The Christmas pickle, told honestly
The custom: a pickle-shaped glass ornament is hidden deep in the tree, and the first to find it on Christmas morning receives an extra gift, or the year's good luck, or the right to open the first present; the reward varies by household. The card that comes with the ornament almost always calls it "an old German tradition."
Here is the difficulty, and we say it plainly because our readers can spot a polished story: most Germans have never heard of it. Surveys and reporting in Germany have repeatedly found the "old German" pickle unknown in the country of its supposed birth. No period German source for the custom has surfaced. What we know for certain is that Lauscha's glassblowers really did make figural fruit and vegetable ornaments, pickles among them, in the late nineteenth century, and that American retailers imported them by the crate. The likeliest reading, held broadly by folklorists: a genuine German object met an invented German legend, somewhere in American retail, and the pairing sold.
The spider's web
An Eastern European legend, most often told as Ukrainian: a poor family's tree is dressed overnight by a spider, whose webs turn to silver and gold in the Christmas morning light. Web-and-spider ornaments, and the tinsel connection sometimes claimed with them, descend from that story. The legend is genuine folklore with real standing in Ukrainian tradition, where spider-web decorations (pavuchky, little spiders) are a documented craft. The tinsel-origin claim stapled to it is a later embroidery, and we treat it as such. As with the pickle, the ornament is real; grade the add-on claims separately.
The first ornament of the year
Many households mark the season's opening with a first ornament: the newest acquisition hung before all others, or a child's ornament hung by the child, or, in a custom the ornament trade has understandably encouraged, a dated ornament bought each year so the tree becomes a ledger of years. We can find no ancient pedigree for any of these, and none is needed. This is a living custom in its first few generations, visible in the dated annual series that Hallmark built an industry on after 1973. Watching a tradition form in real time is its own kind of history.
How to grade a tradition card
A collector's rule of thumb for any legend printed on a box: the object and the story travel separately. Authenticate the object the way our countries and care chapters teach. Then ask of the story: does it name a place and period? Does any source predate the product it's selling? Is the same tale told about three different ornaments? A story that fails those tests can still be worth telling at the tree; just tell it as what it is. The real history, we've found, is consistently the better story.
Continued in Part the Third, Beyond Christmas
