A surprising number of those holiday traditions are not at all family-friendly, including exhumed skulls and spousal murder, illicit bribes and drunken brawls.
, Earl shares instructive stories about the Yuletide practices experienced “at the most wonderful time of the year.”
In addition to being unpalatable, mince pies were rumored to lead to bad dreams or hallucinations. One husband in New Jersey in 1909 even claimed those savory pies made him kill his wife: “I ate three pieces of mince pie at 11:00 and got to dreaming that I was shaking dice. The other fellow was cheating, and I tried to shoot his fingers off. When I awoke, I was holding a pistol in my hand, and my wife was [dead].” As a defense, though, the “mince pies made me do it” did not hold up in court.
The legendary director had already made one movie about a man attempting suicide on the night before Christmas — “Meet John Doe,” starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck — but he saw the cinematic merits in George Bailey’s inspiring saga. Capra was obviously right, with elements of “It’s A Wonderful Life” — Zuzu’s petals, the song “Buffalo Gals,” the idea that ‘every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings’ — remaining a part of the culture to this day.
The holiday classic “Silent Night” was first performed in 1818 in Austria’s St. Nicholas church. A poem originally written by the parish priest, Joseph Mohr, the song had to be performed that Christmas Eve when the church’s organ was flooded by raging river waters. Mohr instead asked a friend to sing his poem and accompany it on guitar, even though that instrument was frowned upon then due to its association with local taverns.
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