It’s the Christmas season now, and that means Baby Jesus, the Manger and Big Sour Pickles.
Every family has its quirks. You deal with it.
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Mine was a passion foisted on my family by my family with good intentions.
I lived in a pickle family. My father was the Prince of Pickles. He nurtured them from optimistic cucumbers, canned them with his secret recipeand made relatives from here to Ashtabulah take them on festive holidays.
Any day, really.
You came to our house, and you were going to leave with pickle jars, or else. But it was not as if our family had a refined hankering for pickles. We did not seem to have a choice.
I think my mother knew that Dad’s passion for pickles was drifting a little toward the odd, but she was just glad he didn’t pump his laxative with LSD in those later years.
But I have decided to come clean this Christmas and cleanse my soul. A Pickle Purge. When you get old, this always seems like a good idea.
I have come to tell you of the Christmas Pickle, a tradition actively exported by my family and encouraged by many corporate enclaves.
But it turns out that if I describe this story one more time as a real Christmas tradition, it will be a big, fat whopper.
My father told me this lie.
My mother told me this lie, and I believed it because who would lie about pickles?
My entire family conspired to pass along this lie – sort of like a cross-delivered COVID-19 variant – for what may be two or three full generations.
Turns out there is no such thing as the Christmas Pickle, and I looked hard for proof.
My life has become a hit-or-myth proposition. First, the Easter Bunny went paws up. Then Santa tanked. And now, the Yule Pickle has been snatched away.
As told to me and repeated about a million times everywhere on the Internet, here’s the legend of “Weihnachtsgurke:” “A very old Christmas Eve tradition in Germany was to hide a pickle ornament deep in the branches of the family Christmas tree. The parents hung the pickle last after all the other ornaments were in place. In the morning, they knew the most observant child would receive an extra gift from St. Nicholas. The first adult who finds the pickle traditionally gets good luck for the whole year.”
They know this legend in Iceland, Utah and Belize.
I shan’t bore you with estimates of how frequently I’ve repeated this story in a knowing, favored-uncle sort of way.
When I couldn’t think of a real present to give, Christmas Pickles worked just fine. It makes you seem quaint and eccentric, but not in a bad way.
I have now learned the Christmas Pickle is about as real as the Tooth Fairy.
Oh, there are many Christmas Pickles. The green glass ornaments are sold at every Hallmark-like store in the country. It’s pickle plague.
About 15 bucks for good ones.
It turns out that Germans might wear squeaky leather pants or swig lager from really large brass buckets.
But they don’t give two hoots for Christmas Pickles. And, in fact, you can’t find one German who’s ever heard of it. They look at you funny when you explain their national heritage to them.
I mean real Germans.
That’s not to say that some smart marketing gurus didn’t create the whole schtick and sell millions of them along with the fake history. Because that’s apparently what happened.
The pickle genius merely got the pickle rolling with a hearty Ja-Vol!, then relied on my family, let’s not forget them, to help the bamboozlement pick up steam.
As for the 57 glass pickles I must have bought over the years, I guess it’s too late for a refund.
Oh, well.
Merry Christmas when the day arrives.
And pass the Vlasics, please.
• David Rutter, a veteran journalist and a former editor of the Waukegan News-Sun, Gary Post-Tribune and Herald-News in Joliet.