Hello and welcome to Christmas Eve, the penultimate Christmas! It’s also the third night of Hanukkah—in general, a day of festivities. Many of us have developed weird (and sometimes wonderful) annual traditions that go hand-in-hand with the holidays (or had them foisted upon us by family and friends). Let’s talk about some of the strange things we get up to.

When you think about it, most of the things we do around the holidays would look utterly bizarre to an outside observer. Decorate a dead tree? Tell children an all-powerful, all-seeing man is bringing them presents, and requires cookies? Light candles to commemorate the Maccabee revolt of 167 BC, and eat some foil-covered chocolate for good measure? Nothing about the holidays makes much sense! But those traditions are long-ingrained, filtered down through the years from disparate cultures, and seem normal. Less so are some of the lesser traditions that have sprung up, and those that we have made for ourselves.

In polling The Mary Sue staff, it was our Jess Mason who took the cake—or, in this instance, the pickle. Jess told us about her family’s tradition of “the Christmas pickle,” sometimes known as “Weihnachtsgurke,” which in the always delightfully literal German means, you guessed it, “Christmaspickle.”

“CHRISTMAS PICKLE???” I typed back in excitement. “DO GO ON.”

The tradition involves hiding a glass ornament shaped like a pickle in the branches of the Christmas tree. Whoever finds it first Christmas morning then receives an extra present or is “said to have a year of good fortune.”

According to Wikipedia, “This tradition is commonly believed by Americans to come from Germany and be referred to as a Weihnachtsgurke, but this is probably apocryphal. In fact, the tradition is completely unknown in Germany. It has been suggested that the origin of the Christmas pickle may have been developed for marketing purposes in the 1890s to coincide with the importation of glass Christmas tree decorations from Germany. Woolworths was the first company to import these types of decorations into the United States in 1890, and glass blown decorative vegetables were imported from France from 1892 onwards. Despite the evidence showing that the tradition did not originate in Germany, the concept of Christmas pickles has since been imported from the United States and they are now on sale in the country traditionally associated with it.”

Alas, it looks as though the Christmas Pickle, like many of our latter-day Christmas traditions, was likely invented by jolly old St. Capitalism. But don’t worry, kids! It could always be worse:

“Another origin which comes from Berrien Springs is a Victorian era tale of St. Nicholas saving two Spanish children who were trapped in a barrel of pickles by an innkeeper, which actually derives from a much more gruesome medieval legend involving a cannibalistic butcher butchering and storing a group of boys in a barrel and St. Nicholas miraculously restoring and resurrecting them.”

Let your days be merry and bright, and don’t forget to tell the kids today about the butchered children St. Nick brings back to life. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go see a man about a glass pickle.

What’s the weirdest thing you do without fail on the holidays?

(image: Wikimedia Commons)

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Recently, I decided to watch the movie Chances Are and realized, quite suddenly, that there was a span of roughly 9 years where we loved movies about reincarnation. At first, I thought maybe it was just a coincidence, but then I started to look into it, and from the late ’80s to the new millennium, there are roughly 5, if not more, movies all around the idea of coming back to life and finding your love.

It isn’t a rare idea; there are plenty of films across the board with this idea, but focusing, especially, on Chances Are, Switch, and Jack Frost, there was a very distinct feel to the idea of reincarnation in that time period that feels both extremely weird and also horribly terrifying? What’s even worse is that I maybe think it’s charming?

Going in order of release, let’s first focus on Chances Are, a movie where Louie Jeffries (Christopher McDonald) dies and wants to get back to Corinne Jeffries (Cybil Shepherd) and their unborn child. He decides to just jump into the closest baby that’s about to be born, named Alex Finch, and gives his soul to a new life. The problem is that he doesn’t have the necessary shot to make him forget his old life, so when he ends up in his old house, all his memories flood to him, and he and Corinne fall back in love.

The problem is that he also kisses his daughter, Miranda (Mary Stuart Masterson), while being Alex Finch (Robert Downey Jr.) before getting his memories back, and so the whole movie is a back and forth between his old life with Corinne as Louie and Alex falling in love with Miranda. The greater point of most of these films is about growth and moving on, but what is specifically interesting about Chances Are is that Corinne realizes she’s been in love with their friend Philip Train (Ryan O’Neal) all this time, and she marries him, but even after Alex gets his “shot” from the angel and forgets his life as Louie, both Philip and Corinne are okay with him being in love with Miranda, even though they remember? Anyway, I really liked this movie so what does that say about me?

