The war between Krampus and teens has flared up once again in the small Austrian city of St. Johann im Pongau, as a group of teens have brutalized one of the performers in the annual Christmas demon parade.
As reported on the Local, during this year’s annual Krampuslauf, one of the demons got attacked by a gang of teens. The parade is an Austrian tradition which sees dozens of locals dress up like the demonic Christmas monster, Krampus, and parade through the streets judging people naughty or nice and threatening to punish them with switches or chains. There is often fire, elaborate costumes, and as with many raucous holiday traditions, a fair amount of heavy drinking.
However, this year, a group of teenagers decided that they liked Santa better and physically assaulted some of the performers in the parade. It doesn’t seem like anyone was seriously injured, although at least one of the teens was placed under arrest.
Surprisingly, this is not the first volley in the war between Krampus’ and their audience. In 2015, a group of teens in Salzburg, Austria was viciously attacked by some of the Krampus performers during their local parade, sending one of the kids to the hospital. Hopefully next year, Krampus and naughty teens can just get along.
It’s 1996. At the behest of Robert De Niro, a small group of coders and game designers toil away in a seedy San Francisco warehouse to finish a surreal, puzzle game about a run down hotel that may house the creative muses. Also, Christopher Reeve, members of Aerosmith, and Jim Belushi will also be voicing character with names like The Toxic Twins and Uncle Salty.
While that all might sound like some kind of bizarre pop culture Mad Lib, it’s actually the story of the long forgotten and hopelessly strange computer game, 9: The Last Resort.
The director of 9: The Last Resort, Buzz Hays, met De Niro while has working as the Director of Engineering at Lucasfilm THX. De Niro enlisted Hays to help design a portion of his new Tribeca Grill, and the actor eventually convinced Hays to get into the movie business himself.
“One day, Robert got tired of us talking about making movies, and he said, ‘Why don’t you just quit your job, and make a movie?’” says Hays who is now the owner of True Image Co., which specializes in stereoscopic 3D film development.
The classic computer puzzle game Myst had been released in 1993, setting a new standard for what thoughtful, atmospheric games could be, thanks to its use of haunting locations and lonely atmosphere. This more cinematic approach to gaming inspired a number of creators who would previously never have thought to make a video game, to try their hand at the growing medium, even as more action oriented games began to take over the scene.
A few years after Myst’s release, De Niro’s production company launched Tribeca Interactive, a division that would focus on new types of media. Hays was put in charge of their very first computer game.
“We knew that we were going to be released in a time when most games were first-person shooters and driving games," says Hays. "Myst had already had its day in the sun. It was still, in many peoples’ eyes the finest video game ever to be created. So we decided to try and do a more irreverent version of that.”
Hays put together small team and moved the operation into a San Francisco warehouse space where they developed 9: The Last Resort.
To create their game world, Hays teamed up with pop art icon Mark Ryden to help design the look of the game. Ryden’s signature aesthetic, heavy on eerie, childlike figures and mysterious symbols, was a natural fit for the world of an enigmatic puzzle game.
“He ended up doing on the order of 1,200 paintings for the game,” says Hays. “Mark would come up a couple of times a week and paint furiously, and our [internal art director] would stand next to him with a hair dryer, drying the paint, so that we could scan it and get it into the computer.”
The resulting game ended up looking not unlike a gorgeous living, explorable version of one of Ryden’s paintings.
Working off of characters Ryden had created, the resulting story in the game came to revolve around a rundown resort hotel and its odd inhabitants. The player starts the game having inherited The Last Resort from their late uncle Thurston Last (Christopher Reeve). As the player explores the hotel and uncovers its secret puzzles they learn that The Last Resort was once a place where creators thrived thanks to the nine muses who lived there. But now a pair of evil residents named The Toxic Twins (Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry) has taken up residence in the hotel, and have ruined its powers of inspiration. The player then has to move through the hotel and find a way to remove the Twins for good, by solving surreal puzzle challenges. They are helped along the way by a little stogie-chomping man in an airplane, Uncle Salty (Jim Belushi). It’s a very weird game.
Unlike with other puzzle games of the day—okay, Myst—Hays created the puzzles in the game to have multiple solutions, so that they couldn’t be instantly burnt through with a strategy guide. “What I wanted to do was to foster this notion that when you finished the game, you had a different way of getting through it than the other people who finished," says Hays. "So you had something to talk about."
With De Niro’s star power and connections, the game was able to pull in an incredible number of celebrities to voice characters in the game. In addition to Reeve, Aerosmith, and Belushi, Cher was brought in to voice a fortune telling machine named Isadora, and Ellen DeGeneres makes an appearance as a cryptic octopus.
According to Hays, the celebrity voice actors really got into the parts. “When we went to record Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, they were recording an album down in Florida. Joe came up with this idea that he maybe should use the voice box he uses when he plays guitar. So his whole character talks through the voice box.”
Working with Reeve proved to be a bit of a challenge do to the debilitating injuries he suffered in a 1995 horseriding accident that left him reliant on a mechanical breathing apparatus. According to Hays, because of the noise of the respiratory machine, they could only record Reeve’s lines in short six-second bursts, although his somewhat rasping delivery ended up being perfect for the mysterious character.
Despite all of the heavy-hitting Hollywood names and gorgeous style of the game, when it was finally released in 1996, 9: The Last Resort turned out to be a dud. While many critics gave the game positive reviews, the changing trends of the 1990s computer game industry proved too much for this weird game to overcome.
“The game came to market, and it barely got noticed,” says Hays. “In those days everyone and their grandmother was releasing CD-rom games. I wouldn’t call it a failure. it was just kind of a quiet landing.”
Surprisingly, before the game even hit store shelves, Hays and his team had already packed up shop and moved on to other projects. “At the end of the game, we ultimately realized that maybe this wasn’t the best business for a film production company to be in," he says. "So we all agreed that it was more important to fold up the tent and walk away gracefully.”
In the years since its release, 9: The Last Resort has been largely forgotten by most gamers. Even with names like De Niro, Tyler, and Cher involved it is only rarely referenced. The game has never been re-released to run on modern machines, making it incredibly difficult, if not nearly impossible, to play now. But Hays still fondly remembers the game, and the experience of making it.
“For us it was just this funny nostalgic time when we got to do this crazy thing in this tiny warehouse in San Francisco," he says. “We had such a good time making this thing that at the end of the day it kind of didn’t matter whether people loved it or not.”
The 1960s were swept up by the boisterous, raging rock-and-roll wave. And at the heart of the sound: the electric guitar. This 1965 video archived by British Pathé follows the creation process of gleaming, wooden electric guitars at a factory in Essex, England. With each step, a curmudgeon of a narrator adds amusing, snippy comments about rebellious teens and youths.
Dozens of craftsmen handle an electric guitar before it’s placed in a shop window, explains the narrator. “All this to make a bedlam of adolescent noise,” he then adds.
After grinding just enough space out of a solid piece of wood to fit in the electromagnetic pickups, the instrument is fitted with two miles of string. At the 49-second mark, you can see how the rosewood fingerboard and nickel frets are fastened to the neck by hand. The lustrous materials can rack up the price, the narrator commenting how, “the guitar boys have to pay so much for their guitars that they have no money left for a haircut.”
Bright neon polyester spray paint is coated over the wooden bodies before adding on the string and glossing the finished product. Each guitar is specially tuned so musicians can play that distinct rock-and-roll sound—or noise, according to the narrator.
“Surprising,” he says. “When you consider the noise they make, that each and every guitar is scientifically tuned just as if they were real musical instruments.”
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Gather 'round, holiday shoppers, for a gift guide that takes inspiration from some of the most memorable items featured on Atlas Obscura this year. Got someone in your life who's difficult to surprise? Need a present that will inspire wonder and curiosity? From autograph albums to antique globes, we've selected the finest objects of intrigue for your loved ones.
An Instrument You Play By Waving Your Hands Over a Doll
Theremins and Russian nesting dolls: together at last! Give the gift of unnerving wails packaged in a plump and happy wooden matryoshka with the matryomin. Oh yes: it's a theremin inside a matryoshka. And it can make beautiful music, especially when the instruments play Beethoven en masse.
Seattle's Archie McPhee is the the world's finest purveyor of utterly bizarre and perfectly useless oddities. If you are looking for a strange gift for that heroic weirdo on your list, you could probably just go on their site, close your eyes, and start clicking. You wouldn't be disappointed with what ended up in your cart. But for our money, we recommend their unsettlingly realistic banana slug mask. Just put it on and wait in the dark for your family to arrive. Christmas achieved.
New York City today is an elegantly congested urban mess, a largely ad hoc group of skyscrapers, highways, avenues, and pedestrian walkways. But if some of the architects in Never Built New York had their way, New York might be a wholly different place, with buildings built over the city's rivers and urban planning that matched the city's ambition to be the greatest on Earth. Check out this intoxicating look at the designs for New York that, either through bureaucracy, budget or bad luck, never came to pass.
Various price points and sizes available from Amazon
As Above, So Below: The Art of Fraternal Societies, 1850-1930
Fraternal societies—many secret—used to be a staple of American life, and, in some places, still are. But they peaked in the late 19th century, when some 5.5 million American men were involved in one society or another. As Above, So Below: Art of the American Fraternal Society 1850-1930 explores the amazing art that many of these societies produced, from banners to magic lanterns to ritual objects. It's 288 pages, in other words, of old fraternal love.
In the 19th century, astronomer Percival Lowell spotted a strange series of lines covering the surface of Mars. Lowell mapped over 700 of these Martian canals, raising controversy that there was intelligent life on the Red Planet. At the Planetenkugel-Manufaktur globe manufactory in Germany, traditional globe maker Michael Plichta recreates historical planetary maps into globes, such as Lowell’s Martian canal maps. These handcrafted 12-inch globes offer a new view of debunked astronomy charts.
What does your signature say about you? In the 1900s, people would collect “ghost signatures” of friends and celebrities in special autograph books called "The Ghost of My Friends". A fresh, well-inked signature would be folded and pressed on special paper to form elegant and devilish inkblots. Modern replicas of the autograph inkblot albums are produced by Reflections of My Friends, so you can continue this odd tradition today.
