Christmas trees, originally a German custom, became popular when German immigrants came to America, and when Queen Victoria's German husband, Prince Albert, put up Christmas trees for the royal family. Over time, the fad led to a shortage of fresh trees in Germany, and people began making artificial trees out of feathers. In the US, the reason we started using artificial trees was that a real Christmas tree festooned with candles or hot incandescent lights was liable to burn the house down.

Quite a few people tried designing a Christmas tree that wouldn't catch fire, but they didn't look much like the real thing. And then a brush company that made everything from toothbrushes to toilet brushes got involved. The same technology that produced toilet brushes made artificial trees look fluffy enough. So we can thank toilet brushes for the look of our modern Christmas trees. Read how all this came about, including some odd failed patents, at Atlas Obscura.   

(Image credit: SeppVei)

With his series Lost in the Pond, Laurence Brown has made a career of comparing the place he grew up in, the UK, with the United States, where he has lived for the past fifteen years or so. Both places celebrate Christmas in a big way, but it turns out the most popular songs played on the radio over his lifetime are different, depending on the country he was in at the time. It never occurred to me to wonder whether the Christmas songs we've heard over and over for decades ever made it in Britain, but apparently a lot of them didn't. Brown highlights eight Christmas songs he never heard before coming to America, ranked in order  from best to worst, and gives us his initial impressions. I mostly agree with his rankings, but for different reasons.  

In colonial America, people drank way more alcohol than would be considered safe today. They rode horses instead of driving cars, the water wasn't all that safe, and alcohol eases pains that medical practices couldn't help. George Washington certainly drank his share, and distilled whiskey on his farm Mount Vernon.

Like many people, Washington enjoyed eggnog for the holidays. The president's eggnog recipe survives (although not written by Washington's own hand), and it's quite, let's say, hearty. The recipe calls for four kinds of booze: brandy, whiskey, rum, and sherry, in addition to milk, cream, and eggs. The finished product seems to be about 35% liquor, and would have preserved the milk and eggs for a long time. His kitchen would produce it by the gallon when guests were expected. A good time was had by all. Read about Washington's drinking habits and his eggnog recipe at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company 

Happy Holidays everyone!

Here is a Santa Claus from every province, from west to east and through the territories.

1. British Columbia pic.twitter.com/FY3J8sWU5e

— Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx (@CraigBaird) December 21, 2023

Craig Baird is a historian with a podcast called Canadian History Ehx. As a Christmas gift to his followers, he harnessed artificial intelligence to create a series of Santa Claus portraits for each Canadian province and territory. Sure, there are stereotypes involved, but they are all lovingly rendered. He even takes back the Santa from Nova Scotia by giving him a re-do at the end.

A Santa Claus from every province, from west to east and through the territories.

11. Nunavut pic.twitter.com/o3FkC9vdlc

— Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx (@CraigBaird) December 21, 2023

Wait until you get a load of Quebec's Santa Claus. See the entire collection of Canadian Santas at Twitter, or at Thread Reader if you prefer.

Until today, the only thing I knew about Charles II was that he's the reason the current British King is named Charles III. Charles II ruled Scotland, then went into exile during the reign of Oliver Cromwell, and later became king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. You can bone up on Charle's place in history at Wikipedia, because this video is only concerned with his personal life, meaning his many lovers. Charles II had a wife plus a long line of mistresses and flings that ended up in the history books. They were court members, actresses, commoners, friends of friends, and even at least one spy. One of them could be called the love of his life, but she was not his wife, and neither did she keep him from other women. None of this was kept secret; after all, the king was the king in the 17th century, and popular opinion had no sway over his behavior. Come to think of it, even today when the king has no real power, popular opinion still doesn't have any sway over his behavior.  

Well, maybe you will, because of the picture. But I was surprised to learn that the 1983 film Trading Places (Una poltrona per due) with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd is an Italian Christmas tradition. Although the movie was a hit and is set during Christmas, it barely registers as a Christmas movie today, possibly because of its New York Stock Exchange plot that could have occurred at any time of the year. But every Christmas Eve, TV station Italia 1 airs Trading Places, and the nation tunes in. It's a shared tradition like Swedish people watching Donald Duck cartoons on Christmas Eve, or Germans watching Dinner for One on New Year's Eve. They were all broadcast one year in the days before cable TV, everyone saw it, and it became a thing they did every year.  

Excitement is growing for this year's broadcast, and there's even a Facebook page dedicated to the annual showing. Read about the Italian tradition of watching Una poltrona per due at Cracked.

Tom BetGeorge always goes all out in producing extravagant computerized holiday light shows, but I was surprised to find that we haven't posted his Christmas lights since the Star Wars show in 2015! We've always posted them for Halloween, however. BetGeorge launched his 2023 Christmas light show with aplomb and a standup routine delivered by Christmas trees. The full show comprises five musical interludes, so you can skip through to listen to your favorite. They are:

“I Believe in Santa” Meghan Trainor
“You Make It Feel Like Christmas” Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani
“Noel (He Is Born)” Tommee Profitt Feat. Stanaj
“Livin’ On A Prayer” Bon Jovi
Taylor Swift Medley (mix created by Tom BetGeorge)

Veering away from labor-intensive drones, this year's extravaganza has fireworks instead. Two of the songs are accompanied by fireworks because it's too expensive to shoot off fireworks during the whole show every night. You can try to guess which songs. At the YouTube page, he gives a shout out to the Linden-Peters Fire Department for standing by just in case. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

We can all think of names that are no longer given to babies because they seem old-fashioned. For my generation, that included Mabel, Gertrude, and Ethel, which reminded us of our grandmothers. Now I'm afraid my own name signals "old." That happens with men's names, too, but for men it's often less because of fad and fashion and more for their association with someone famous, whether real or fictional.