Another movie I loved as a kid and didn’t realize was problematic until I got older was the 1991 movie Switch. Starring Ellen Barkin and Jimmy Smits, the movie focuses on Steve Brooks (Perry King), who dies and is going to go to Hell but gets a second chance at life. The goal is to go back to Earth and find one woman who loves him and doesn’t hate him and his misogynistic ways, but what he doesn’t know is that he’s being sent back as a woman. Amanda Brooks (Ellen Barkin) has all the same memories as Steve and the same tendencies, but has to find a woman to love her as a woman.

Finding Steve’s friend Walter Stone (Jimmy Smits), she tells him of her task, and throughout the movie, the two end up falling in love and having a baby together. Luckily, the baby is a daughter, and so, in the end, the woman who loved Steve Brooks unconditionally was his own daughter with his best friend. So, to be fair, when you write the movie out like this, it just sounds like the kind of movie your parents would watch whenever it was on TV and not realize how messed up it really was.

And finally, the movie that warped so many of my generation’s minds and how we view death: Jack Frost. Remember when Michael Keaton wanted to be back with his son Charlie, and so he came back as a snowman for one Christmas? Because I sure do! A movie that forever made “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac the saddest song in the world, Jack Frost is basically one father’s hope to spend one last moment with his kid.

If you want to terrify your children, just put this movie on! It shows a talking snowman that is in no way as comforting as Frosty.

To be fair, I remember loving Jack Frost as a kid, even though it was 1998 and I was barely 7 and barely had a concept of death to begin with. But I do remember crying over “Landslide.” That I’ll never forget. Basically, the story is this: Jack (Michael Keaton) dies in a car accident on his way back from a show that his son, Charlie, didn’t want him to go on.

To help both Charlie and his mother (Kelly Preston) cope, Jack comes back in the form of a snowman, and they spend the holidays together in a way that Charlie never really got to with his father. A sad lesson about living life to the fullest while we can, the movie, yet again, is about coping with death and how we all struggle to move on. I’m just baffled parents let us watch this, because truly, I think I might have nightmares of Michael Keaton as a snowman.

Look, I think the fact of the matter is that we like thinking that when we die, we can come back, but right before Y2K, we really wanted to believe in reincarnation, and I have to respect that.

(image: TriStar Pictures)

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Source: Scott Dudelson / Getty

Sadly, sexual abuse of children is all too common. And while some of us conceptualize it for what it is, for men, with the way sex is seen as some type of rite of passage or something they are supposed to desire from a woman, without exception, the lines get blurred.

You’ll often hear men describing predatory, molestation or rape encounters with older women as “losing their virginity” or the beginning of their sexual experience. But in actuality, it’s the violation of a trusting child.

Recently, 28-year-old rapper Da Baby appeared on Angela Yee’s podcast Lip Service. At the very top of the interview, Yee and her co-hosts, Lore’l and GiGi Maguire, spoke about losing their virginity to a woman. GiGi shared that she hunched another girl until the both of them climaxed. While the hosts argued about whether or not that constituted losing one’s virginity, Da Baby shared that he had done something similar, much earlier.

Da Baby: “If that’s losing your virginity. Then I lost my virginity at four/five years old…Never mind I ain’t gon’ speak on it. But like, I got two older brothers. So all the older n*ggas from the neighborhood, they used to come to the crib. My momma worked two jobs. She wouldn’t even be home. Me and my brothers would come straight home from school. We  little ass boys. And there was this little girl, not a little girl, they was grown. My brother was a kid. My oldest brother was a kid. So I’m a kid kid. I’m like five years old. And in there doing whatever they was doing. And I was copying off them n*ggas: Humping on her leg, sucking on her titties, that type of sh*t at five years old. B*tch R-Kelly’d me when I think about it. She was grown. They look like they were grown. Like 17-18. My first time sharing that on camera. But yeah, I wouldn’t call that losing my virginity.

I ain’t know what I was doing then. I knew more than the average five-year-old.”

They gloss over this particular story relatively quickly but you can watch the full interview in the video below.