In the Victorian era, a common decorative item seen in the homes of scientists and naturalists were kaleidoscopic art pieces made out of tiny single-celled algae known as diatoms. English artist, Klaus Kemp, continues the Victorian art of diatom arrangement, and sells microscope slides of his beautiful biology masterpieces.
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
Okay, so clearly this is a biased recommendation. But if you like what we do at Atlas Obscura, you will certainly dig the hidden wonders and awe-inspiring sights contained in our hefty 480-page hardcover book. Flip through the pages to see glowworm caves, hair museums, flaming holes, and 650 other fascinating places and phenomena around the world.
As any respectable 18th-century doctor knew, it’s important to have a place to store the leeches you use for bleeding your patients. Historical product purveyor Jas. Townsend & Sons puts great care and research into ensuring the accuracy of their offerings, so you can be assured that your leech jar will be the real deal. Their suggestion? Fill it with gummy worms if you are “short on leeches.”
Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market has a little-known section where incredibly rare and expensive fish are sold. What better way to show your love for friends and family than with a brightly colored dragon fish, a freshwater stingray as large as a pizza, or a two-foot long “platinum” gar?
Sick of checking your smartphone’s weather app? So are we. That’s why we are gushing over this natural, battery-free alternative. Made from organic balsam fir, the 16-inch weather stick curves upwards for clear skies or downwards for rain and snow. Whether it predicts or simply confirms local meteorology is irrelevant—either way, your holiday would not be complete without one.
If you want to understand the tortured psyche of young Peter Parker through the language of progressive rock, there is no finer album than Rock Reflections of a Superhero. Between the lonely longing of "Peter Stays and Spider-Man Goes," and the the sinister chants of "Dr. Octopus," this one-of-a-kind album, released in 1975, is the perfect piece of pop culture ephemera for the comic book or music fan on your list.
If by some terrible twist of fate, a beloved pet is trapped in a burning house, they’ll have a better chance of recovery if the local firefighters have oxygen masks designed especially for pets on hand. A mask kit comes with three different sizes, suitable for pets from guinea pigs to ponies.
People Knitting, a Book Filled With People Knitting
One of the great charms of knitting is that you can knit almost anywhere—at the beauty salon, on the streets of Seattle, on a horse drawn cart in England, or at a classical music concert (although apparently that’s frowned upon). This book of surprisingly compelling photos from the 1860s to the 1960s shows just how universal and ubiquitous knitting can be.
Take a four-day trip into the deepest darkness with an Atlas Obscura adventure to Iceland on March 9—a time when the sun is a rare sight. You’ll see the Northern Lights at their most spectacular, hike to a plane wreck on a black sand beach, and try not to giggle too much at the world’s only penis museum, located in Reykjavik.
Did you know that the purple Skittle tastes different outside the United States? In some countries, including the UK and Australia, its flavor is blackcurrant rather than grape.
Blackcurrant is a rare taste in the States due to an early 20th-century ban on farming the berry. (It was given a bad rap after being associated with wood blight.) With the ban lifted in many states, blackcurrant is making a slow American comeback in the form of syrups, sauces, and juices. But it you want to taste it in the form of a purple Skittle, you'll need to source the candy from an international supplier.
From 17th-century colonial homes to the beige interiors of early 21st-century McMansions, American abodes have gone through many incarnations. Chart the changes with this poster, which provides an architectural timeline of the United States.
For the last 43 years, owning a copy of Les Diners de Gala, Salvador Dali’s rare and eccentric cookbook, cost upwards of $400. As of last month, you can buy it for much less, thanks to a Taschen reprint. With recipes ranging from fast-acting cocktails to lambs brain with avocado to a royal peacock surrounded by its court, it is the perfectly unique gift for the chef who’s always looking to impress.
In 1923, Vermont artist, Arctic explorer, and amateur astronomer Russell W. Porter created the beautiful bronze Porter Garden Telescope, a floral objet d'art which functioned as both stargazer and garden ornament. A replica version is now available for those who don’t mind spending an astronomical sum on their astronomical appliances.
Full of millennia-old trees, soaring and stout against backgrounds of moonless nights filled with endless stars, these photos offer some humbling perspective on the vast stretch of time and the universe. Sometimes it’s nice to remember that we are all tiny blips in a much larger world.
Nothing says "I adore you, admire your patience, and want you to be warm" like a pair of hand-knitted socks from the world's most remote island. Due to shipping schedules it's little too late to order them for the 2016 holiday season, but you'll have them in time for next year. And the IOU makes for a great story.
In the morning of March 10, 1860, a crowd of several hundred New Yorkers looked up curiously at a long cloth chute dangling from the top of City Hall. The tube was supported by ropes along its sides, with one end fastened to the top of the building and the other held by people on the ground. “Through this bottomless bag the persons in danger are expected to slide,” reported Scientific American in its March 10 issue.
A group of adventurous boys and men slid daringly through the chute, the spectators both relieved and amused when they reached the ground in one piece.
Inventor W.W. Van Loan’s English-made cloth tube, experimentally demonstrated at City Hall, was just one of the many kinds of fire escape contraptions of the 1800s and early 1900s. New household technologies such as oil and gas lamps and kitchen ranges had become commonplace, and also a common cause of fires. Consequentially, inventors came up with creative mechanisms to help escape from a burning building.
While most patents were portable variations on ropes, chutes, and ladders-on-wheels, parachute helmets and winged apparatuses leaned more towards the bizarre and ridiculous.
"There are a lot of designs for fire escapes, but none of them really inspire confidence," says National Archives archivist Julie Halls, who authored a section about fire escape patents in her book Inventions That Didn’t Change the World. "There’s a flimsy looking contraption designed to catch you if you jump out of a window, and various baskets attached to ropes and pulleys that are meant to lower to the ground. Although none of them look very practical, they do reflect the fear of fire at that time."
By the 19th century, fire risks began to increase at an alarming rate within homes and factories. Faulty home appliances like kitchen ranges and small bathroom boilers (also called geysers) were prone to explode, wrote Halls in Inventions That Didn’t Change the World. Oil and gas lamps, stoves, hearths, and chimneys were all sources of inferno.
Unfortunately, Victorian popular fashion did not mix well with these sources of heat. The brush of a six-foot wide crinoline dress against a hearth or stove would engulf the material (and the woman in it) in flames. Many tragic deaths were caused by scorched crinoline. Other women donning the same style could only watch in horror, knowing if they got too close to assist they too could end up caught in an inferno, Halls wrote.
The fireplace was a symbol of Victorian domestic life, and firemen became heroic figures in the public imagination. It was common for fires to attract large crowds of spectators, the head of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in 1865 even playing up the public performance aspect of fire fighting, Halls says.
With the higher number of conflagrations and casualties, came a greater number of fire escape inventions, particularly those aimed at middle-class consumers, says Halls.
“Patents for fire escapes increased from just a handful before 1860 to dozens each year in the 1860s,” Sara Wermiel wrote in Technology and Culture. In New York, lawmakers did not specify the kinds of devices that would qualify as safe and approved fire escapes. The lack of specificity and the sheer demand “inspired inventors to turn out a range of mainly impractical things they dubbed ‘fire escapes,’” she wrote.
Many didn’t see the need to construct additional exits and stairs within buildings since most were small, and required only a rescue ladder. From 1862 to the end of the decade, New York City’s building officials accepted portable devices, including such inventions meant to be worn by an escapee as he or she jumps from the window of a tall building.
B.B. Oppenheimer’s 1879 patent for a fire escape helmet would have included a wax cloth chute, about four to five feet in diameter, attached in “a suitable manner” to the head. “A person may safely jump out of the window of a burning building from any height and land without injury and without the least damage on the ground,” Oppenheimer wrote. To soften the impact, his invention also featured overshoes with thick elastic bottom pads.
In a similar vein, Pasquale Nigro proposed a fabric-covered set of wings that would allow a wearer to fly down to safety. He wrote: “In operation, the wearer engages the loops with his hands and is prepared to leap, the air imprisoned beneath the fabric material, serving to up-hold the wearer and break the force of his fall.”
Nigro asked for about $33,000 in 1909 to execute his invention, however, the idea never quite took off.
A common design trend seen among patents were ropes, pulleys, slings, and baskets, says Halls. "They often look quite complicated to use and set up, and would require a lot of quick thinking and dexterity under pressure," she says.
For example, R.H. Houghton’s 1877 fire escape proposal featured pegs tied along a rope to create a flimsy mock ladder that may have been difficult to keep steady if an escapee was trying to quickly descend from a burning building. A few systems operated like an elevator that would be propped and fastened to a window.
Some officials tried mandating different tactics with ropes, but were met with skepticism. In 1882, retired quartermaster general of the United States Army, Montgomery Meigs, proposed that long bows with heavy metal arrows or hooks and balls of twine be hung inside doors of the government printing office building in Washington.
In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other states in the United States, local authorities adopted a rope fire-escape law for hotels, which had the second highest fatality rate after theater fires. The law required hotel owners to place ropes in guestrooms, explains Wermiel. “Such laws, which assumed that frightened hotel guests could climb down ropes from windows high above the street, struck contemporaries as silly,” she wrote.
Tall slides and cloth tubes that gave escapees a direct line of descent to the ground was a popular, and more logical solution. There were a variety of chute designs, from flame retardant canvas, netting, and metal. In the early 20th century, some schools and hospitals installed metal slide chutes to the sides of buildings. Companies still install and utilize similar kinds of escape chutes today.
Over time, the success and failure of different fire escape designs brought forth improved rules and regulations. In 1861, the massive London Tooley Street fire that caused the demise of many warehouses led to new legislation for governing fire services, the adoption of stricter commercial building regulations, and increased fire brigade services in the United Kingdom, Halls wrote.
In the United States, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire at the Asch Building in Greenwich Village in New York City that left 145 workers dead and dozens injured caused a shift towards stricter requirements for exits and fire escapes, Wermiel explains. Because of the horrible incident, architects incorporated fire towers, exterior stairs built with the similar strength of interior stairs, and other alternative exit routes.
The Victorians’ fascination with fires and the fertile ground for enterprise bolstered the number of fire escape designs. The only problem: each of them, says Halls, “seem to carry as many risks as the fire the person was trying to escape from.”
