A Brief History On December 29, Catholics and Lutherans celebrate the feast day of David, a man from the Bible perhaps most famous for slaying the giant Goliath.  Listed as 6 cubits tall (9 feet in today’s cubits, 6 feet according to some scholars), Goliath was the mightiest warrior of the Philistines, Israel’s go-to nemesis in those days.  David, as with other Biblical characters, is considered a “legendary” character by many historians and other people.  To believers, however, he is an historical figure that also happens to be a direct ancestor of Jesus Christ.  Digging Deeper With a rock that…

A Brief History On June 25, 1940, the day France surrendered to the Nazis, Germany began planning the invasion of Switzerland in Operation Tannenbaum. Digging Deeper Between June and October of 1940, a plan was worked out that called for German divisions to invade Switzerland from the North and for Italian divisions to invade from the South, with both sides annexing the respective German/French and Italian parts.  The operation kept getting delayed, however, and after the Allied invasion at Normandy on D-Day, it was cancelled for good. The Swiss knew the German were planning to invade them.  In fact, in…

A Brief History On December 27, 1929, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin signed an order to “eliminate the Kulaks as a class,” resulting in a sort of genocide.  The Kulaks were not an ethnic group but rather a social class that in today’s United States would be the equivalent of the upper working class or the lower middle class.  In the Soviet Union, Kulaks were the upper class of peasants who had accumulated more property, wealth and power than the lower-class peasants. Digging Deeper Stalin sought to separate the Kulaks into 3 main groups, the first of which were those to be executed.  The second group…

A Brief History On December 26, 1919, the owner of the Boston Red Sox gave the owner of the New York Yankees probably the greatest Christmas gift in history when he sold Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player of all time to him.  Red Sox owner Harry Frazee was said to have needed money to finance a play and so sold Ruth for only $100,000 in cash and a $350,000 loan. Digging Deeper The Red Sox had won the 1918 World Series and would not win another until 2004, often said to be because of “The Curse of the Bambino.”  With both his terrific…

A Brief History For starters, if you have never heard of the Christmas Pickle, do not feel bad!  The author herself only learned of the Christmas Pickle two years ago while she was living in Germany and was being visited by a fellow American who brought up the topic.  The friend hung a pickle-shaped ornament on her Christmas tree every year, and since she believed the tradition came from Germany, wanted to know more about it. Digging Deeper Various American Christmas traditions include: singing carols; hanging stockings over the fireplace; leaving cookies out for Santa; placing mistletoe over doorways; but some Americans apparently also hang an…