Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (10 page)

Our modern image of a baby in a diaper with a New Year’s banner across its chest originated in Germany in the fourteenth century. Celebrated in folk songs and illustrations of the day, the diapered tot was brought to America by German immigrants.

Groundhog Day: 16th Century, Germany

Horniness and hunger are the actual elements that determine a groundhog’s behavior when it emerges in winter from months of hibernation.

Quite simply, if on awakening a groundhog is sexually aroused and famished, he’ll stay aboveground and search for a mate and a meal. If, on the other hand, these appetites are still dulled from his winter torpor, he’ll return to his burrow for a six-week doze. Weather has nothing to do with it.

As to the folklore concerning the animal’s seeing his shadow, that originated
with sixteenth-century German farmers. And the original animal of German legend was not a groundhog—a fifteen-inch-long woodchuck,
Marmota monax
, with coarse red-brown fur. Rather, it was a badger, a sixteen-to-twenty-eight-inch-long, broad-backed, carnivorous mammal of the genera
Taxidea
and
Meles
, with thick, short legs, and long claws on its forefeet.

The switch from badger to groundhog did not result from mistaken identity. German immigrants who settled in the nineteenth century in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania—a small town in the heart of the Allegheny plateau, eighty-five miles northeast of Pittsburgh—found that the area had no badgers. It did, however, have hordes of groundhogs, which the immigrants conveniently fitted to their folklore.

Weather did come to play one key role in the legend:

At Punxsutawney’s latitude, a groundhog emerges from its hibernating burrow in February. Had the immigrants settled a few states south, where it’s warmer, they would have found the groundhog waking and coming aboveground in January; in the upper Great Lakes region, the cold delays his appearance until March. Thus, it was the latitude at which the German immigrants settled that set Groundhog Day as February 2.

German folklore dictated that if the day was sunny and the groundhog (badger) was frightened by his shadow back into hibernation, then farmers should refrain from planting crops, since there would be another six weeks of winter weather. Scientific studies have dashed that lore. The groundhog’s accuracy in forecasting the onset of spring, observed over a sixty-year period, is a disappointing 28 percent—though, in fairness to the groundhog, the figure is no worse than the estimate of a modern weatherman.

St. Valentine’s Day: 5th Century, Rome

The Catholic Church’s attempt to paper over a popular pagan fertility rite with the clubbing death and decapitation of one of its own martyrs is the origin of this lovers’ holiday.

As early as the fourth century
B.C
., the Romans engaged in an annual young man’s rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of teenage women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men; thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment and pleasure (often sexual), for the duration of a year, after which another lottery was staged. Determined to put an end to this eight-hundred-year-old practice, the early church fathers sought a “lovers’ “saint to replace the deity Lupercus. They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred some two hundred years earlier.

In Rome in
A.D
. 270, Valentine had enraged the mad emperor Claudius II, who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they were loath to leave their families for battle. The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius, never one to fear unpopularity, abolished marriage.

Valentine, bishop of Interamna, invited young lovers to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius learned of this “friend of lovers,” and had the bishop brought to the palace. The emperor, impressed with the young priest’s dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the Roman gods, to save him from otherwise certain execution. Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and imprudently attempted to convert the emperor. On February 24, 270, Valentine was clubbed, stoned, then beheaded.

History also claims that while Valentine was in prison awaiting execution, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Through his unswerving faith, he miraculously restored her sight. He signed a farewell message to her “From Your Valentine,” a phrase that would live long after its author died.

From the Church’s standpoint, Valentine seemed to be the ideal candidate to usurp the popularity of Lupercus. So in
A.D
. 496, a stern Pope Gelasius outlawed the mid-February Lupercian festival. But he was clever enough to retain the lottery, aware of Romans’ love for games of chance. Now into the box that had once held the names of available and willing single women were placed the names of saints. Both men and women extracted slips of paper, and in the ensuing year they were expected to emulate the life of the saint whose name they had drawn. Admittedly, it was a different game, with different incentives; to expect a woman and draw a saint must have disappointed many a Roman male. The spiritual overseer of the entire affair was its patron saint, Valentine. With reluctance, and the passage of time, more and more Romans relinquished their pagan festival and replaced it with the Church’s holy day.

Valentine Cards
. Traditionally, mid-February was a Roman time to meet and court prospective mates. The Lupercalia had established the practice. While no one reinstated the Lupercian lottery (under penalty of mortal sin), Roman young men did institute the custom of offering women they admired and wished to court handwritten greetings of affection on February 14. The cards acquired St. Valentine’s name.

As Christianity spread, so did the Valentine’s Day card. The earliest extant card was sent in 1415 by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London. It is now in the British Museum.

In the sixteenth century, St. Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva, attempted to expunge the custom of cards and reinstate the lottery of saints’ names. He felt that Christians had become wayward and needed models to emulate. However, this lottery was less successful and shorter-lived than Pope Gelasius’s. And rather than disappearing, cards proliferated and became more decorative.
Cupid
, the naked cherub armed with arrows dipped in love potion, became a popular valentine image. He was associated with the holiday because in Roman mythology he is the son of Venus, goddess of love and beauty.

The earliest extant Valentine’s Day card, c. 1415, sent by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London
.

