• Music: Paul Weston & His Orchestra - Good King Wenceslas

Advent 2011: Warm wishes for a Merry Christmas! (A Very Heaton Christmas, day 1)

All this week—well, every weekday this week—I'll be putting up cards sent out by members of my own family. Because why not? This first one I got from my grandmother. (Who technically isn't a Heaton. However, shut up.) Decorating a Christmas tree with strings of popcorn and cranberries is one of those traditions that it's a little hard to believe anyone ever actually did. In addition to being mind-bogglingly time-consuming, it's got to be appallingly messy as well. The cranberries would be leaking juice all over the damn place, and your hands would be sticky from the juice and greasy from handling all the popcorn, and you'd probably faint from blood loss after dozens of accidental needle pricks. Man.

(ETA: I was thinking of this from a historical perspective. Nowadays, one could use popcorn popped in a hot air popper, but back in the day when this tradition supposedly started, they would have used hot oil to pop the corn, Hence, grease. Also, imwalde raises a good point below, namely that cranberries aren't really juicy enough to leak juice all over the damn place. And that does track with my experience slicing cranberries for cranberry bread. Neverthess, I think they are juicy to make your hands sticky over time when handled in volume.)

Incidentally, did you know that Wisconsin leads the nation in cranberry production? More than half the cranberries grown in the United States come from here. Meanwhile, our official nickname is the Dairy State, but we're a distant second in milk production behind California. Go figure.


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By the way, sorry about the crummy scan. Look like I had it set to "photo" instead of "magazine." I'll rescan it later. Rescanned and reposted!