THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, December 22, 1994 TAG: 9412210045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, DEBRA GORDON, ELIZABETH SIMPSON, DIANE TENNANT AND
DENISE WATSON, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: Long : 246 lines
AH, SWEET MYSTERY of Christmas, at last we've solved you.
Or given it our best shot.
Haven't you always wondered what's really in fruitcake? Or what a wassail is? Or the big one: What do reindeer really eat? Wonder no more. Just read on.
What is that stuff in fruitcake?
If you're talking about the little bits that look like melted-down Christmas ornaments, those would be candied fruit. Depending on which recipe you choose, or which plastic container you pick up at the grocery store, the various fruits could be pineapple, orange rind, lemon rind, cherries or raisins.
If you're talking about the stuff that gives off that pungent aroma when you open the tin, you might be talking about the brandy or sherry that binds it all together and preserves it for millennia. Or thereabouts.
If you're talking about something down in the middle of the cake, you'd be lying because no one actually eats fruitcake, right? It is true, isn't it, that there are only 12 fruitcakes in the country and they get passed from one family to the next from one year to the other?
Whoa. We take it back. That last paragraph is a vicious rumor. The monks at the Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., made 28,000 of them, just this year.
And we know they wouldn't lie.
Does eggnog have raw eggs in it?
You sure don't see scrambled eggs floating around in there, do you?
Then shouldn't we all be worried about getting salmonella at the office Christmas party?
Not to worry. If you're drinking eggnog bought at a store, the nog was made with pasteurized eggs, which are safe. Homemade eggnog is another story. You gotta ask the cook. Recipes often call for raw eggs, but to be on the safe side, you should use pasteurized eggs or frozen egg substitutes.
As long as you've got the eggnog carton out, you might as well hear the history of the drink, right?
The word eggnog comes from the English and first appeared this side of the ocean during Colonial times. The drink has a close kinship with sack-posset, a milk-and-egg concoction made in England. It was often made with ale or sack, a dry white wine from Spain. Ale was also referred to as ``nog,'' a term derived from the word ``noggin.''
No, noggin did not stand for the head you poured it all into, but the small drinking vessel used to hold ale.
But pour too much eggnog in your noggin, and you'll wake up with an aching noggin in the morning.
Why are candy canes that color and shape?
You probably thought they were bent to hang on trees, and red and white to match Santa Claus, right?
Wrong, peppermint breath.
Here's the real story. Or the best one we could find.
In 1670, a choirmaster at the Cologne Cathedral in Germany handed out sugar sticks to keep his young singers quiet during the long Living Creche ceremony. In honor of the occasion, he bent the candy into shepherds' crooks.
The candy cane became popular in Living Creche ceremonies all over Northern Europe. The more prosperous churches placed sugar roses in the crook and gave out the candy as a souvenir to decorate the home.
In 1847, a German-Swedish immigrant named August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, decorated a small blue spruce with paper ornaments and candy canes. He left off the roses so the white canes could hang on the tree.
It wasn't until the turn of the century that red-and-white stripes and peppermint flavor became accepted as the standard. Many people believe the white stripes are symbolic of purity, and the red symbolic of the Lord's sacrifice.
How does Santa get in?
A toughie. You've got small chimneys. You've got no chimneys. The current hit movie ``The Santa Clause'' suggests one answer, but that's Hollywood. Newspapers get the facts.
So we went to the man himself. This being the 1990s, that meant sending an e-mail message to Santa (santa(AT)northpole.net). His actual answer: virtual reality.
``I am there, then I am not,'' Santa wrote. ``The presents are there, but my VR machine runs out of juice and presents stay behind.''
Now you know.
Just what is a ``Tannenbaum'' anyway?
Contrary to popular belief - and the Anglicized version of the song - ``Tannenbaum'' isn't German for ``Christmas tree.'' It and the song refer to a specific kind of spruce tree that often is used as a Christmas tree in Germany, says Regula A. Meier, chairwoman of Old Dominion University's department of foreign languages and literature.
