is White Christmas.

But the most sung and recorded song is Silent Night.

And the thing I find the most interesting about all of this, the church in Obendorf, Austria, where Joseph Moore led a choir singing Silent Night for the very first time, is named St. Nicholas.

It does seem that some of the Christmas songs that hang around and have hung around are very simple, like jingle bells and we Wish You a Merry Christmas.

And they couldn't be simpler, but they last forever.

Yeah, and Jingle Bells is another weird one that shouldn't be associated with Christmas. Jingle Bells is, in truth, the best-known Thanksgiving song in the world.

And the man was instructed to create a song for a children's choir at a Thanksgiving service.

And he went to the only piano in town, which is on a mystic lane, ironically enough, at a lady's house and was playing it and couldn't come up with anything and went outside and watched a bunch of teenage boys attempting to impress girls by drag racing sleighs.

And he went in and immediately wrote Jingle Bells.

And Jingle Bells was performed at that Thanksgiving service and was so popular, the church came back at Medford and had their choir perform it again at Christmas. And the people

who were visiting from Boston and New York, their relatives, took that song back as a Christmas song. So it's actually kind of a Thanksgiving song.

But Jingle Bells is responsible for the way most Americans picture Christmas. We picture one-horse sleighs.
Courier and I have later painted those scenes.

So a Thanksgiving song that was morphed into a Christmas song is the way that Americans picture Christmas.

By the way, what is really interesting is two songwriters would later write one of the big Christmas hits.

Jingle Bell Rock. And when they wrote that song, they wrote it about riding in a one-horse open sleigh.
They did not write a rock and roll song.

When it was recorded, everyone assumed because of when it came out and Bobby Helms recorded it in 1957 that it was a rock and roll song. It wasn't.

It was, if you listen to the lyrics, it's about riding in a one-horse sleigh.

And the rocking along is what you, the feel of riding in that sleigh as those crude shock absorbers those sleigh had, those springs bounced you up and down.

Well, it's so much fun to hear the stories behind the traditions and the songs, and I appreciate you sharing it all with us ace collins has been my guest his books are stories behind the great traditions of christmas and stories behind the best loved songs of christmas and there's a link to those books in the show notes thanks ace merry christmas have a wonderful holiday season

When you're getting a real Christmas tree, the biggest mistake people make happens before the tree ever goes into the stand. A Christmas tree is basically a giant cut flower.

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Next, water matters more than additives. Sugar, aspirin, soda, none of those things really help.
Plain tap water works best. A healthy tree can actually drink up to a gallon of water per day at first.

So check the stand daily and never let it run dry. Placement also matters.
Keep your tree away from heat sources like fireplaces, radiators, and heating vents.

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If it stays well hydrated early on, it'll stay fresher for much longer. And that is something you should know.
I really enjoyed putting together these bonus holiday episodes.

They're so much fun to to do, and I hope you've enjoyed listening to them as well.

And from everyone here at Something You Should Know, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and thank you for listening to Something You Should Know.