By the seventeenth century, handmade cards were oversized and elaborate, while store-bought ones were smaller and costly. In 1797, a British publisher issued “The Young Man’s Valentine Writer,” which contained scores of suggested sentimental verses for the young lover unable to compose his own. Printers had already begun producing a limited number of cards with verses and sketches, called “mechanical valentines,” and a reduction in postal rates in the next century ushered in the less personal but easier practice of mailing valentines. That, in turn, made it possible for the first time to exchange cards anonymously, which is taken as the reason for the sudden appearance of racy verse in an era otherwise prudishly Victorian. The burgeoning number of obscene valentines caused several countries to ban the practice of exchanging cards. In Chicago, for instance, late in the nineteenth century, the post office rejected some twenty-five thousand cards on the ground that they were not fit to be carried through the U.S. mail.

The first American publisher of valentines was printer and artist Esther Howland. Her elaborate lace cards of the 1870s cost from five to ten dollars, with some selling for as much as thirty-five dollars. Since that time, the valentine card business has flourished. With the exception of Christmas, Americans exchange more cards on Valentine’s Day than at any other time of year.

XXX for Kisses
. Lovers who affectionally sign “XXX”s to valentine cards and letters are usually unaware that the custom goes back to the early
Christian era, when a cross mark, or “X,” conveyed the force of a sworn oath.

The cross was, of course, a religious symbol. Not only did it refer to the cross of Calvary; it also was the first letter of the Greek word for Christ,
Xristos
.

In the days when few people could write, their signature cross, or “X,” was a legally valid mark. To emphasize their complete sincerity in an accord, they often kissed the mark, as a Bible was frequently kissed when an oath was sworn upon it.

It was this practice of kissing the “X” that led to its becoming a symbol of a kiss. During World War II, the British and American governments both forbade men in the armed forces from putting “XXX”s on their letters, afraid that spies within the services might begin sending clandestine messages coded as kisses.

St. Patrick’s Day:
A.D
. 493, Ireland

Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, was born in either Scotland, England, Wales, or France, but definitely not in Ireland. His given name was not Patrick but Maewyn. Or Succat. He barely became bishop of Ireland, because his superiors felt he lacked the finesse and scholarship the position called for. Nonetheless, he did do something that made him a saint and merited him a holy day—now more of a holiday.

Many facts about Patrick have been distorted under the weight of Irish folklore.

He was born about
A.D
. 385, most likely in a small village near the mouth of the Severn River in what is now Wales. The region was part of the vast Roman Empire. He was by the locale of his birth Romano-Briton, by parentage a Roman Catholic; by his own later admission, until age sixteen he was covetous, licentious, materialistic, and generally heathen.

When he was sixteen, a group of Irish marauders raided his village and carried off Patrick and hundreds of other young men and women to be sold as slaves. For six years, he toiled as a sheepherder in County Antrim, Ireland, and it was during this period of slavery and solitude that he felt an increasing awareness of God. One of his two published works.
Confession
, in which he renounces his heathen bent, begins: “I, Patrick, a sinner, the most rustic and the least of all the faithful…”

Escaping Ireland and slavery, he spent a dozen idyllic, studious years at a monastery in Gaul under the tutelage of St. Germain, bishop of Auxerre. Germain instilled in Patrick the desire to convert pagans to Christianity.

As a priest, Patrick planned to return to pagan Ireland as its first bishop. But his monastery superiors felt that the position should be filled by someone with more tact and learning. They chose St. Palladius. Patrick importuned for two years, until Palladius transferred to Scotland. By the time he was
appointed Ireland’s second bishop, he had already adopted the Christian name Patrick.

His imposing presence, unaffected manner, and immensely winning personality aided him in winning converts, which aggravated Celtic Druid priests. A dozen times they arrested him, and each time he escaped. Eventually, he traveled throughout Ireland, founding monasteries, schools, and churches, which would in time transform the non-Christian country into the Church’s proud “Isle of Saints.”

After thirty years of exemplary missionary work, Patrick retired to Saul in County Down, where he died on March 17, his commemorated “death day,” in or about the year 461. He is believed to be buried in Downpatrick, and many pilgrims each year visit a local tombstone, carved with a “P,” which may or may not mark his grave.

Shamrock
. Among the less authenticated lore surrounding St. Patrick are the tales that he raised people from the dead and kindled fire from snow, and that from a hilltop he delivered a sermon that drove the snakes from Ireland.

However, one of the more historically cogent stories concerning St. Patrick explains how the shamrock came to be associated with the celebration of his holy day.

One central church doctrine Patrick repeatedly preached to converts was that of the Trinity: the belief that three Gods—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—coexist in a single entity but are nonetheless separate and distinct. Once, struggling in a sermon to convey the complexity by way of analogy, Patrick glanced to the ground and spotted a three-leafed shamrock. Holding up the herb, he asked his audience to imagine the three leaves as representing the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the stem as the single Godhead from which they proceeded. In homage, after Patrick’s death, his converts wore a shamrock as a religious symbol on his feast day.

The first public celebration of St. Patrick’s Day in America was in 1737, sponsored by the Charitable Irish Society of Boston. Oddly enough, the society was a Protestant organization, founded that year to assist ill, homeless, and unemployed Irishmen.