h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Even Dickens couldn't have come up with Adolphus Schwenk!

Thanks!

That's Pennsylvania for you.

Would the Germans in Pennsylvania have had Saint Nicholas in their Christmas customs? Or was Clement Moore's famous poem the source for Saint Nicholas lore? Just curious.

Also, now that we are getting late into November, do I detect a wistfulness about the social interactions based around holidays that we will likely not be allowed this year of the virus?

I'm feeling unusually sad lately (partly my on fault; I have not put full-spectrum lightbulbs in all my lamps until today).

Not that it's relevant to this thread, but I'm wishing I had not opted to write a murder mystery this month. Murder is such a downer. The lively adventures chronicled in the Holes in History projects are much more nourishing to my soul, which could use some nourishment.

Glad you're enjoying them!

'Moore's' poem - although we're pretty sure these days that Clement Clark Moore didn't actually write that poem, among other things, he didn't like kids - was the early model for the story of the American Santa Claus, but not, of course, for St Nicholas. The Dutch in the Hudson Valley had been celebrating St Nicholas for a long time.

The Dutch have had Sinterklaas for centuries, and Nickolaus is an old German custom. Of course, Nicholas' Day is 6 December. The original St Nicholas was a 4th-century Byzantine saint. The Americans moved the Nicholas business to Christmas fairly early on, I gather.

The image of Santa Claus as a fat guy in a red suit is the invention of German American Thomas Nast, who drew for Harper's Weekly in the 1860s. The rest is Coca-Cola and Macy's.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Santa_Claus_1863_Harpers.png

When there's no pandemic, you can go to the Schiele Museum and Planetarium in Gastonia, NC in December and see colonial re-enactors do a 'Backcountry Christmas'. They've found old recipes, songs, and even an old Christmas sermon from colonial times. Christmas wasn't elaborate or tinsel-y, but it was apparently heartfelt.

They don't make Christmases like that nowadays!

Well, they couldn't this year anyway.

Yes, we still have Sinterklaas here (some people do both Sinterklaas and Santa, which I find a bit annoying/greedy)

Poetry can get you into trouble like that. Discussions here are about the Black Peter issue. Originally, Sinterklaas was working alone, but someone wrote that he had a helper somewhere. One helper became a horde. Key in the discussions is whether Black Peter is black skinned or black due to climbing through chimneys and the whole subservience question. The last few years the word black and servant have been purged from the usual songs. Although the discussion in itself has been going on for 50+ years, it has gained a lot of momentum in the wake of #Metoo and Black Lives Matter. A lot of people cry "Tradition", some say "update to current standards" others say "skip the whole thing"

Experiments have been done with different colours, soot smudges instead of full black face, caramel waffle pattern faces. Even the kids have trouble keeping up, which doesn't help keeping up the "Belief".

Note: we don't do stockings but put down a shoe for filling, with a carrot or apple for the horse of Sinterklaas. On the fifth of December we have "Pakjesavond", coming together with the family with more / bigger presents left at the door by Peter. Traditionally some of the adults or older kids gets to ring the doorbell / knock on the door and run to turn up later from the bathroom saying "Did I miss something?". With older kids it is more common to make a surprise gift for someone specific after drawing lots, writing humorous/ ironic / scathing rhymes to go with the present. In our family we also had some "relics", objects that changed owner every year.

Oh, those are great ideas!

Stockings were an American idea, I think, since people didn't have wooden barn shoes. And since they were in the poem...the Hudson Valley was Dutch country, real Dutch, not German...that's how we ended up with Santa Claus and Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

The Appalachians mixed a few of those ideas (there were Germans, too) with British Isles customs, at least those that were left after the Puritans outlawed it for years. New England didn't really 'do' Christmas until the mid-19th Century, when Queen Victoria made it 'cool'.

Of course, then they claimed they invented it, because in the 19th Century, New England had massive pretensions and believed it was the home of the intellectual and style leaders of the country.

Yeah, I know about New England pretensions.

I remember 1972, when "Don't blame me, I voted for McGovern" bumper stickers were on a lot of cars here. Then came Watergate, which only doubled down on our self-righteousness.

I haven't had political bumper stickers on my cars, well, maybe ever. My car would be visible in the library parking lot. A bumper sticker would make the car's owner seem to be taking sides. librarians are supposed to be impartial.

Good for you! The only bumper sticker I ever had said, 'My other car is a Tardis.' I don't want to make other drivers annoyed. They should be thinking about driving.

You'd know about New Englanders today, and I wasn't casting aspersions on you lot. But in the early republic, they really did have pretensions to 'setting the tone'. They vied to be the 'sage of this' and the 'poet of that', and controlled schoolbook publishing for a very long time. It sort of got up other regions' noses.

That's how come schoolkids ended up reciting poems that started 'By the rude bridge that arched the flood...', which is about the Battle of Lexington, while there were no poems at all about, say, the Battle of King's Mountain.

There was a really big flap when they asked Mark Twain to do an after-dinner speech at a gala evening honouring John Greenleaf Whittier on Dec. 17, 1877. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were there.

Twain 'roasted' them. New England nearly roasted Twain alive.

Twain lived in Connecticut.

His house is burned down in this book:
http://www.thriftbooks.com/w/an-arsonists-guide-to-writers-homes-in-new-england_brock-clarke/989724/item/17000636/?mkwid=nNQcndKL%7cdc&pcrid=11558858482&pkw=&pmt=be&slid=&product=17000636&plc=&pgrid=3970769556&ptaid=pla-1101002859750&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Bing+Shopping+%7c+Literature+&+Fiction&utm_term=&utm_content=nNQcndKL%7cdc%7cpcrid%7c11558858482%7cpkw%7c%7cpmt%7cbe%7cproduct%7c17000636%7cslid%7c%7cpgrid%7c3970769556%7cptaid%7cpla-1101002859750%7c&msclkid=367f4e62fc061609a80611dc716faa65#idiq=17000636&edition=4643937

A very funny book about new Englanders' literary pretensions, and about a sad sack who always got the short end of the stick.

I'm kind of glad to have had Twain/Clemens as a New Englander, but not *too* close to home.

Twain's wife was from Elmira, New York. My parents lived there for about a decade. Twain lived there for a while, and gave his 'pilot house' study to Elmira College, where it is still admired as a whatnot on the green.

He ran a newspaper in Buffalo, which his father-in-law bought for him. It wasn't a go, so they moved to Hartford. His wife kept trying to 'civilise' him - he was really well-read, and his German was excellent, his French I suspect better than he let on. But New England believed that people from the 'frontier' were feral.

William Gillette grew up as Twain's neighbour. He was a big fan.

And oh, lord, how far off-topic are we by now?

Given the colour of my car, the sticker should just read "Bigger on the inside"

Oh, I love that colour!

I get off-topic at the drop of a hat.