In the picture above, Rudy Giuliani, Hizzoner, Mayor of New York City, is having a grand old time with Mother Teresa. This meeting took place in June of 1997, just a few months before her death, when she came to New York for a surprise visit to the South Bronx branch of her organization, Missionaries of Charity. What did the world’s most famous nun need to talk to the Mayor of New York about?
Parking.
As the New York Times reported, the main item on Mother Teresa’s agenda was making sure that her nuns had special parking permits that would allow them to park in normally illegal spots. According to the mayor, she got them: ''I would do anything Mother Teresa wanted,'' he told the Times. "If Mother Teresa wants more parking, she can have more parking.”
Among all the opaque and hidden systems of New York City, the unwritten rules of public parking are one of the most mystifying, both to outsiders and the people that live here. Understanding how it works can feel like unlocking an obscure code.
At the core of this mystery is an astonishing fact: some of the most valuable land in the country, if not the world, is available, for free, to store parked cars. Because such a valuable resource is available for no money, the cost is measured in different currencies. To park on the street in New York City, it’s almost necessary to have access to either time or political influence.
One of the stranger rituals of New York City life is alternate side parking. Every street in the city has a designated period when parking is forbidden and the street cleaned. When ASP kicks in, the cars parked on one side of a street move, en masse, to double park on the other side. It’s a strange phenomenon: I once saw a car with Alabama plates crawling down the street during ASP, its occupants clearly baffled, the person in the backseat filming the whole thing on their phone, as if they had encountered crop circles or some other disturbing sight. This practice is also illegal. If you look at the city’s website, the most frequently asked question about ASP is “Can I double park when ASP is in effect?” The very clear answer: “No, double parking is illegal at all times.”
But during ASP periods, parking enforcers ticket unmoved cars, while ignoring the flagrant lawbreakers across the streets. Everyone knows the system. Everyone accepts it. There are variations, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street. Some places, the drivers wait out ASP in their cars; elsewhere it’s acceptable to lock your car and come back in an hour. On some streets, you can pay a neighbor to move your car; in some wealthy areas, doormen perform this service. On one street near me, a retired cop coordinates the weekly migration—if someone doesn’t move their car fast enough, he’ll knock on their door or holler until they come out and perform their part.
The second hidden system of parking in New York is the one Mother Teresa was trying to take advantage of. The city government issues permits to certain groups of people—teachers, government employees, clergy, and employees of other not-for-profit organizations. These permits allow their holders to bend the rules: a car with a clergy permits, for example, can be left in no parking zones near hospitals for up to three hours.
“You’re a member of protected class and a rarified class if you can get a magic placard that lets you park wherever you are,” says Paul Steely White, of Transportation Alternatives, a local advocacy group that believes New York’s streets should be made more friendly to all forms of transportation, not just cars.
The group has a problem, on principle, with the permits, which White call the “crony-ish and corrupt way parking is distributed to certain groups of New Yorkers,” but also, more pressingly, with the way they’re abused. Surveys of areas popular with permit holders show that people with permits park anywhere they want—by hydrants, in crosswalks, on sidewalks, none of which is allowed under the terms of the permits. But they’re rarely, if ever, ticketed. As with the ASP double parkers, it’s almost like a car with a permit becomes invisible. Plus, it’s extremely easy to create fake permits. “You make some official looking sign and you slap some on laminate and you can park pretty much wherever you want,” says White.
Presumably, though, Mother Teresa and her nuns were not going to just create fake permits for themselves. Instead, they had to flex what muscle they had—they had to have Mother Teresa go directly to the mayor. According to the Times, this had happened from time to time over the years. At a memorial from the nun just a few months later, Giuliani said, “If she wanted parking spaces, we gave her parking spaces. If she wanted parking signs for her nuns, we gave her parking signs...She didn’t even have to ask.”
Which wasn’t quite true—like any other parking-hungry supplicant, coming to the city in search of more space, she did have to ask.
Richard Feynman’s sprawling FBI file covers two-thirds of the physicist’s legendary career, from drama over his invitation to speak at a Soviet science conference to an unnamed colleague citing his hobby of cracking safes at Los Alamos as evidence he was a “master of deception and enemy of America.” But the file stops abruptly in 1958, and for a very Feynmanian reason: Feynman asked them to.
After decades of Bureau inquiries, it appears a fed-up Feynman simply pulled the “I made the atomic bomb” card and asked to be left alone.
To their credit (and perhaps due to Feynman’s not inconsiderable clout), the FBI obeyed Feynman’s wishes, with Hoover even writing a chastising memo reminding agents not to bother the man without a damn good reason.
So there you have it: if you ever wanted to get the Bureau off your back, try to get a job on the Manhattan Project.
Every February in the Hungarian city of Mohács, goat-horned monsters and mysterious women in lace masks parade through town, jangling bells and twirling noisemakers. This is Busójárás, a national tradition dating back to the early Middle Ages.
Busójárás achieves multiple purposes. First, it is a traditional Carnival, a festival of drunkenness and revelry celebrated the week before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. Second, it's the reenactment of a historic victory by the Šokci, a Croatian ethnic minority that has a large populace in Mohács.
As the story goes, the townspeople fled the city to escape the Ottoman Turks who had invaded in 1526. Hiding in the forest, they were approached by an old mystic who told them to don masks, weapons, and bells, and that a knight would appear to lead them into battle. Some nights later, when the masks were fashioned, the knight arrived and led them home to Mohács where the racket of bells led the Turks to believe they were plagued by demons. They deserted the town, and the townspeople had their homes back. Another, more ancient version tells that the Busos are chasing away winter itself.
The Busójárás parade occurs every year without fail. Modern amenities have made carving the Buso masks easier (each one is unique to its wearer), and as word of the festival spreads the crowd grows bigger each February.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Some people love a movie so much, they re-watch it over and over and over again. Others, decide to live it. Literally.
Such is the case of the Mad Max enthusiasts who gather in the Southern California desert each September to live out their post-apocalyptic dreams. Wasteland, directed by David Freid takes us into the mind of Mike Orr, a.k.a. “Sweet Lips,” a regular at the Wasteland festival. When he’s not modifying cars and driving through the desert, Sweet Lips works at a public aquarium in Las Vegas. His real passion, however, is Wasteland. “I’m married to it!” he exclaims with a laugh.
The festival attracts those who want to try living in a place were rough is the norm and rules are a thing of the past. “It’s the end of the world” Sweet Lips tells us. “You get to do whatever you want to do.” And what Wasteland enthusiasts like to do is build mind-blowing cars and enjoy an entire weekend of living in this fictional world. Because there are no rules, whatever happens here depends on whatever the people want to happen. Usually, there is combat, fire spinning, and burlesque shows.
Like most other festival regulars, Sweet Lips tries to come up with bigger and better car designs each year. On his third year, he took the idea a step further and brought in a refurbished ship— which happened to be the one from the 1995 film Waterworld. The ship, just like Sweet Lips, got to leave behind its watery life and be reborn in the desert.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
After one Long Island woman accidentally tossed out $5,000 in cold, hard cash, a group of heroic sanitation workers went dumpster diving to fish it back out, according to NBC 4 New York.
Bayban Nadalall had put her $5,000 mortgage payment in an envelope to be delivered, but at some point she confused it with a piece of garbage and threw the envelope away. Luckily, when she discovered her error, she was able to contact her son Krishna, who works in sanitation, asking him what she should do. Krishna then sprang into action.
Along with three of his fellow sanitation workers, they traced his mother’s trash to a local transfer station. There they dumped out a huge pile of garbage, and got to digging. Miraculously, they actually found the envelope and were able to return it with only $40 missing, which had fallen out on the ride.
In a video of the scene, shared by NBC, Bayban can be seen counting out her bills on the back of her car, looking stunned. She offered a reward to the men who found the money, but they refused.
In southern China, not far from where the rice paddies fade into the urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta, there is a place that used to be called the Four Counties. It's farming country still, even in this age when everyone seems to be heading to make their fortunes in the cities. Small villages of low, tile-roofed houses speckle the landscape. People carry bamboo baskets full of root vegetables on their backs. Stray dogs trot purposefully through the village lanes, eyes alert for kitchen scraps. In the summer, the subtropical sun is like a hammer; in the winter, cold rain sweeps the fields.
It was to this place that Imogene Lim came in 2009. She had just a little bit of information to go on. But Lim, a Canadian anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Tanzania to observe tribes of former hunter-gatherers, was on a voyage of discovery. And with the help of local authorities, she soon reached the object of her quest. She returned this year for a visit. In a Guangzhou hotel room this fall, having recently arrived from the Four Counties (now five, after a redrawing of borders), she took out a photocopied booklet. The cover showed a calligraphic title, proclaiming it to be a genealogy, and inside were page after page of branching diagrams. It had been given to her by a cousin in the village.
“This is my father,” she said, pointing to a name deep into the pages. Underneath it, in a language she cannot read or speak, it says, "Went to Canada, communication lost. Number of children: Unknown.”
The United States and Canada are, famously, nations built from immigrants. Successive waves of fortune seekers, refugees, and slaves—from Italy, from West Africa, from Poland, from China, from almost any place where the prospects of life in a foreign country looked better than staying home, or from places they had no choice about leaving—brought the ancestors of almost the entire present population to the continent. As they assimilated into the existing culture, their children and children's children often grew resolutely rooted in the new place, with little connection to the place of their elders' birth. Lim remembers overhearing her parents and their generation of the family talking about her generation. They called them “the empty ones,” she says—the ones who looked Chinese on the outside, but not on the inside. In the case of Chinese immigrants, even if some families wanted to keep up connections, it wasn't easy for most to visit after the revolution in 1949.
These days, however, a sizeable number of people from these immigrant nations are getting on planes to reverse the journey for at least a few days or weeks, taking trips in search of places left behind. They clamber through muddy fields to find churches, take rural buses to remote farming towns, stand outside houses they've never seen before but have sought out with years of painstaking research. In China, as in Ireland, Poland, and many other wellsprings of emigration, businesses have been set up to serve genealogy or diaspora tourists, offering tours and research help as people set out to find ancestral villages. But what does it mean to return to a place you've never been?
The practice of genealogy—tracing one's ancestors—has a long and strange history. These days, it's mostly obscured by the impression that genealogy is the fusty reserve of retirees, sitting before computers and piecing together information about parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, as far back as possible. Plaintive requests for information about long-lost ancestors on genealogy forums make clear one of the many paradoxes of this process. Though an individual may be the key to an important puzzle for someone, they are inconsequential to almost everyone else on the planet.
