Some of you may be familiar with my Christmas poem, “The Pickle and The Pear” (you can read the poem here.) These are the two ornaments that inspired it (I told you more pears were to come!). In fact, some of the other ornaments mentioned in the poem have appeared in these posts. Perhaps I should send you on a scavenger hunt to see if you can identify them all.
Do you know the tradition of the Christmas pickle? My pickle’s out in the open, but you’re supposed to hide it in your tree and whoever should find it gets a special gift, or good luck in the coming year. I always thought it was a German tradition given the German roots of my family, but I did some research and found this isn’t true, that it has American roots to the late 19th century. My cynical side likes the theory that it was a marketing ploy by Woolworth’s to sell German glass ornaments in the 1890s. Sounds about right for a holiday steeped in competing spiritual/material traditions.
