The pickle tradition

When I was a kid in Hawaii my family hosted missionaries and missionaries-in-training on their way from or to mission trips in the pacific. It was really cool and we met a lot of people....very religious people, but still. One Christmas we were hosting a young missionary from Germany when she told us of the pickle ornament, a German Christmas tradition.

In Germany, she said, families have a glass Christmas tree ornament in the shape of a pickle. The oldest members of the household hide this ornament in the tree on Christmas eve. The next morning everyone looks for it (except, of course, the person who hid it) and the person to find it first wins. If an adult to finds it said adult gets good luck for the rest of the year. If a child gets it, he's given a small treat. As a kid I always thought it was sort of a gyp to be an adult and find the pickle.

"Great! You get good luck all year!"

"You are totally just saying that so that you don't have to give me a piece of candy."

The Christmas the missionary returned to her home in Germany she sent us our very own glass pickle ornament. My sisters and I were thrilled! Unfortunately, mom and dad were working 3 and 2 jobs respectively, so they were always dead tired wrapping presents on Christmas eve. Consequently, they totally forgot to put that little glass pickle in the tree. Christmas morning my sisters and I would run out and scour the tree for several minutes while our parents wilted from guilt in the background.

The bad news is that they never remembered to put the pickle in the tree. The good news is that every year we caught on a little earlier and now have a hilarious story to tell of thwarted family traditions.

Relating the story to some friends this year I realized that either I'd forgotten the origin of the pickle myth or the missionary had never told us. Google to the rescue.

Imagine my surprise when I found that most Germans have never heard of the pickle story and are puzzled to hear that Americans think it's a German tradition. Doing some research I found that, while the "pickle tradition" is now accepted in some parts of Germany, many of those Germans believe that the tradition came from somewhere else.

As best I found in my limited digging, one of the origins of the story is that a Bavarian-American fighting in the Civil War was captured around Christmas time. Dying in his cell from starvation he wished only for a pickle to eat. He was given the pickle by a kind guard and it cheered him so much that he didn't die. Returning to his family in Bavaria he started the tradition as an affirmation of life and Christmas miracles.

Two things stand out as being very amusing in this story. First, the guy was Bavarian, immigrated to the US, fought in the civil war and then went, "Fuck this, America sucks. I got in a war, starved near to death and then the country went to shit. Bavaria is not looking so bad now." and moved back? Secondly, in the words of another critic of this pickle story origin, "If you thought you were dying, would your last wish be for a pickle?"

I'm not sure if this is the real beginning of the pickle tradition though it seems to be one of the more widely spread myths. I do believe though, that I will cherish this story as the correct one, as it fits so well with the comedic nature of my own family's pickle tradition.