December is known for some large holidays and Winter Solstice. I want to get down to the unique and unusual things this month offers. Please see some interesting facts below, all thanks to a great article from Reader’s Digest:
New Year’s Eve ever year brings around a million revelers to Times Square every year. So what is unique about them? A lot of them are wearing diapers, Adult Diapers. Apparently, due to a lack of toilets, some adults wear diapers while ringing in the new year in Times Square.
Eating fried chicken on Christmas in Japan is a time-honored tradition. Starting in 1974, Kentucky Fried Chicken got in on the action by asking the people of Japan to show thanks for Christmas by enjoying a bucket of KFC. People in Japan order up their finger-licking-good Christmas chicken months in advance—to the tune of about 3,000,000 orders of KFC each year.
The city of Mobile, Alabama, Since New Year’s Eve 2008, raises a 12-foot tall lighted mechanical Moon Pie to celebrate the coming of the New Year. Over 50,000 people are on hand to party the night away as they await the main event: ringing in the new year when the giant Moon Pie drops at midnight, along with a laser show and fireworks.
On New Year’s Eve, residents in a small neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa, collect old appliances, carry them up to apartment building rooftops and toss them down to the streets far below.
In Denmark and the Netherlands, folks ring in the New Year by shattering dishes across the doors of houses of their family and friends. We assume (or at least, hope) that the dishes are ones the New Year’s revelers don’t mind losing because smashing a dish is pretty much irreversible.
In Spain, the New Year’s tradition for good luck revolves around grapes. If you can manage to stuff 12 grapes in your mouth at midnight you’ve achieved good luck for the next year.
Boxing Day is an English tradition the day after Christmas. It got its name because it’s the day on which families would literally “open the box” (the alms box) to the poor. Traditionally, every church in England had an alms box, into which people would place money intended for donation. The box was opened on Boxing Day, and the contents were distributed to those less fortunate in the parish. The tradition continues today.
Festivus: This holiday for “the rest of us” arrived in popular culture in the 1990s thanks to the television show, Seinfeld, but it’s really been a thing since 1966 in the household of Dan O’Keefe, the television writer credited with writing the episode.
It’s a Wonderful Life, a Christmas film, premiered in 1946. For the first 10 years after it’s premier this Christmas classic, was on the FBI’s radar as suspected Communist propaganda. Why? Well, supposedly it tended to make bankers seem heartless and vindictive. The film was exonerated in 1956.
Photo by Adriaan Greyling from Pexels
You have to wonder the history behind some of these traditions. Very interesting. Thanks