If you want to talk Christmas tree in German, you have to say ``Weihnachtsbaum,'' which translates into ``consecrated-night tree'' or ``Tree of Christmas,'' she said.
Still, even Germans sometimes use ``Tannenbaum'' to mean any evergreen used as a Christmas tree. And for Americans, it's a lot easier to sing ``Oh Christmas tree'' than to sing ``Oh specific-kind-of-spruce-tree, oh specific-kind-of-spruce-tree. . . .''
Why do we have Christmas trees?
The easy answer would be that ornaments and tinsel kept falling off the Christmas rock. That also would be wrong, according to ``The World Book Encyclopedia'' and Dan Bechtel, a religion professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
The professor says many early Christians were converts from religions in which nature played a large role, and it was natural for them to look to evergreens - the only plant that remained green through the winter - to symbolize what Jesus' birth meant to them.
The encyclopedia says modern Christmas trees probably developed from the ``Paradise Tree'' of medieval Germany, an evergreen decorated with red apples and used in a popular Christmas play about Adam and Eve. By the early 1600s, many German homes also were decorated with evergreens for Christmas, decorated with fruits, nuts, lighted candles, paper roses and, later, cookies, candies and painted eggshells.
When descendants of those Germans settled in Pennsylvania in the early 1800s, they brought their Christmas-tree-trimming tradition with them.
And now you can't toss an elf without hitting a Christmas-tree lot.
What exactly is a wassail?
Sometimes confused with a small, furry animal that goes ``Pop!'' a wassail is actually a toast, a drink or a hearty round of door-to-door caroling.
The actual wording of such a salutation-given-in-drinking-the-health-of-a-person is debatable. Does one shout ``Wassail!'' while holding a tankard aloft, or ``Here's wassailing to you'' or does the word appear in the toast at all?
Of course, wassail is also the name given the spiced ale or liquor with which such healths were drunk.
And the British use the term to describe the habit of trudging through snowy streets at night to knock on the doors of perfect strangers and bursting into song when - and if - they open the door.
Why is Christmas on Dec. 25?
All right, everyone who believes Dec. 25 is a pagan sun celebration, stand on the right side of the deck. Everyone who believes the date has actual basis in Christian and Jewish religious beliefs stand on the left side.
Whoa, we're listing heavily to starboard.
Far and away, most people who think about this kind of thing believe that Dec. 25 was a) a celebration of the winter solstice, the time when the sun reaches its southernmost point in the sky before turning north again, bringing longer and brighter days, or b) the birthday of the pagan Roman god Mithra. Mithra was the god of light and victory, and because Christians thought of Christ as bringing light into a world of darkness, they latched onto Dec. 25 for their own holiday.
``Choosing Dec. 25 as Christmas Day was presumably a way of competing with this other religion,'' said Robert Hall, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
But Dr. J. Patout Burns, a professor of Christian thought at Washington University, says there is a Christian and Jewish basis. Asserting that Christ was conceived on the same date as his death, Christians began with the accepted date of Jesus' death and worked backward, Burns explained. Backtracking nine months for a normal pregnancy, they arrived at the winter solstice as the date of birth. Calendar adjustments have moved the solstice forward three days, but Christmas remained on Dec. 25.
What do reindeer eat?
You know Dasher and Prancer and Comet, etc., etc. Meet Poser, as in This Question is a Real.
What does Santa's team eat? ``Reindeer food, of course,'' said the incredibly helpful Joe Roman, a curator at Norfolk's Lafayette Zoological Park.
Reindeer are large herbivores, which means they eat plants, he continued. In the wild, reindeers eat reindeer moss, which is actually a type of lichen. You will have difficulty finding that to place on your hearth as a snack for Santa's team.
Reindeer will also paw through the snow to find vegetation and they will nibble on evergreens, Roman added. In the interest of keeping Rudolph from eating your Christmas tree, Roman suggests leaving carrots by the fireside. ``I'm sure he would enjoy that.''
What is the true meaning of ``Christmas?''
The word comes from Cristes maesse, an early English phrase that means ``Mass of Christ.''
