5 Beloved Holiday Traditions (That Started Out Crazy Dark)

The name "Black Friday" eventually got such a bad reputation that in 1961, Philadelphia store owners tried to change it to "Big Friday," but it never quite caught on with the rest of the country. In the late '80s, when merciless greed got a great PR department, national retailers decided to lean into their black mark and reclaim the name as a positive thing, forever blackening the sacrifice of the brave men and women keeping Black Friday safe.

Seriously, just shop online.

... the gaudy, holiday-themed paper we know today is a relatively recent invention. Up until the early 20th century, your options for wrapping a gift were a modest variety of "gift dressing" -- red, green, or white tissue paper. So even if the gift sucked, you could at least dry your eyes on the paper.

In the fall of 1917, however, brothers Rollie and Joyce Hall of Hallmark fame were facing a serious shortage of tissue paper. There's something about a devastating world war that makes people a bit sobby. Spotting some brightly colored paper sheets that were meant to line the insides of envelopes, Rollie put them next to the cash register and sold them for 10 cents a sheet. The sturdy, shiny paper was a hit with customers, and the Halls burned through their stock so fast that they heavily increased their orders the following year. The success of the wrapping paper led the Halls to realize they could squeeze consumers for much more than just greeting cards, which led them the monolith of unnecessary crap they're known for today.

The first official "pardon" of a Turkey occurred under Ronald Reagan in 1987. Reagan's administration was embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair, having been caught illegally selling weapons to Iran to fund fascist death squads in Nicaragua. Military officials Oliver North and John Poindexter were charged with facilitating the sale, and there were rumors brewing that Reagan was going to pardon them. During the annual turkey presentation, an intrepid reporter demanded an answer as to whether Reagan was going to hand out a Thanksgiving pardon. Reagan deflected the question by pointing at the turkey and saying, "Him?" thereby creating the first ever official turkey pardon.

Though Reagan didn't pardon his final turkey in 1988, George H.W. Bush resumed the practice in 1989, and every turkey since then has been pardoned, getting to live on a lovely farm with their myriad health problems brought on by morbid obesity, rarely living more than a year after being pardoned. Cute!

In late 1934, radio star Eddie Cantor was looking for a new Christmas song to perform on his show. As time was of the essence, he made a deal with one Leo Feist, who promised Cantor he'd have an original song written for him by the end of the week. There was only one problem: Feist wasn't a songwriter. However, he did know a newspaper reporter with a knack for upbeat music named James Gillespie. But when Feist called Gillespie, he had just learned that his brother had died, so he wasn't exactly in a merry mood. However, Gillespie did need money to go home for his brother's funeral, so he gave it a shot. During a subway ride home, he hastily penned a song called "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town," using memories of waiting for Santa with his brother as inspiration.

Unexpectedly, the song became a mega success, which was quite unfortunate for Gillespie, who never again could turn on a radio during Christmas without being reminded of his dead brother.

Then there's "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," a lovely little ditty about ... come to think of it, have you ever really listened to the lyrics? They're pretty depressing. That's because it was written by Hugh Martin for the movie Meet Me In St. Louis. In the movie, Judy Garland sings it to her younger sister, in an effort to cheer her up when the family is told they will be moving to across the country.

Martin had gotten the memo that the song was for a sad scene, but missed the part where it was meant to cheer a little girl up. Consequently, he wrote a first draft that was about as cheerful as a Yuletide asteroid hurtling toward the Earth:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

It may be your last

Next year we may all be living in the past

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Pop that champagne cork

Next year we may all be living in New York

No good times like the olden days

Happy golden days of yore

Faithful friends who were dear to us

Will be near to us no more

But at least we all will be together

If the Lord allows

From now on, we'll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

Garland and the studio rejected the song, fearing that opening day audiences hanging themselves would have a negative impact on ticket sales. However, Martin stood his ground. Only after much arguing did Martin's friend convince him by shouting, "You stupid son of a bitch! You're gonna foul up your life if you don't write another verse of that song!" Martin finally relented and rewrote it into the version we know today, though he insisted on leaving in the morose lyric about "muddl[ing] through somehow." Guess he wasn't feeling very merry at that point.

But no song has such a depressing origin as perhaps the happiest-sounding of them all: "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," made famous by singer Gene Autry. During the Great Depression, the manager of a Montgomery Ward store in Chicago decided that a Christmas-themed children's book would help boost sales, so he tapped a copywriter in the ad department named Robert May to write it. May was at a rather unhappy with where he was in life, wanting to be a novelist but instead churning out shitty store catalogs. He channeled that into a story about an underappreciated reindeer who had the right skills when the boss needed them most. However, a few months into the project, May's wife died of cancer, and when his manager offered to pull him off the book, May refused, deciding if anyone could guide him out of a crippling depression, it was Rudolph.

The book was a huge success and sold two million copies -- of which May, a company man, didn't see a dime. But the story does have a happy ending. After World War II, a middle-aged May was finally given the rights to his creation by the store's new CEO. He then convinced his brother-in-law to write an original song based on his story. That song was picked up by Autry, who turned into a massive hit, and in the end, May finally had the kind of success story everyone who's ever bitched about their work should worship.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas with the In The Mix Ugly Sweater Cookie Kit.

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