When genealogists find a connection to a historical figure of some kind, of course, that all changes. Then the family tree is seen from the other way around—as the descendants of someone consequential, we are consequential too, or at least have an interesting piece of trivia for cocktail party conversation. In an essay for Harper's Magazine, Jack Hitt recounts the childhood moment when a relative helped him fill in a diagram with himself at the center and successive generations of ancestors radiating outwards, then shared a revelation. “This line, she said, pointing to one of the ancient British earls we could claim, leads in a direct line all the way to Charlemagne,” he writes. “Mary's tone was solemn, nearly religious: You are the direct descendant of King Charlemagne. The room felt still as the rest of the universe slowly turned on its gyre about me, just as it did on the paper.”
This is how genealogy has usually worked in the past, says Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers and author of the book Ancestors and Relatives. “Traditionally, it's been something that was done for people with power,” he says, people who had reasons beyond the strictly intellectual for tracing their roots. Ivan the Terrible of Russia, for instance, had an imperial genealogy that traced his line all the way back to Noah. (Noah, it turns out, crops up regularly in royal genealogies.) Through the centuries, genealogists have sought to link rulers to some distant eminence or to the original inhabitants of their land. “It's establishing legitimacy,” Zerubavel says, “and establishing identity.”
Even without direct proof of a famous forebear, there is a widespread feeling that blood matters—that understanding who your biological relatives are helps you understand yourself. Adoptees who have rich and full lives with their adopted families sometimes still go in search of birth families. People look at photographs of great-grandparents and wonder whether their own laugh or their temper or their love of music might have been passed down from them. The farther back an ancestor is, the more important knowing about them seems to be, Zerubavel writes, and perhaps the more important they are to one's pedigree.
You share about the same amount of DNA with strangers as you do with many of your distant ancestors, however. Each generation, children get half of their genes from each parent, which comes out to a quarter from each grandparent, and so on. You only have to go five generations back before you stop sharing DNA with some of your forebears. Additionally, geneticists have calculated that anyone who was alive several thousand years ago is either the ancestor of everyone now alive, or of no one. It's an odd fact to get one's mind around, but it's real: Even people born only a few hundred or a thousand years back have staggering numbers of descendants. Everyone now alive who has any European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne, in fact. This is another fascinating paradox of genealogy. Far from being a tidy tree, ancestry is a web that spreads wide long before we are able to draw the boundary lines of family and not-family.
But that hasn't really stopped us from thirsting after connecting ourselves biologically to the past. “We reify nature and biology,” observes Zerubavel, “so that blood, the genes, become much more important, much more significant, than other ways of tying people to one another.”
Those other ways of tying people together—the forms of attachment beyond those of blood—include the language of the country where one was raised, and its culture and common history. Scholars who study diaspora tourism have found that some of these tourists can have very strong attachments to these things in their home countries, even as they seek to understand their roots in other countries.
When Imogene Lim speaks, it's with an accent that would make any North American traveler homesick. She is a compact woman with cropped greying hair and the intent eyes of someone who observes for a living. On this day in mid-October, she is wearing Keen hiking sandals, a salmon top, and a sensible skirt, the kind of outfit that would be at home on any university campus in Canada or the United States. She walks with a confident, no-nonsense stride. And she looks slightly outlandish in Guangzhou, a city of 13 million people, formerly known as Canton.
Practically no one else is wearing anything like this. Fashions for someone of her age around here run to flowing linen shifts and ladylike sandals. No one walks quite like her either. And yet, before you hear her talk, or see her walk, or took in her clothes, you could mistake her face for that of someone around here.
Lim's grandparents left this area for Canada in the early 1900s, before returning, for legal reasons, when their children were small. Her Canadian-born mother was stranded in the ancestral village during the Japanese occupation of China, and walked 800 miles to Kunming, where American forces were based, with her sister, to get a job as a secretary. She eventually managed to get back to North America, and Lim's parents married in Vancouver after World War II. Her father, who was from the same part of China, began to work for what became the family business: a restaurant called WK Gardens, a mainstay of the local Chinatown.
Growing up, Lim was a typical Canadian kid, and she didn't think too much about where her grandparents had come from. As a graduate student, she helped excavate and study the rock paintings of the Sandawe in Tanzania. “The Sandawe people know which clan they belong to, as well as their ancestral land,” she says. “When someone sneezes, you are to call out your ancestral land.” But after her parents passed, she realized that time was running out. If she wanted to know about where her own people came from, she needed to act before the last of that generation was gone. And she found herself wanting to see certain places. “My mother almost died in the village,” she says. “I wanted to see that house.”
The 1977 broadcasting of the miniseries Roots is thought to have helped spark such an urge in many Americans. Based on Alex Haley's multi-generational saga of an African-American family, the story follows the one of the first members of the family to arrive on the continent, an enslaved Mandika man, and then successive generations up to the modern descendants who, drawing on oral history, travel to the Gambia to learn about who their ancestor was.
That year both Newsweek and Time ran trend stories about the rapid growth of American genealogy, emphasizing that while the practice had been mainly a reserve of elites in years past—like Cousin Mary, establishing connections to past greatness—it was now something for everyone, whether their ancestors had been nobility or slaves or Italian laborers. “Newsweek also remarked that genealogy had become fully commercialized, with airlines advertising “ancestor hunting” trips and “local entrepreneurs . . . cashing in as well,”” writes Francois Weil in his book Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in North America. Weil notes that in fact there had been growing interest in genealogy for some time, but Roots was a public, decisive moment.
“I remember the whole nation was talking about it. It was riveting,” says Ellen Puff, a teacher and author who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and watched the miniseries as a child. When Puff took up genealogy in her mid-30s, tracing her family back to Ireland, she grew interested in not just the parish books and records she needed for her research, but in the landscapes around them. “It started from an analytical, curiosity perspective—where are they from?” she says. “As I got deeper into the research, I don't know if you'd say this is romantic or not, but I wanted to see what they saw. I wanted to see their horizons. And the mountains don't move. The rivers rarely move.” She has made three trips to Ireland since 2007.
Ireland is a particular hotspot for diaspora tourists. More than 34 million Americans list their heritage as Irish or partially Irish in the census, and Ireland's Tourism Board has a marketing plan specifically for such folks. (Nearly 1.4 million North Americans visited the Republic of Ireland in 2016, making up the fastest-growing major segment of foreign tourists.) But China has its own flow, especially to the part of Guangdong Province where Lim's ancestral villages are. This area, as it happens, was the major source of 19th-century Chinese immigrants to North America.
At the end of second Opium War in 1860, one of the Chinese government's concessions to the British was to permit citizens to leave the country to work, although emigration had been happening illegally for some time. In China’s Four Counties, tribal warfare and banditry provided incentives for departure, and thousands of people made their way out through the ports of Macau and Hong Kong, notes Selia Tan, a historian at Wuyi University in the city of Jiangmen. These were the Chinese who dug for gold in California and built railroads in Canada and the U.S. In fact, historian Mae Ngai estimates that 90 percent of the Chinese in California in the 19th century were from this small corner of China.
Then, as now, the Four Counties are agricultural land, anchored with a handful of cities and thousands of villages. But factories making everything from bidets to motorcycle parts have sprung up as well in recent decades. In one town, a long, dusty main street is lined as far the eye can see with stalls selling faucets of every shape and description (in a serendipitous coincidence, the town is called Shuikou, or Water Mouth). Additionally, rising above the traditional village houses today are more than 2,000 baroque watchtowers, many of which were built in the late 19th century and early 20th century with money sent home by those working abroad. A number of these towers, which were often both mansions and fortresses to protect against kidnappings of the wealthy returnees, stand empty.
Because while some Chinese migrants came back for good—in fact, Tan's own great-great-grandfather was a returnee from California, where he'd been a cook in a construction camp—many didn't. When those people's descendants abroad grow interested in genealogy, the Four Counties is where they trace their roots. It can difficult for roots tourists to arrange the visits themselves, though: Many of them do not speak Cantonese, the most widely spoken local language, or Mandarin. And while some of their families might have maintained contact with folks back home before China’s Communist Revolution, the 20th century’s tumultuous events cut off visits and communication.
Tan has performed extensive fieldwork in North America, visiting local Chinese historical societies and associations, and she acts as a point person for those who'd like to visit their ancestral homeland. They may come with the slightest of leads, as when Newfoundlander David Fong arrived with two empty envelopes bearing return addresses in a town in the Four Counties, from the effects of his deceased father. Detective work led him to a tower house where the inhabitants, long-lost cousins, turned out to have photos of him sent by his father when he was a child. Not everyone is so lucky in their search. But the influx since China's opening up in 1978 of visiting emigrants and their descendants has shaped the area.
“Kaiping had one of the earliest 5-star hotels in China in the countryside,” Tan says of a city in Guangdong Province. With families scattered and lost in the upheaval of the preceding years, these visitors needed a place to stay, and they could afford the price tag.
China doesn't collect statistics on diaspora tourists, says Li Tingting, a scholar of tourism management who has studied the phenomenon. But in a study on the Jiangmen Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, which often aids returnees in finding family, she reported that diaspora tourism was a major interest. In most parts of the country, the OCAO doesn't focus particularly on visitors, instead ministering to the more mundane administrative needs of Chinese citizens living abroad or returning home to stay. In the Four Counties, where so many Chinese overseas have roots, it's a different story. The OCAOs there host festivals and events to draw visits from Chinese who live abroad or people with Chinese ancestry.
The area has long benefitted financially from its diaspora: In 2007, an LA Times reporter visited a place called Los Angeles Village, named for the destination of so many of its inhabitants. There, remittances sent home had supported people for decades, but the money was slowing to a trickle, inhabitants said, as the older generation of folks living abroad died, and younger people did not seem so inclined to continue the gifts. Still, diaspora tourists continue to be sources of investments, donations, and valuable relationships for the area.
Those younger generations may have a different perspective on what it means to go to China than their elders. Huihan Lie, born in the Netherlands to Indonesian-Chinese parents, came to China some years ago, and grew curious about his own heritage. After realizing that there were few resources in English for potential seekers, he founded a boutique genealogy research firm called My China Roots. Lie and his staff now scour local records and hunt down villages on behalf of their clients abroad, even taking them on trips if desired.
