Last night at SNL one of my students showed me her new cell phone that she received in her stocking!
“Your stocking?”, I asked.
“Yes, my stocking!”, she replied.
“It’s December 9th, did you know that?”, I asked.
“Yah, I got it in my St. Nick’s stocking!”, she replied.
“Your what?”, I asked.
Thus I was introduced to “St. Nick’s” – a Wisconsin-tradition that I had never heard about before last night! More information here on Wikipedia.
So after my introduction to “St. Nick’s Day”, I happened to hear about another German-tradition familiar in most Wisconsin-homes called “Hide The Pickle”. An interesting title for an interesting tradition.
I laughed about these traditions last night and this morning happened to open an early Christmas gift from one of our students’ mothers and what’dya know – we are now the proud owners of a glass pickle ready for hiding! More on the Christmas Pickle tradition which seems to actually be a mythical German tradition and actually an American tradition here on Wikipedia.
The library here had/has a program this month on that–the pickle thing.
i knew u’d delete it!
hey stev!
we play hide the pickle at our friend’s christmas party every year! weird i know…but now i can’t imagine christmas without the little ceramic pickle hiding on the tree!
What parallel universe did you move to?
HAHA…We too had the same suprises! St. Nicks is interesting!!
My dad’s family is catholic, so I’ve known about St. Nick’s for a while. We don’t hide a pickle on our tree though, we hide a mini dachsund because we have a mini doxie and because they are german too!