16 Innovative Origins of Holiday Traditions - mental_floss - List Show (Ep. 237)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube, and did you know

that artificial snow dates back to 1950? That's when three engineers from Milford, Connecticut

attached a garden hose to a compressor and used a spray nozzle to cover a hill in 20 inches

of snow. Before that, ski slope owners used ice. In 1949, for instance, the owner of Mohawk

Mountain in Connecticut spent $3,500 on 500 tons of ice, which he broke up with a pick

then spread the chips over a slope. And that's just one of many origins of holiday traditions that I'm going to share with you

today in this video brought to you by Intel. The Christmas tree in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center is 65 feet tall, 555 pounds, contains

30,000 LED lights and costs the city of New York over $1.5 million

To find the perfect tree of a year, the city sends out helicopter crews on surveying flights

all over New England. In 1851, Mark Carr became the first logger ever to set up a Christmas

tree stand on a New York City sidewalk. He paid $1 to rent the space for that season

He was so successful that the next year his rent was up to $100

Christmas trees in 18th century Germany were often lit with candles fixed to the branches

with wax, making them fire hazards. In 1882, Edward H. Johnson, vice president of the Edison

Electric Light Company, made the first electric Christmas lights for his family tree. The 80

walnut-sized individual bulbs were red, white, and blue. Oh so you look kind of like our nutcracker red white and blue and Picard Holiday lights went commercial in 1901 but you had to plug each light in meaning you probably couldn have more than a couple on your tree

Ever Ready solved that problem two years later, selling strings of lights with up to eight little bulbs in a row

While mistletoe has been linked to fertility in lots of ancient cultures, the practice of kissing under it really took off in Victorian England

where some jerks circulated a myth that girls who refused to kiss under the mistletoe wouldn't receive any marriage proposals in the following year

Speaking of mistletoe, it isn't native to the United States, but unwilling to let the tradition die

American entrepreneurs sourced the plants from France and began shipping the clippings over by steamship in the 19th century

The most popular place to eat on December 25th in Japan is KFC

It's so common that you have to make reservations months in advance, despite the fact that only 1% of the population even celebrates Christmas

The tradition goes back to 1974, when the fast food chain launched a commercial offering foreign visitors the next best thing to a traditional turkey

but instead it unexpectedly caught on with locals. Festivus from Seinfeld actually existed long before the TV show

The holiday, which features traditions like using a stark aluminum pole instead of a Christmas tree

and the feats of strength where someone has to wrestle the head of the household, is credited to staff writer Dan O'Keefe

But O'Keefe's father actually invented it when he began researching obscure European holidays

and bundled them together as an excuse to gripe about his magazine job he worked for Reader's Digest

According to Dan, the family was forced to attend the celebration for years, and it was much stranger than anything he could write about for the sitcom

The first Christmas cards were designed by the Englishman John Calcutt Horsley in 1843 He printed up a thousand cards with three little drawings side by side none of which were like Santa or reindeer Instead his cards featured a family sitting together at a table in the middle with two

images of them helping the poor on either side. That's lovely, but I don't understand what it has to do with holidays

Where was the Xbox? Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas is loosely based on Seuss himself

The day after Christmas in 1956, Seuss, aka Theodore Geisel, realized he no longer enjoyed

the holiday, so he wrote the book in an attempt to remind himself about the true spirit of

the season. According to his stepdaughter, there's a little soose in all of his characters

As she put it, I always thought the cat was Ted on his good days, and the Grinch was Ted

on his bad days. Christmas pickles are not supposed to be a thing. The idea comes from a German tradition

where families hide a dill in their Tenenbaum's branches. The lucky child who finds it the

next morning receives an extra gift from St. Nick. But the story's actually completely

untrue. Before F.W. Woolworth, Americans used to trim trees with candy and fruit and paper

but on a trip to a little town in Germany, Woolworth noticed an opportunity. People there

had started to make and use glass ornaments. Once he started importing the glass trinkets

Woolworth's team concocted the idea of Christmas pickles, along with a fake tradition story

to boost sales of their new line at department stores. Huh, can I start a Christmas tradition of playing Nintendo games all day

Advent calendars first took off in America when a picture of President Eisenhower opening

one up with his grandkids showed up in newspapers across the nation. But unlike the Christmas

pickle this tradition actually is German The calendars were first produced by the German printer Gerhard Lang who was inspired to recreate the handcrafted calendars his mother had made for him in the early 1900s Before Lang most Germans used to mark the advent by lighting candles or hanging pictures on advent clocks

Now, obviously American customers want the Postal Service to make holiday stamps, right? Because that's the only time we actually send mail anymore

But the service always struggled to figure out how to make a stamp that satisfied everyone without offending anyone

In 1962, Jim Crawford came up with a simple design that worked, featuring two candles and a wreath

It was very popular. The Postal Service sold out its first run of 350 million stamps in no time

By the end of 1962, it had distributed over one billion of the stamps

In 2007, the sport major league dreidel was formed in New York City

The tournaments occurred during Hanukkah, and the winner is the dreidler with the longest time of spin

And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you that in 1991, artificial trees started

outselling natural trees in the United States, but artificial trees aren't new

In fact, the first ones came from Germany in 1913 as a way to lessen deforestation

They were originally made out of goose feathers, dyed green and fixed to a wooden pole

But goose feathers are messy and shed all over people's houses, so the toilet brush

company, Addis Brush Company, stepped in and using the exact same technology as Brings

toilet brushes into the world made artificial Christmas trees