While genealogy has the reputation in North America of being primarily a retirement hobby—and genealogy tourism to destinations in Europe, perhaps even more so—Lie says that his clients span a wide range of ages, and many are younger. They're often in their 20s or 30s, beginning to process what it means to have Chinese heritage.
“A very important element is searching for a cultural identity, because very often it's been lacking while growing up,” he says. “There's something there...but you don't know how to identify with it, or what role it should play in your life. You only know that it's part of your life.”
This feeling of being between two worlds often persists even after arriving in one's ancestral homeland. When Imogene Lim got to China the first time, she already knew the name of her father's village. With some help from the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in Kaiping, she managed to find her mother's, by repeating the story of the two Canadian sisters who had left for Kunming. But being in China was a challenging experience. She could not speak to people without an interpreter. She was constantly mistaken for a local, and it was a problem.
In a restaurant in Guangzhou on her trip this October, intrigued by the man scooping rice out of a steamer, she takes a few snapshots. The man begins to shout in Mandarin at her, telling her pictures are forbidden. When told she is Canadian, not Chinese, he falls silent. “It's funny, in Canada it's the same problem,” she says wryly, sitting down at a table.
As a child, she'd worked hard to blend into her neighborhood, and it worked well. With a new wave of Chinese immigrants arriving in recent years in British Columbia, though, she has felt the gaze of other Canadians getting chillier. When people say pointedly, “Where are you from?” she replies, pointedly, “From here.”
Still, when she saw the places her parents' families had been from, something more personal came into focus for her. Her parents were married for decades. But there was always friction between them, Lim says, and they separated when her mother was in her 70s. In the villages, she felt she understood something of that friction. Her mother's village had a market square, and basketball courts. People had cars. It was a more prosperous-looking place. Her father's village was smaller, poorer-looking. Her mother's expectations might have been different from her father’s, she thinks. And she saw the house where her mother almost died. As the story went, during the Japanese occupation, she'd been so sick that she'd been put outside to die. It was after her recovery that she walked to Kunming, in search of a way out—a way back to where she was from, Canada.
Nearly 70 years later, Kunming and Canada don’t feel as far away from each other as they once were. Even the lengthy plane flight—starting at about 15 hours with connections—is a minor inconvenience compared with how difficult the journey used to be, overland and on ship. That means that the children and grandchildren of immigrants, from China or any nation, aren't necessarily as cut off as they once were.
This is something I have experience with. My mother and grandparents are naturalized Americans, and though I'm from California, I spent many childhood vacations away with their garrulous army of French and Swiss relatives. I have in fact been many times to the ancestral village in Switzerland (or at least, as becomes clear the more you think about genealogy, one of the many ancestral villages), where one of my many great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers was born in 1570. While it's a pleasant place to walk, dominated by an enormous castle and surrounded by vineyards that a distant cousin still works, it's not a place I need to seek out. I've known about it my whole life, and my parents now live a short train ride away.
For many children and grandchildren of immigrants around the world, today's immigration—with Skype, with email, with plane tickets—is not necessarily the stark uprooting of earlier generations. One doesn't have to leave and never go back, and if one's descendants do, it may not be in search of lost roots.
Anders Hsi, a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, didn't grow up speaking Mandarin or Shanghainese, his grandparents' dialect, but his favorite picture book as a child was a 30-volume adaptation of the Chinese novel Journey to the West. In kindergarten, his teacher called home after she found him drawing what she took to be Satanic creatures—his mother had to gently break it to her they were Chinese spirits, like the ones in his books. Some of Hsi’s most vivid childhood memories are of going to China with his paternal grandparents when he was about five years old, and again when he was 10, in the 1990s. He remembers riding in a van with his great-uncles on a road trip in Western China, and seeing the former family homes in the center of Shanghai, long since converted to apartments. For Hsi, his Chinese roots weren't distant, or masked; they were just part of him, something he was proud of.
As it happens, Hsi moved to China eight years ago, and has lived in Guangzhou for the last seven. He has married a Chinese woman and now runs an e-commerce business with a focus on baby and maternity products, among other ventures. But the fact that his grandparents are from China has had little influence on these decisions, he says. Far more influential has been his interest in international business and the Mandarin classes he took in college; learning a language spoken by a billion people seemed like the best route to an interesting, meaningful life.
Nor is the China he lives in anything like the one they left in the 1940s. It's far more affluent, for one thing: “When they were growing up in China they saw tens of thousands of refugees flooding into Shanghai and freezing to death in the streets during the winter,” he says. The China he returned to is a place of booming commerce and new confidence.
Hsi’s father and grandfather know he cares for his heritage, he says, and they're proud of his new life built between the two nations. “Our family has learned to straddle the fault line between the two nations' essence, you particularly, and we feel very happy for you,” his father wrote him in an email. Both see his move as primarily motivated by natural curiosity and professional interests. “My grandpa was a genetic scientist and spent his career researching and developing peanuts,” says Hsi. “He has told me that I represent "hybrid vigor," which he says with his Chinese accent, meaning I can take the best from both the U.S. and China.”
Hsi and his wife have a two-year-old daughter, a strong-willed girl whose first language is Mandarin. How will she feel about the United States? Will the family stay in China while she grows up? Hsi laughs. “Well, we've been talking about building a house in California. Or maybe Southern France.” There’s one thing he knows for sure: She will have connections to many places.
To yearn to seek roots, perhaps you first must lose them. As young children, we have transitional objects, like security blankets, to maintain a connection lost at birth, remarks Zerubavel, the sociologist; as adults, we have genealogies and ancestral villages, to make up for connections lost before birth. With greater connection possible in the lives of immigrants and their children, it’s possible that root-seeking will fade, or turn into something else. For the moment, however, many people are still engaged in rebuilding these ties, in whatever way they can.
The south China sun filters through the banyan leaves as Lim walks back towards her hotel. She's going to be attending an anthropology conference for the next couple of days before heading back to British Columbia. We stop at the intersection in front of the hotel, talking about her plans. She's excited to report the latest family genealogy developments to her sister and niece. She's wondering how she'll manage the next leg of her journey, which will involve taking the train to Hong Kong, where her flight is. Then she says she is looking for one more thing: She wants to buy a pomelo.
These gigantic citrus fruits, as big as a soccer ball and yellow as a harvest moon, are sold on carts and from stalls all over the city. They are one of the quintessential foods of the Mid-Autumn Festival, when people sit outside together and watch the moonrise while snacking on fruit and mooncakes. Schoolchildren even make lanterns from the hollowed-out skins, carved in a jack-o-lantern effect.
In North America pomelos aren't so easy to get. But Lim's parents used to find them for the Christmas holidays. She has vivid memories of eating them as a child, though they were sometimes battered and dry from their long journey. The fruit's sweet pink segments, extracted from thick white pith, taste like home. Even as an adult, she used to go back from visits to her father's weighed down with gifts of fruit.
I give her instructions to a fruit stall on the Pearl River. It's in a narrow maze of alleyways, a thirty-minute walk to the north, and I'm not sure whether it will be easy to find. But undaunted, she goes off later that afternoon—one last quest for the road.
What's cooler than living on top of an active underground volcano? Oh, I don't know—maybe drilling into the volcano's core in order to renewably power your town. A team of geologists on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula is working on just that, digging a thin shaft thousands of meters into the lava fields in the hopes of harvesting volcanic energy.
The team—a group of scientists, industry, and government officials called the Iceland Deep Drilling Project—seeks to get 5,000 meters underground, where it can tap into the peninsula's large reservoirs of superhot steam. Down there, the volcano-heated water can get up to about 932 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Once the drilling is complete it will be, by far, the world's hottest borehole," Digital Journal reports.
When the shaft is done, the steam will use it like a chimney, traveling up to the surface, where it will be transformed into electricity and through geothermal power plants.
Asgeir Margeirsson, CEO of the IDDP, said what we're all thinking. "We have never been this deep before, we have never been into rock this hot before," he told BBC Science on Wednesday. "But we are optimistic." Steamy.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
If you raise an arm in the neon-soaked streets of Tokyo, a taxi—or takushi—will begin a series of majestic maneuvers.
The vehicle will exit the steady stream of traffic, and glide towards you. Before the car has stopped, the door will begin to open as if by magic. It almost clips your thigh, but it’s executed with such skill that all you need to do is turn your hips and slide in the pristine backseat of the cab. While you zoom off to your destination, you become part of Tokyo’s opulence—the radiant roof sign and reflective surface of the cab contributing to the illuminated city.
“The driver is a ballerina with a Toyota Crown at his disposal,” says English artist and photographer Alexander James. As a passenger, “you’re sitting so stationary inside it, yet there’s this burst of energy six inches above your head where the top of the taxi is reacting with the world around it.”
Every city has their own cab culture—from London’s black cabs to New York's checkered yellow. In Tokyo, the tall roofline and the large doors of the boxy Toyota Crown dominate Tokyo’s streets. To differentiate themselves from the approximately 50,000 other cabs driving throughout Tokyo, companies adorn their taxis with their own vibrantly lit roof sign. The colorful symbols and shapes—ranging from cute kittens to bright pink cherry blossoms to cartoon owls—help customers navigate the sea of vehicles.
“I think it’s almost like the modern-day version of an illuminated family crest,” says James.
Over the course of 26 years and 12 trips to Japan, James spent his evenings taking photos of the flow of taxis in the neighborhood of Akasaka, one of Tokyo’s central business districts. Lugging his 6x6 Format Hasselblad camera on his collapsible bike, James went on a crusade to capture and preserve the shining roof signs. He pedaled furiously to snap photos of the rarer signs of independent driver-owned taxis, known as kojin taxis, and smaller cab companies that only operated a few cars.
A selection of his photos were published in the 2012 book Tokyo Taxi, however the streets of Tokyo look much different today.
When he started the project, there were approximately 1,024 cab companies, James wrote in his book. Now, James estimates there are only about 70. Increasingly, kojin taxis and family businesses are being absorbed into larger cab corporations, causing the number of diverse taxi signs to slowly disappear from roadways.
