The Christmas Pickle

We had a Christmas dinner for the Girl's Ministry workers this evening; part of our program was a Christmas trivia contest. One of the questions was about a tradition of finding a particular ornament in order to get to open the first package on Christmas morning.

No one else there had heard of the Christmas Pickle.
Our Christmas Pickle ornament was a gift from friends several years ago; this one is a ceramic ornament. My In-laws have had larger, blown-glass pickle ornament on their tree about as long as I've known them, I believe.

The label on my ornament jar says, "In Old World Germany, the last decoration placed on the Christmas Tree was always a pickle...carefully hidden deep in the boughs. Legend has it that the observant child who found it on Christmas day was blessed with a year of good fortune...and a special gift."

We adapted it in our house...the one who finds the pickle on Christmas morning at our house gets a Wonka bar (or other fancy chocolate bar if I can't find a Wonka bar) and opens the first present.

But at dinner tonight, no one had heard of this and everyone generally thought it humorously absurd. So I promised I'd blog about it and, just for grins, did a google search.

Turns out the 'old German custom' really isn't! No one seems to know exactly where it *did* start...but it's all over the web (especially on retail sites that sell the pickle ornaments).

Too funny!!!!

Oh...and I had another long-held Christmas notion debunked; I thought Johnny Marks invented the character Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer when he wrote the song; turns out he got the character from a poem written by his brother-in-law, Robert May. So I concede that the trivia quiz was right and I was wrong on that one... ;)