It’s an unusual sight: A glass pickle hiding in the depths of the pine branches of a Christmas tree, awaiting a curious child to pluck it out and hold it up for all to see on Christmas morning.
The child who finds it opens the first gift and gets an additional present, or, better yet, a year of good luck. The exact reward is debatable. Three years ago, I bought a plastic cucumber ornament for my mom, Evelyn Rivera, at a Dollar Tree store. She thought it was pretty funny.
“I said, ‘Why am I putting a pickle in my tree?’ And she (me) said, ‘When you put it in the middle and then when people walk in, they have to find the pickle in the tree,” Rivera said of her experience receiving the gift. She had no idea of its roots, and neither did I. Now, I’m riveted by its complex origin story.
Legend has it that the Christmas pickle tradition originated in Spreewald, Germany during the 19th century among impoverished locals who couldn’t afford ornaments or to buy their children gifts. Instead, they hung real pickles on their trees, and the first child to find them would get a piece of cake, or a loaf of bread. Peter Trovato, a vice president for Kurt S. Adler Inc., an ornament importer, said he heard that when the upper-class Germans got whiff of the idea, they had the funds to buy presents, and that’s where the first, or extra gift idea came from.
Despite the tradition's seemingly German heritage, a 2016 poll found 91% of the Germans polled weren’t familiar with the tradition. YouGov, the market research company that issued the survey, cited an alternative history: German-American soldier John Lower was fighting in the Civil War when he was badly injured. He recovered from his wounds after eating his favorite snack — a pickle — and commemorated his good fortune by hanging one on his Christmas tree the next year.
Another rumored tale is the stuff of nightmares. According to a 2011 Tampa Bay Magazine column, a nefarious innkeeper trapped two boys heading home for the holidays from boarding school in a pickle barrel. They only escaped when St. Nicholas tapped on the barrel with his staff.
Regardless of the bauble's roots abroad, pickle ornaments made their first appearance in the U.S. during the 1880s when five-and-dime store F.W. Woolworth Company started importing them.
Kurt S. Adler Inc. has at least 20 different pickle ornaments available to purchase at mom and pop stores and on Amazon. Trovato said he looked up the number of orders for just two types of pickle ornaments, and he saw they bought 30,000 units this year.
The tradition is alive and well in Massachusetts. Elisa Parker of Attleboro was gifted her ornament by her mom 20 years ago, and her two daughters search for it every year. At first, she had no idea what the tradition was.
“There are lots of different ways to do the pickle ornament. In our house, I always hide it. And the first person that finds it gets a dollar,” said Parker. “That was probably a cool thing when you're six and nine, but now that they're 26 and 29, the dollar doesn't count that much. But let me tell you, they hunt that tree like crazy!”
This year, Parker couldn’t pull out her ornaments and tree because of a surgery. But she was given a tiny tree by her husband, and added a hand-drawn pickle ornament to its boughs.
In North Grafton, Shannon Wnukowski’s mother gifted her a glass pickle after she married, and every year, she enjoys hanging it and reading the paper that goes with it.
“It says, ‘in Germany, the last decoration placed on the Christmas tree was always the pickle, carefully hidden in the boughs,’ and then it says ‘Legend has it that an observant child who found it on Christmas Day was blessed with a year of good fortune and a special gift,” Wnukowski said over Zoom. She doesn’t give out the gift, but her family gets a kick out of finding the pickle.
She came into a second pickle and was selling it on Facebook Marketplace when GBH News stumbled upon her. At $12, it might be a steal, because pickle hunters often find stores sold out of the cherished ornaments. Craig Johnson is the Manager of the TAGS Ace Hardware store in Cambridge’s Porter Square, which has been stocking them since 2012. This year, they sold out of all 24 of their $8.99 pickles by mid-December, and regional stores sent over a few more.
“I think it's a great tradition to start if someone is starting a family and has multiple kids,” said Johnson.
At manufacturer Old World Christmas, the ornaments are made just as they were in the 1700s — hand-carved shapes with molten glass blown into the mold. Silver nitrate solution makes it shine, and they’re hand-painted.
“It’s a pretty labor-intensive process, but it makes for a very special ornament,” said Neil Applefeld, CEO of the Washington-based company, founded in 1979.
Old World Christmas's $9 to $10 pickle makes it onto Amazon and into about 3,000 specialty shops, gift stores, and even Urban Outfitters, selling 40,000 total last year. The ornaments have been a constant since the 1980s, when the founders of the company visited Germany to research how people celebrate Christmas. Applefeld said he’s heard that if a child finds it, they get an extra gift, but if an adult finds it, they get good luck for the full year.
One of his buyers is Matt Triest, who owns gift shop Be Charmed in Medfield, and often sells out of pickle ornaments.
“We have definitely gotten calls or people that come in asking for that,” he said. ”Just the other day, someone bought a few of them and they were going to give them as gifts to people who don't have the pickle in their house."
My mother, Evelyn Rivera, who lives in Vermont, was astounded to hear about the pickle’s journey through the ages. “It’s terrific,” she said of the tradition. These days, she’s invested in having her five-year-old granddaughter find the ornament.
In the meantime, she says it’s a wonderful “conversation piece” for anyone who doesn’t know about the ornament's storied past.