“Many of these taxis don’t exist anymore,” James says. “All of these unique signs are now being homogenized.”
Tokyo’s taxi system began in 1912 with just six Ford vehicles. It has since expanded into a large multi-company operation, with approximately 49,000 taxis on the road providing 330 rides per day as of 2014. Majority of the taxis belong to one of the major firms collectively known as Dai Nippon Teikoku or “Empire of Japan”, an entity that has been around since World War II.
In 1986, James was walking through Tokyo at night when caught a glimpse of a taxi sign he had never seen before. It was a white and gold horizontal bar with a little monkey flanking one side. The friendly-looking cartoon had its arms down at its sides, and rather strange looking nipples, James recalls. He discovered that the taxi, under a company named Monkeys, was one of two in all of Tokyo.
“That’s just so sexy,” he says. “That this city of 14 million people has thousands of taxis, and two of them—just two of them—have this remarkably unique sign of a very cheeky-looking monkey.”
James spent from 1986 to 2012 obsessed with finding and shooting all the rare breeds of taxi signs, making a dozen trips and amounting about 19 months total in Tokyo. Some of his favorite signs are the green star of the Edosou Group Taxi Co., the cute little puppy on the Wan Wan taxi, and the bubblegum-pink flower of the Sakura (which translates to "cherry blossom") Taxi Co.
After a night chasing taxis, James would have trekked about 40 to 50 miles on his bike. He always started taking pictures after 2 a.m. Emerging from a two-dollar soba noodle bar, he cycled around the streets of Akasaka snapping photos and conversing with drivers to learn about their lives.
Every taxi driver faces the same kinds of challenges, yet they all have independent experiences, explains James. Drivers, predominantly men, work about 20 hours a day, according to James. Kojin taxi drivers may even clock in more hours, as they tend to work until they meet their target earnings since they don’t have anyone controlling their workload, write Walter Skok and Satoko Kobayashi in the journal Knowledge and Process Management.
On an average day, a Tokyo taxi driver will journey 154 miles and earn ¥43,514, according to 2012 data, reports Japan Times.
Taxi drivers show pride in their work, says James, explaining in his book that the cars are kept immaculate despite some being 20-year-old models. Some drivers wear white gloves and cover the seats in white cloth. It’s also a very social job, many of the cab companies’ make conversation and proper etiquette a service requirement.
One driver had shared a story about carrying a woman who fainted to her room, and letting her pay the fare at her convenience. A driver of a Sakura taxi told James of a time a young woman dressed in couture had forgotten her large weekend bag in the backseat. When he drove back to the hotel he had dropped her off at to return the bag, she opened it and a little dog jumped out onto her shoulder—covered head to toe in diarrhea.
“The poor taxi driver said, ‘Out of courtesy I had to look away.’ There were 10 men just looking the other way trying to be respectful to the young lady,” he says. There were only four Sakura taxis in operation during the time of his project, according to James. As of March 30, Sakura Taxi Co. is now a subsidiary of Nihon Kotsu Co., one of the Dai Nippon Teikoku firms.
James took upwards of 15,000 photos and documented 950 taxis, but his book could only feature a fraction of the dying breed of neon signs. What is still a major feature of the hypnotic lights of Tokyo may soon only exist in James’ photos.
He has visited every continent and lived in 17 countries, but there isn’t quite a cab system like Tokyo’s, he says. Tokyo’s taxis are “hallowed ground,” a kind of sacred space that defends a passenger’s privacy, he says.
“When you come out of a bar at four in the morning, you don’t want an iPhone driving you home,” he says. “You want something you know is dependable. It doesn’t matter how shit your night may be, [in a Tokyo taxi] you are riding with a gentleman.”
View more of James' photos of the luminous taxi signs below.
The year was 1912, and the rampant commercialism of Christmas in America had begun to irritate the working women of New York City.
Americans had been exchanging holiday gifts for centuries, after the ritual became legal in 1680 following a ban by the Pilgrims, who considered it a crass anathema. By the 19th century Christmas gifts were a firmly entrenched tradition. But by 1911, when a few dozen women in New York City formed what would later be called The Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, it had reached an early fever pitch.
The yearly emphasis on materialism annoyed the so-called Spugs, but there was also a practical complaint: the era's custom of employees giving gifts to bosses and higher-ups in exchange for work favors. Frequently, these gifts didn't run cheap, costing in some cases up to two weeks' worth of wages, a tradition propelled in part by peer pressure that had grown only bigger with each passing year.
And so, with the help of two of New York richest women, the Spugs decided to strike back.
"Are you a giver of Christmas gifts?" The New York Timesreported on November 12, 1912. "If you are, do you give them in the true spirit of generosity or in the hope that you may get presents or favors in return? If that is the way you have been offering holiday remembrances, and if you wish to rebel against this hypocrisy, then you are eligible for membership in the Spug Club."
The society was founded by Eleanor Robson Belmont, an actress whose husband's family is the namesake of the Belmont Stakes, and Anne Morgan, the daughter of J.P. Morgan, one of the richest men who ever lived. The group began in 1911, with a few dozen female members, but exploded over the next year, growing to over 6,000, the New York Times reported then.
This growth was in part an expression of collective frustration, but it was effectively powered by the charisma of Belmont, who, in the 1900s, was one of the most famous stage actresses in America. She retired in 1910 after her marriage to August Belmont II, going on to become one of the "genuine grande dames" of Manhattan society, the Times said in her obituary. And while she would later become known as an early savior of the Metropolitan Opera, one of her first big philanthropic projects was helping out the Spugs.
At one rally in 1912, Belmont addressed a dissenter, a "young woman of about 25 years," who complained that such a club wasn't necessary.
"But, my girl friends," she told the crowd. "Is it not true that these evils do exist and that you must give many useless Christmas gifts simply because it is the custom?
"Yes, it's true," Belmont continued. "Start the Spug Club."
What happened at the Spug meetings? Ice cream was served, for one thing, while women also took in what was then a novel form of entertainment: moving pictures. The rallies were also, at their root, about female solidarity, even if class divisions lingered, giving the occasions an air of maternalistic charity.
"Don't call them 'working girls,'" the philanthropist Gertrude Robinson Smith said at a meeting of over 1,000 Spugs in December 1912. "They are self-respecting, self-supporting women." The Times went on to describe the meeting this way:
"At first it was difficult to single out the working girls. They were all as well dressed as their patronesses. In fact, all sister Spugs, patrons, and patroned looked alike to the reportorial eye. For the benefit of those who still think that the trem [sic] Spugs is the name for some strange new bug, it must be explained that the letters stand for the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving."
The meetings continued, and by the following year, the Spug boom was in full force.
"BIG SPUG DANCE ON THE PIER," the Timesreported in June 1913. "Miss Morgan Witnesses 8,000 Vacation Girls In an Evening's Pleasure."
The organization initially was just for women, though men were later allowed in, mostly because of Theodore Roosevelt, who, in December 1912, became the first "man Spug," prompting hundreds of others to join to movement to tamp down on Christmas gifts.
"I believe the group can accomplish what the individual cannot—namely, the gradual substitution of the right spirit of Christmas giving, in place of the custom of 'collective' and 'exchange' presents which exists to-day," read the Society membership card Roosevelt signed. "I agree to pay 10c. a year dues and wear during all campaigns the Spug button."
Yet just two years later, the Spugs had scattered. War had erupted in Europe, and the attentions of Spug founders Belmont and Morgan—as well as the rest of the world—had shifted elsewhere. The Spug fad was over, though their point had been made, a message that wouldn't seem out of date today.
The Real Housewives of New Jersey is very often on in my house, blaring from a television or phone or tablet. I hear it more than I see it, and it is a fantastically fun show to listen to, if you have an ear for regional dialects. My god, the vowels these people use! It’s like a chorus of airhorns.
One word that the Housewives use, sometimes to excess, is “friggin',” as in, “These people are friggin’ animals.” With that friggin’ word constantly ricocheting around my apartment, it’s impossible for me not to wonder: where does it come from? And what about all the other soundalike words we use to say “fucking” without actually saying it? What determines whether someone says “friggin',” “frickin',” or “freakin'”?
“Fuck,” or “fucking,” dates back as far as the early 14th century, but it’s not until the late 15th century that historical linguists have lots of examples to toy around with. There is a whole group of words that are etymologically related, throughout all the Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic). “They’re all short words beginning with an “F” and ending in some kind of stop consonant, with something in between,” says Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer and author of The F-Word, a history of the word “fuck.” These words all meant something like “to strike” or “to thrust,” which led to a sexual meaning.
But though the word is pan-Germanic, English was the real “fuck” pioneer, responsible for the earliest examples of words that are definitely “fuck.” Most of the other Germanic languages now have some kind of variation with its own sexual connotation, but English was first.
The use of the word as an exclamation (as when you stub your toe) or as an intensifier (as in “New Fucking Jersey”) is much newer. “The earliest clear example of ‘fucking’ as an intensifier is from the 1890s,” says Sheidlower. Certainly expletives and profane language are harder to track than most words, given that people are often reluctant to write them down, but Sheidlower was confident that if the word was used in this way earlier than the 19th century, we’d know about it by now.
Here’s where things start to get goofy. A word that is similar to (either in sound or meaning) but is not quite a profanity is called a “minced oath.” We don’t really know how old minced oaths are; examples from centuries past tend to be more like puns or double entendres than what we’d consider now a minced oath. (“Frickin’” is a minced oath, because it has no real meaning of its own but is used because of its sound similarity with “fucking.” A Shakespearean joke where a character says “country,” with extra emphasis on the first syllable, is a pun, sort of.)
According to Google’s Ngram, which tracks the frequencies of printed words over time, the major three minced oaths for “fucking”—”freaking,” “fricking,” and “frigging”—all came about at around the same time, starting in the 1920s with minimal use and then really taking off in the 1950s and 1960s. Nobody seems to know why this happened, except that minced oaths have to be born after a word is firmly entrenched as a profanity. In other words, “fucking” has to be common before anyone would know what you were saying when you say “fricking.”
Was there also something about the culture of the mid-20th century that encouraged the use of these minced oaths? Probably! But any explanation would involve working backwards to come up with a guess; there isn’t any data about that kind of thing.