Why is everything red and green?
Red and green, the colors of the Christian holiday, actually have their origins in northern European pagan customs. Plants that had the ability to remain green throughout the harsh winter months had some mystical significance, says Una Cadegan, assistant professor of history at the University of Dayton. Evergreens, holly and mistletoe also bore fruit the color of blood, another color associated with life.
As Christians adapted these symbols, green came to mean the sign of eternal life through Christ. Red became associated with the blood that Jesus shed at death.
Why do we say, ``Thank God, the holidays are over''?
Think about it. We spend months looking forward to Christmas, waiting for ``the day.'' And yet, on Dec. 26, everyone heaves a huge sigh of relief that it's over.
Why bother?
``First of all, not everyone says those things,'' says Paul Schervish, an associate sociology professor at Boston College.
Schervish should know. He actually has a grant to study Christmas. His topic - Christmas: Troubles and Traditions in Culture, Home and Heart.
Notice how kids are not happy that Christmas is over, he says. That's because kids are the ``receivers'' of Christmas, rather than the ``constructors'' - the people who make it all happen.
What's happened is that we've distorted the best of Christmas, he says.
``There was gift giving, but now if you're going to do gift giving, you have to do gift buying, gift searching, gift wrapping, gift producing, gift ideas.
``And so the very same thing that can be most enriching is now also most debilitating.''
Why do people kiss under mistletoe?
Outside the small town of Goldthwaite, Texas, hangs a sign proclaiming it the Mistletoe Capital of the World. Every Christmas, this town collects and ships more than 1 million packages of mistletoe all over the continent.
Why? What is it about this parasitic, poisonous plant that has embedded it so deeply in our Christmas traditions? And, more to the point, why do we kiss under it?
From the University of Vermont comes horticulturist Leonard Perry.
To the ancient Druids of Britain, Perry says, mistletoe was a sacred symbol that could cure diseases, make animals and humans more fertile and bring good luck. In fact, mistletoe was so sacred that if enemies met beneath a tree on which it was growing, they would lay down their weapons, exchange greetings and observe a truce until the following day.
Anthropology professors Vaughn M. Bryant Jr. and Sylvia Griber from Texas A&M University theorize that kissing under the mistletoe is a blend of three cultural beliefs: the Celtic belief in mistletoe's magic powers, the Roman custom of kissing to seal a engagement, and the Christian custom of marriage being more important than the engagement.
It was believed that a kiss under the mistletoe was a serious commitment. Thus, the couple that sealed its engagement with a kiss under the mistletoe, followed by a church marriage, would be assured of good fortune, fertility and a long and happy married life.
Think about that the next time you get caught under the mistletoe.
How did Christmas get to be so commercial?
We return again to Paul Schervish at Boston College, who says Christmas has always been materialistic.
Think about the first Christmas, he says. With its animals, stars, gifts and songs, it was full of material images.
OK, so how do we fight 2,000 years of history? How do we stem the tide of Christmas marketing that begins earlier and earlier each year? How do we raise our kids to understand that the word ``Christmas'' is not synonymous with ``I want?''
The answers might come from a tiny nonprofit, Washington-based organization called the Center for the Study of Commercialism.
Two years ago, it turned its attention to the king of commercialism - Christmas -, and formed the Religious Coalition to Take Commercialism Out of Christmas, a group of 25 religious leaders.
``People are becoming dependent upon consuming and buying gifts as a part of the holiday,'' said the center's research director, Susan Monaco. ``They feel this pressure to be consumers, go to the malls and buy a bunch of presents.''
Each year, the coalition releases a statement decrying the holiday's commercialism, and urging people to remember its spiritual roots.
``Regrettably, many people find it ever more difficult to separate Christmas from commerce,'' says this year's statement. ``Good will towards all, concern for our communities, and love for our families are goals that come from the heart. They cannot be purchased hastily in department stores.'' ILLUSTRATION: JOHN CORBITT/Staff photo illustrations
JANET SHAUGHNESSY/Staff illustration
by CNB