Christmas Factoid 3: Santa's Reindeer

Male reindeer shed their antlers at the beginning of winter. Therefore, it appears that all of Santa's reindeer (as traditionally depicted) are female!

I guess with names like Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, etc., that shouldn't be too surprising. :)

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

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Christmas Factoid 2: Ornaments

This comes to you from The Detroit Free Press:

The earliest Christmas tree ornaments were fruit and nuts, in the early 1800s. These ornaments, and the evergreen trees that they adorned, represented "the certainty that life would return again in the spring".

My goodness I hope spring is returning. :)

Christmas Factoid 1: Santa's Looks

Q. Who was the first to clothe Santa in (what we now consider) the traditional red coat with a white fur collar?

A. The Coca-Cola Company first displayed the jolly bearded red-and-white Santa in 1931.

To get more on the story (including how Santa was depicted before!), click here!

Never underestimate the power of advertising!

Cooties!

I don't know about all of you, but I always assumed that a "cootie" was just a vague imaginary disease that kids use to alienate each other. Not so!

Cooties are actual things, defined as "body louses", which are small insects that are usually parasitic.

It was a general term that began in World War I (circa 1917) to describe any number of vermin (lice, fleas, etc) that a soldier could pick up living in the trenches. The word is thought to have come from the Austronesian word "kutu", which means "lice". Soldiers who traveled to Polynesia, the Philippines, or Malaya could have brought the word back west.

Kids picked up the term later for fun.

That information certainly makes this game from my childhood more logical. :)

Aw, they look so happy!

Bonus fun fact: One early 20th Century treatment for cooties was a pickle-juice-solution bath! Maybe it would also work for this bedbug outbreak? Anyone want to try it?

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Pirates & Theater

... apparently don't mix well!

I recently visited the "Real Pirates" exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural History. It follows the early-1700s shipwrecked Whydah and its crew. It's very impressive - I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area!

One of the Whydah stories I read was particularly ridiculous, so I decided to share it with you. It was listed as a side note on a "Life on Board a Pirate Ship" banner.

One-Act Plays -- Pirate Style

Pirates even performed plays on ships. The Whydah crew staged a play about a mock pirate trial called The Royal Pirate. A group of crewmembers, the worse for drink, missed the first act. They stumbled in -- clueless that a play was being performed -- just as one of the actors was being sentenced to death for piracy.

Outraged, they leapt to his defense, throwing hand grenades and drawing their cutlasses, breaking the actor's leg, taking the arm off the playwright, and killing a member of the audience.

!!! It really made me appreciate all of the performances that I've been to that haven't involved any unplanned violence!

But I guess what else should we expect from drunken pirates?