In any case, by the late 20th century, minced oaths for “fucking” were standard. And weird. The entire idea of a minced oath is bizarre, a pure example of how completely arbitrary language can be.
“You want people to know exactly what you mean, but you don’t want to be on the record having actually said it,” says Benjamin Bergen, the author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. “We don't think that anyone we're talking to doesn't know the word, we don't think they're going to think we don't know the word when we say something different, but we're all party to this agreement.” “Frickin’” is an unspoken contract we’ve all signed, saying that one word is forbidden, but a similar word can stand in while in polite conversation.
You might notice we haven’t talked much about “friggin’” yet, and that’s because “friggin’” is not quite like the others. From the 15th century until the late 16th century, “frig” was an innocent verb in English, meaning to move rapidly, to rub, or to chafe. It was its own word, entirely unlike “freaking” and “fricking,” which are, essentially, made up words which sound like “fucking.” (Yes, “freak” is its own word, but “freaking,” as a verb or expletive, is entirely unrelated and born much later.)
By the late 16th century, “frig” had taken on a sexual meaning, referring specifically to masturbation, and usually female masturbation. The earliest examples were kind of punny, used by wordy playwrights and writers as a way to talk about sex cleverly. But soon the masturbatory meaning eclipsed the nonsexual meaning. “Frig” was a very common expletive, if a fairly mild one, until around 1850, when it suddenly dropped off in popularity. Until, that is, the word was reborn.
A century later, “frigging” was dug out of the closet, now used as a minced oath for “fucking.” This is, to say the least, not how minced oaths usually work—they’re typically minced oaths, not reconstituted ones. “Frigging,” previously profanity in its own right, lost both its edge and its original meaning and became wholly acceptable as an anodyne substitute for a completely different swear word. “By the mid-20th century it’s become a minced oath, so it’s not considered offensive anymore, really,” says Bergen.
Depending where you live, though, you might never hear “friggin’” from anyone except the Real Housewives. Where do people say “freakin’” compared with “friggin’”?
Jack Grieve, a linguist at Aston University in England, has created a truly magical tool to look at just this kind of thing. His WordMapper collects about a billion tweets geotagged in the U.S. from late 2013 to late 2014, and plots the 10,000 most commonly used words. You can search any word and see its geographic frequency and distribution. For our purposes, we’re using the “hotspot” feature, which adjusts for relative frequency—meaning it controls for the amount of people in each county, so New York City doesn’t just show up as the hotspot for every word.
The data isn’t necessarily foolproof as a way to tell how people speak; after all, it only measures Twitter users, and it’s only looking at how they type. But it’s still a good indicator of where people say certain things, and when it comes to minced oaths, it’s got some pretty weird data.
Let’s first try “fucking,” as a sort of control. What it gives us is basically a population map of the United States: major cities tend to use “fucking” more often, whether they’re New York, Miami, or San Francisco.
We tend to get slightly different results if we leave the final “g” off these words, and not every version shows up in Grieve’s top 10,000 list. There’s an entry for “frickin” but not “fricking,” for example.
“Freaking” and “freakin’” both show up. With the “g,” we get the highest use throughout Texas, and, for some reason, in both major American mountain ranges, the Appalachians (well, the western part of them, anyway) and the Rockies (Utah and Wyoming, especially). “Freakin” is slightly more popular, including those regions but also bleeding into Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.
“Frickin” is totally different. The map for this word shows the highest frequency in the Upper Midwest, especially Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota, with significant popularity also southward in Nebraska.
“Friggin” is, again, a different story. (“Frigging,” with the “g,” isn’t popular enough to make the map.) This strangest of minced oaths has the highest frequency of use in Upper New England, specifically in Maine and New Hampshire, with a weird little pocket out in South Dakota and Nebraska.
I also tried some different spellings, just for fun. “Fucken” makes the grade, with very high frequency all around the Pacific Coast, from Washington to Oregon, California, and into New Mexico and Arizona.
“Fricken',” too, shows up on the map, with an expanded map similar to the one for “frickin'.” This time, it hits Michigan, through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and to the Dakotas.
The obvious question, when presented with these clear regional boundaries for our favorite “fucking” substitute, is, well, why? The unfortunate answer is the same one you often get when you ask linguists why people speak the way they do: we have no real idea.
“We do have some good explanations for regional patterns in the vowels and other aspects of sound systems of American English dialects. But when it comes to idiosyncratic, fast-changing lexical items like soda or friggin’, it's hard to track the origins,” says James Stanford, a linguist who studies the dialect of New England at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Could it be because Mainers and other New Englanders use a dialect rich in archaic English words, like a variation on “aye” that’s sometimes spelled “ayuh”? Sure, maybe. But also maybe not. It’s not really possible to find out.
Stanford, though he doesn’t know why it’s the case, agrees that “friggin’” is remarkably popular in northern New England. “I'm around Northeast students all the time here, and I think I hear them say friggin’ quite a bit (but the unvarnished f-word is the most popular),” he writes. “But we haven't done a quantitative study.” As usual, we have a much better sense of where, when, and how people speak. As to why Mainers say “friggin’” and Minnesotans say “frickin’,” well, that remains a freakin' mystery.
Across the world, and likely right this moment, humans are knocking on wood. Many are frantically flipping over their slippers, making sure they’re not upside-down. Still others around the globe are shivering at the sight of a black cat crossing their path. Or an owl.
These are all common superstitions, or non-organized folk rituals built on the premise of controlling the outcome of events. Superstitions are spread through word of mouth; we teach them to our friends and our grandchildren. These traditions are often ancient and untraceable, focusing on powerful otherworldly forces that are related to incidental or simple actions any person can do.
Superstitions offer a way for humans to shape our destinies—or try to. Many of us follow rituals to stave off bad luck, attract romance, or keep our own inner worlds intact. Now thanks to this interactive map, we can look at 150 of these mini-beliefs across the planet.
Many of the most prevalent superstitions loosely relate to early versions of the world’s major religions or to ancient pagan beliefs. Still, "Pinning down the origins of superstitions can be baffling," Max Cryer writes in his book Superstitions: And Why We Have Them. "Unlike epigrams, quotations, proverbs and literary allusions, superstitions often grow without visible ancestry."
Countries can share superstitions, too. If you speak at the same time as a friend or say something you don’t want to come true, and then knock on wood? You’re in the good company of millions of people in the United States, Syria, Ireland, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and likely a few other locales. In some locations, knocking on wood is believed to prevent the devil from entering the room (stemming from the notion that the devil was unable to touch certain woods, like oak)—which may in turn have evolved from pagan rituals regarding the worship of trees.
Leaving slippers upside down is bad luck in Syria, Egypt, Nepal and Brazil, while breaking mirrors is bad luck in most of the Western world. Keeping disembodied rabbit feet and avoiding black cats—which has been traced back to Egypt in the year 3,000 BC—are both observed practices in countries across every inhabited continent on Earth. If your palms itch in Ghana, the U.S., Brazil, and much of Europe, something money-related is about to happen.
Meanwhile, people in almost every single country in the world are constantly avoiding the “evil eye” (wishes of ill will by one person upon another) by wearing various amulets or ash, crossing their fingers to make a “figas” hand shape, or, as in the Netherlands, painting their farmhouses with a protective black stripe. Across Europe and its former colonies, bad events like deaths or illnesses are said to happen in threes, and horseshoes are believed to bring money and luck. Although each location offers its own variation on popular superstitions, for the most part common beliefs have been left off our map to make room for more distinctive entries.
A note on the unified phenomena of our folk traditions, however: because there is no agreed-upon distinction between religion and superstition, what one person considers a superstition (derogatorily), another sees as a legitimate belief. So this map is offered without judgement, with a focus on rituals we teach each other from one generation to the next, which tend to fall beyond mainstream religion and into the folk-made aspects of belief. Sometimes superstitions are taken seriously; other times they are not. All of them are, for one reason or another, rumored to have real consequences.
As there are thousands of superstitions around the world—the U.S. section of the map could be filled with fisherman's beliefs and sports superstitions alone—consider this a sample. For some, it can serve as a guide. But whatever you do, if you’re traveling in Italy, Germany, parts of the United States or many other areas of the world, don’t toast with a glass of water, which wishes death to your companions, or you’re going to have a lot of figas to do.
Deep within a mine in Canada, there is a pool of water bubbling out of the ground. It’s close to 2 miles below the surface of the earth and, according to the scientists who discovered it, it’s been there for 2 billion years, making it the oldest pool of water in the world.
Previously that record was held by a pool further up in the mine, about 1.5 miles down, which was discovered in 2013 and given the age of 1.5 billion years.
The scientists date the water by analysing the gases trapped inside. As the CBC explains, gases like helium and xenon accumulate in the water while it’s stuck in rock fractures. Measuring those concentrations can tell the researchers how old the water is.
What’s unique about this water is that it’s been conserved for all that time. Much of the water on this planet has an even older origin: half of the water on Earth is actually melted interstellar ice that predates the sun.
As the BBC reports, the most fascinating aspect of these billion-year-old pools of water is the possibility that they could reveal more about life on Earth billions of years ago. The scientists have detected signs that single-celled organisms once lived in this water, which is now about eight times saltier than seawater.
If you celebrate Christmas—either for the sake of Jesus or just seasonal tradition—and you're lucky enough to receive a bounty of gifts from friends and family, it's time to make the yearly decision of when exactly you'll open presents.
While many Christmas traditions (the trees, ornaments, Santa) are essentially the same, at least in the United States, every family seems to have their own rituals or traditions about when to open their gifts.
Some people wait until Christmas Day to distribute and open presents, while others are used to opening their gifts on Christmas Eve (a common German tradition). Still others split up the presents, opening a few on Christmas Eve, and the rest on Christmas Day, or even New Year's Eve. Some people exchange gifts on a separate day entirely.
To find out more about the how people celebrate the Christmas holidays, we asked our readers to let us know about their own unwrapping practices. Almost 500 people filled out our survey, and let us know how things traditionally go down during their Christmas. Here are the results.
Over half of the respondents said they open their gifts on Christmas Day. The rest said they either spread the presents between both days, or open their gifts on Christmas Eve. Just four percent of people opened them on some other day.
Some users also shared stories and feelings about their Christmas traditions, the best of which we've shared below. Check them out to see how similar your Christmas rituals are, and no matter how you spend the season, happy holidays!
