Whether or not flesh-and-blood Leprechauns really do exist in the woodlands of Ireland, they have cropped up in ceramic forms, populating gift shops in the United States ever since the 1960s, when St. Patrick’s Day started to become an annual… Read More ›
Holidays
Different demographics in different regions shaping Holidays with American style.
Kitschy, Kitschy Cute: Interpreting Old Valentine’s Day Vases
Kitschy, Kitschy Cute. Throughout the Fifties and early Sixties, before they were sent in cheap papier-mâché and then expensive colored-glass vases, sweethearts sent Valentine’s Day flowers in highly-breakable ceramic ones with that once-ubiquitous label “Made in Japan.” How many ways… Read More ›
The White House New Year’s Day Reception: Good Riddance to a Miserable Tradition
Resolutions, college football bowl games, parades, gym renewals, and January first’s first-born child: New Year’s Day customs give people hope, happiness or distraction. Swollen feet, pneumonia and confrontation do not. Which explains the silent death of the legendary White House… Read More ›
Old-School New Year’s Day Food: From the South, North or Midwest – its Imported
Holidays, as celebrated throughout the United States, are closely tied to annual feasts of traditional foods. Thanksgiving has its turkey and pumpkin pie, Christmas its goose, Hanukah its fried potato pancakes, St. Patrick’s Day is usually marked with plates of… Read More ›
Sex Lives of the Pilgrims: Girls Gone Wild, Gay Guys, An Orgy, Incest & Goodwives Chasing Native Men
“Puritanism,” said legendary wit H. L. Mencken, “is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Clearly, Mencken never pawed through the court record of Plymouth Colony‘s first generations of Pilgrims. In them, one finds eye-popping details of every… Read More ›
Cracking Plymouth Rock: Cold Stone Facts Behind the American Myth
It’s no Statue of Liberty on a New York Harbor pedestal or precious Constitution under low lights in Washington, but it’s the most ancient American relic. Or is it? Legend claims it’s the first bit of land that the first… Read More ›
The Four Best Presidential Pumpkin Pies: From the first Adams and Johnson, Ike & Reagan
When it comes to Presidents, the quality of political policy is entirely inconsistent with that of their pumpkin pie. There’s not even a preference for pumpkin over mince, for example, among those regularly rated as either the “best” (like… Read More ›
Mother's Day, the Guilty Daughter and Mamma's-Boy President Behind It
What many may think fuels Mother’s Day today is what seems to have fueled one woman to crusade for its creation – and then its destruction. Guilt. Never a mother herself, the “mother” of Mother’s Day, Miss Anna Jarvis, ninth… Read More ›
New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade: An Important Early Image
New York’s famous St. Patrick’s Day Parade is perhaps one of the oldest traditions celebrating an aspect of American diversity, an annual event which dates back to 1762. By eighty years later, with the first wave of massive immigration of… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.