When discussing baby names with my daughter, I mentioned Michael, and she shot that down. She said that name will always remind people of Michael Scott, the lead character of the TV series The Office. Really? Not Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, or the archangel? You never know what will stick in the minds of a different generation.

The graph above from Memetic shows some men's names that fell out of favor rather long ago, and for some of them, you can see the association that did them in. I would have added the steeper drop off for Herman when The Munsters was on TV. Clarence faded out for babies when It's a Wonderful Life became a hit movie, decades after its release. No doubt there are many other men's names that suffered the same fate. -via Digg

For decades, people thought that avocados with their huge seeds were spread across Central and South America by giant sloths that went extinct 10,000 years ago. That made sense, because avocados have very large pits, and it would take a huge animal to ingest them and poop out intact pits to grow further away from the parent tree. But it turns out there is no study, no data, and no evidence to support that. It was just an idea someone had that seemed to make sense. We reported it, and so did Sci Show. But now Hank Green explains where that "fact" came from and why it ain't necessarily so. It turns out that avocados didn't always have such huge seeds, and the reason they do may have more to do with human avocado fans than with giant sloths. Score one for mythbusting, and an example why there is always a need for fact checking and further research.

In a hereditary monarchy, you were ruled by a "rightwise born" king or queen, and no illness, disability, or incompetence could change that. Certainly death could, but not always for the better. Take the case of the Tudor monarchs of 16th century England. The line of succession was drastically altered by illnesses and injuries that medical science could not ease, and so was the behavior of those monarchs.

Henry VII expected his firstborn son Arthur to inherit the crown. At age 15, Arthur was married to Katherine of Aragorn, but the couple soon fell ill of what was called "English sweating sickness." Historians are still not sure what English sweating sickness really was. Arthur died of the illness, leaving his younger brother Henry as the only royal heir. Katherine survived to marry her brother-in-law Henry, who became Henry VIII.   

But Henry VIII suffered from other medical problems, as did Katherine, and their offspring, many of whom died before or shortly after birth, leading to a whole nation being jerked around in the quest for a royal heir. Read about ten medical problems that shaped the history of the Tudor dynasty at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Lucas de Heere)

Randall Munroe, best known for his webcomic xkcd, received a question for his "What if?" series. The question from Hunter Freyer was "What if you ignored all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was simply to get a human being around a track 200 times as fast as possible, what strategy would win?"

This would be much more fun for a creative, scientific mind to answer if there wasn't a caveat that the driver had to survive. In that case, the answer is pretty easy- we can use a number of acceleration methods. The possible speed of each is limited by what the human body can withstand, and Munroe explains why. But what's the fun in that? Let's speed up, theoretically. There are ways to go faster than any auto race has ever seen, completing 200 laps in an hour, but they involve great danger and possibly obliteration for the driver. Once Munroe drops the idea of a surviving driver, we can go exponentially faster, and he is glad to explain how we would do that.

“Oops, we’ve accidentally built a particle accelerator.”

-via Damn Interesting

On December 11th, NASA engineers deployed their NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, testing a new system designed to send video information by lasers from great distances. The distance was 19 million miles, which is how far the asteroid-hunting space probe Psyche is now. A video was beamed to earth and intercepted successfully, proving the technology has the chops to relay videos throughout our solar system.

The video displayed test patterns, space data, and a video of a cat named Taters chasing a laser light. NASA engineers love a cute cat video as much as the rest of us, and the laser light was an appropriate touch. Taters belongs to a NASA employee, and now he's a famous contributor to our space exploration program, and may have been intercepted by any aliens moving through our solar system. Read more about the communications experiment and see the video at Gizmodo.

We are lurching toward the end of 2023, and it's time for all the retrospectives to come out, summing up with the year was all about. Every December, Louis Plamondon, also known as Sleepy Skunk, edits together clips from the trailers of the movies we watched over the previous year. The video for 2023 is presented in three stages. You could term the first as "leaving," followed by "shocking," and then by "beautiful." It's a masterful edit, and left me with the realization that I went the entire year without seeing one current film. This video contains NSFW language. -via Laughing Squid

See Sleepy Skunk's mashups from previous years as well.

In the 1890s, James B. Shaw of Atlantic City, New Jersey, developed a technique for taking one picture of a person and getting an image that showed that person from five angles. These came to be known as photo multigraphs. Since these five images were usually all facing each other, the effect was that of a group having a conversation. The secret behind these photo-multigraphs was simple: the subject was set in front of two mirrors set at a 75° angle.

The novelty of this setup lent itself to photo booths set up to take pictures of tourists at seaside resorts and amusement parks. The fact that it was developed in Atlantic City probably also had something to do with that. People could pay a dollar or two and have several copies of postcards made of themselves to send to friends back home. Photo-multigraphs were popular for decades, but faded in the 1950s when more tourists began carrying their own cameras. But it's not completely gone. In 2018, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard used the technique in an art project. See a gallery of a couple of dozen whimsical photo-multigraphs at Gods and Foolish Grandeur.  -via Messy Nessy Chic

You know how every year, as soon as Halloween is over, it seems that Mariah Carey takes over all the music speakers in the world, and her 1994 song "All I Want for Christmas is You" plays nonstop wherever you go? Carey herself has noticed and capitalized on the phenomenon. But after thirty years, too much of a good thing is still too much. When you get down to the last week before Christmas, you just want to get away from that song. The Carey takeover is like a horror story, in which you cannot escape no matter what you do. Fabrice Mathieu made it so, by mixing Carey's music video with clips from more than 40 movies of all kinds. He calls this mashup "All I want for Christmas is... Silence!" You can see the wide-screen version at YouTube. You can also click "more" in the description and see a list of the movies used.   -Thanks, Fabrice!