From Those Who Open Their Gifts on Christmas Day
"My grandmother would give each grandchild a Hallmark keepsake ornament, which was opened on Christmas Eve. All other presents were opened Christmas morning."
"As an only child of divorced parents, my Christmas was always split in two, which was certainly not a bad thing! Christmas Eve I'm always with my mother. We attend an evening church service and make a special Christmas meal for just the two of us. We exchange gifts early Christmas morning. Around noon, my father comes to pick me up, and by the time I get to his house my step siblings are awake (hopefully). My step mother makes appetizers and snacks for the whole day, and we open gifts in the afternoon. We then have a Christmas dinner all together."
"We leave one present for each person under the tree until New Years when the tree is taken down. This keeps the tree from looking bare and motivates family members to help me take down the tree."
"My sister and I thought that the kids next door who opened presents on Christmas Eve were deviants with poor impulse control. Didn't know opening on Christmas Eve was a done thing until I was an adult."
"My dad's side of the family often light a candle at (Catholic) church on Christmas Eve; also we would drive around and look at Christmas lights in rich neighborhoods."
"All of us kids would take turns creeping down the stairs to investigate our stockings. If caught, you were responsible for Christmas Coffee and Cinnamon Buns."
"My dad's family had a tradition in which the first person on Christmas Eve to call out, 'Christmas Eve Gift!' would get to open one present that day. The rest of the presents waited until the holiday, itself."
"Sometimes we just say 'screw it' and open our gifts at different times because Christmas kinda lasts 12 days anyway and life is too short."
"My family has Swedish, Italian, and Scottish traditions. St. Lucia comes on the longest night of the year (Swedish), but because we are Italian, we call her Santa Lu-chee-ya. We sing, party together, eat Swedish food.
Advent celebrations, with weekly readings of bible verses and hymns along with lighting the advent wreath is a tradition. Young kids believe in Santa, but he only brings three gifts, since Jesus only got three gifts."
"Stockings before breakfast, then presents slowly throughout the day - we watch each person open each present. We save one 'last present' for each person under the tree to open right before bed on Christmas Day as the way to close out the holiday."
"When we were little, my mom would leave our stockings at the foot of our bed, so that when we woke up on Christmas morning we'd have something with which to amuse ourselves until a more decent hour. A book, a video game, some cards...it was genius, I now realize."
"Even atheists like presents."
From Those Who Open Their Gifts on Christmas Eve
"It's quite common in Germany to open gifts on Dec 24th instead of 25th."
"We save our stockings and Santa gifts for Christmas Day, everything else is opened on Christmas Eve."
"My daughter, son-in-law and I still do Santa gifts. We open everything except those marked 'From Santa.' Those are left for Christmas morning."
"On Christmas Eve evening, Father Xmas visits every home personally to give the presents :)"
From Those Who Open Their Gifts on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve
"My Irish Catholic grandfather and Southern Baptist grandmother would serve lasagna at Christmas. (I'm not sure how this got started—no Italians anywhere in my family tree.) They made spaghetti one year when I was little and just starting to feed myself, and we had spaghetti on Christmas Eve for the next 15 years."
"We started opening present early when I was a kid because the parents split Christmas, so we would spend the week before Christmas with one, switch on Christmas day, and then the rest of break with the other. Have kept early presents because hey, presents."
"We open one gift on Christmas Eve. For one gift of the Magi. The rest from Santa, Christmas morning. Midnight Sleigh bells are rung and clattering of hooves are heard on the roof. Strangely enough, pebbles are found in the snow banks once the sun comes out."
"My favorite Christmas tradition is that the "Christmas Elves" come on Christmas Eve and give the family their new pajamas to wear for Christmas Eve/Morning. It is a tradition from when I was a baby, and I will be continuing it through my life."
"It's one present each for the kids on Christmas Eve and then the rest as soon as Dad has finished his coffee on Christmas morning. He used to torture my sister and I by drinking it as slowly as possible and going back for another cup when we got excited he'd finished his first one."
"We open one present each (not a "big" one) one Christmas Eve and the rest from under our tree on Christmas morning. We spend the rest of the day visiting family, opening and giving gifts along the way."
From People Who Open Gifts on Another Day Entirely
"We both grew up in culturally Christian households but are uncomfortable with that for ourselves because we outwardly and actively reject Christianity, so we do our winter holiday celebrating on New Year's Day since our families won't abstain from including us in their gift-giving."
"Christmas is traditionally only religious in our culture (i.e., church service and candy/chocolates). We do presents on New Years Eve, right after midnight."
But on December 25th, 1902, one man got the better of Roosevelt—his eight-year-old son, Archie. And he did it all for the sake of a Christmas tree.
These days, a tree is a vital part of any Christmas tableau. But back in the mid and late 1900s, that particular tradition hadn't quite taken root, Jamie Lewis explains on Forest History Society blog. While households with small children might put one up, others still considered the trees too pagan, too German, or just too difficult.
Starting at the turn of the century, Christmas trees also also faced an environmentally-minded backlash. In an editorial, the Minneapolis Times warned that the annual harvest "threatens to strip our forests;" soon after, the Hartford Courant bemoaned what they called "an altogether endless sacrifice… just to meet the calls of an absurd fad."
The public agreed: "Many among the general public opposed cutting trees for the holiday because of the injurious impact on forests, the destructive methods used to harvest them, or the overall perceived wastefulness of the practice," writes Lewis.
In 1899, one green-minded group took their grievance all the way to the White House, sending letters calling on President McKinley to publicly denounce the "Christmas Tree Habit." (While McKinley, childless by the time he took office, didn't put up a tree for himself, he was known to keep one around for the White House maids.)
There's no evidence that this lobby also reached out to Roosevelt, who became President in 1901, after McKinley's assassination. As it turned out, though, they didn't have to—Teddy and his wife, Edith, just weren't that into Christmas trees.
It's unclear what put the Roosevelts, who had six young children, off the custom. Although Teddy was a staunch environmentalist, he never specifically spoke out against harvesting Christmas trees—and Gifford Pinchot, whom he eventually chose to head up the U.S. Forest Service, was in favor of the practice. The true naysayer may have been Edith, who, Lewis postulates, probably had enough to deal with: "They've got a bunch of rambunctious kids, and this growing menagerie of animals as well," he says.
In years past, they had sated their kids' arboreal appetites by going to see the tree at the local Episcopal Sunday School, or at the home of Theodore’s sister, Anna Cowles, who always had a big one. But by 1902, dissent was quietly growing in the ranks. While the New York Sunreported early that "there will be no Christmas tree at the White House," Archie Roosevelt, the family's next-to-youngest child, was secretly taking matters into his own hands.
That year, the Roosevelt parents had arranged a tasteful Christmas for their brood. A December 26th letter from the President to James Garfield (whom he addressed as "Jimmikins"), sets the scene: bulging stockings, dancing in the East Room, and an electric train set for the children, rigged up by the White House electrician.
"But first there was a surprise for me," writes Roosevelt, "for Archie had a little Christmas tree of his own which he had rigged up with the help of one of the carpenters in a big closet."
According to Robert Lincoln O'Brien, then Washington correspondent for the Boston Transcript and a close friend of Roosevelt, this event was weeks in the making. A steward had smuggled a two-foot-tall fir top into the White House at the request of Archie, who had hidden it in one of the many unused clothes closets and slowly trussed it up.
The eight-year-old then gathered everyone around for the big reveal. "All the family were there… but none appeared more astonished than Mr. Roosevelt himself at the sight of this diminutive Christmas tree," O'Brien wrote in a 1903 account, published in Ladies' Home Journal.
"We all had to look at the tree," Roosevelt continues, "and each of us got a present off of it. There was also one present each for Jack the dog, Tom Quartz the kitten, and Algonquin the pony."
Roosevelt offered no further reaction to the tree, choosing instead to talk about his own chosen Christmas pursuits (a three-hour horse ride and several games of cudgels). Letters from later years indicate that Archie turned his triumph into a new tradition. In 1906, there were apparently two secret trees—Archie's closet tree, and a second made especially for their parents. By 1907, in a note to his sister, Roosevelt tosses off a cool "There was a Christmas tree of Archie's" as though it were old hat.
The press, though, couldn't get enough of the story. After O'Brien's version was published, every holiday season saw papers from coast to coast speculating as to whether Archie would pull his trick again. In 1904, the Washington Times reported a spat between Archie and his baby brother, Quentin: "This year [Archie] announced that he was 'too big for kids' things,' but offered to fix up a tree for Quentin," the Times wrote. "His younger brother, however, spurned this offer, informing Archie that if he wanted a tree he could make one for himself."
Like Washington's cherry tree chop, Archie's plant exploits eventually took on a life of their own. At least one writer has credited Archie as the first person to bring a Christmas tree into the White House. (That honor, though disputed, probably belongs to Franklin Pierce.) Others held that Theodore had been swayed by the anti-tree lobby, with some spinning elaborate yarns in which Archie and Quentin called on chief forester Pinchot, begging him to talk the Grinchiness out of their dad.
But these legends, cute as they are, miss the point of Archie's triumph: his true legacy comes from turning his father's best-known maxim against him. If you want to win against the most powerful man in the world, speak softly and carry a big stick—or a small tree.
The modern world is paradise for voyeuristic humans. But as of now, there's at least one thing people haven't gotten to see: we have never watched whale sharks have sex.
Now one aquarium is trying to change all that. According to the Japan News, Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium has recently begun displaying a pair of whale sharks, in the hope that they'll do the deed.
Whale sharks are the largest known fish species, and can grow to at least 42 feet—the length of an RV. They live about as long as humans do, and are filter feeders, surviving on copious amounts of tiny creatures, like plankton.
But scientists know very little about their lives, including how they mate or have offspring. Okinawa Churaumi, which is one the only aquariums in the world large enough to hold the creatures, has been raising several since 2005. They recently released one of their females into an ocean pen, to give the other two a chance to get closer.
"It's a rare chance in the first place for a mature pair of whale sharks to be kept together," aquarium curator Keiichi Sato told the outlet. He hopes for success, because captive breeding of whale sharks would allow him and other researchers to display and study them without having to deplete the wild population.
"My mind is now filled with thoughts of the two," he said. And I bet yours is, too.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
