The Christmas Pickle Is Just What You Need to Amp Up Your Holiday Cheer

Every family has its own unique holiday traditions. But there’s one admittedly weird custom that’s played a big role in family celebrations across the country for decades: the Christmas pickle.

While some families are incredibly familiar with the Christmas pickle tradition, plenty of others have never heard of it. Some may be vaguely familiar with the tradition, but fuzzy on the details. “My family never did it, but a friend of mine’s family did,” says Rhiannon Cizon, executive director of Michigan’s Berrien County Historical Association, which hosts the annual Berrien Springs Pickle Festival. “Sometimes families learn of it by word of mouth or it gets adopted because someone who was already doing the tradition brought it into the family. It’s a very organic tradition.”

Carl Lindhal, Ph.D., a professor of folklore at University of Houston and author of American Folktales: From the Collections of the Library of Congress, calls the Christmas pickle “a pop culture phenom” that’s “largely limited to the Northern Midwest and points East.”

But what is the Christmas pickle and where did it come from? Here’s what we know. 

What is the Christmas pickle?

The Christmas pickle, or Weihnachtsgurke, is a holiday tradition where a family member hides a pickle ornament in the Christmas tree and encourages loved ones to find it as part of a special game. The person who finds the pickle usually gets a prize. “Some people get money or a present, sometimes it's a special dessert, or they get to wear a special crown,” Cizon says. “Every family has their own twist on it.”

No matter how families do it, the Christmas pickle is usually a quick and fun scavenger hunt that everyone in the family can enjoy.

Where did the Christmas pickle come from?

That’s a big mystery. Many families that do the Christmas pickle claim that it’s a German tradition. But research has shown it’s actually not. A YouGov survey of more than 2,000 Germans found that a whopping 91% had never heard of the Christmas pickle — even though it was supposed to have originated in their country. “It is not a German tradition,” Cizon says.

Instead, historians think the Christmas pickle tradition actually started as a marketing strategy. “It most likely began in the United States in the late 19th century when ornament salesmen devised the story to sell ornaments,” says Jackie Schweitzer, Chester Read curator of history collections for the Milwaukee Public Museum. “The belief in the German origin for the tradition may be because Germany was the primary source for glass ornaments in the United States [at the time], which were distributed through FW Woolworth starting in the late 1800s.”

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Cizon calls the Christmas pickle “the greatest marketing ploy ever created.” She notes that it’s likely Woolworth carried plenty of produce-themed ornaments, and that pickles just may not have sold well. “Who wants a pickle on their tree?” she says. But calling this a “German tradition” (which would have been hard to fact-check at the time) made it more of a hot item. “It’s also smart because now you have to go and get a gift for the person who finds the pickle,” she says.

Others think the Christmas pickle may be traced to a Civil War soldier who fended off starvation by eating a pickle on Christmas Eve, Schweitzer says. But the German origin story has stuck over time. “That might help explain why the tradition is popular in the Midwest, where a lot of German immigrants settled,” says Blake Victor Kent, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Westmont College. 

How did the Christmas pickle turn into a tradition for some families?

It’s not entirely clear why some families latched onto the Christmas pickle tradition and made it their own, but there are some theories. “The Christmas pickle brings a fun game and a little excitement to Christmas morning,” Schweitzer says. “Traditions like this make us feel a connection to our family and a sense of consistency and comfort.”

Kent says that people like traditions in general. “When we're talking about traditions that persist over time, we’re really talking about rituals that serve to form and sustain our identities and act to create and maintain social bonds,” he says. Kent refers to the Christmas pickle as a “ritual chain,” which is a set of ritual behaviors that link together to create a meaningful experience.

“Christmas is full of rituals and different families, regions, and religious traditions build up rituals and ritual chains over time that coalesce to really provide that social and emotional experience so many of us enjoy,” he says.

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The Christmas pickle also taps into three traditional themes that surface around winter holidays, Lindhal says. One is the tradition of finding something hidden. “During Christmas celebrations in England something — usually a bean — would be baked into the holiday bread, and the person who found it would receive money or some other gift, or sometimes the privilege of being considered king for a day,” he says. “A document from 1314 talks about this as an ‘ancient Christmas game’ — it was very old, even 700 years ago.”

Green is also a big focus during the cold winter months. “[Pickles are] green, the color of life, which has special significance in a season when most trees are bare and the grass is brown,” Lindhal says. “The pickles, like evergreen Christmas trees, wreaths, holly, mistletoe, and ivy, are holiday fixtures that bring life into an otherwise lifeless landscape.”

Finally, the Civil War soldier story focuses on the theme of survival, which also comes up in other traditions, like eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s day. In this case, the Christmas pickle “makes the pickle a special agent in saving the life of the person who starts the tradition,” Lindhal says.

But while the Christmas pickle has been around for decades, Lindhal says it “remains to be seen” how long it will last.

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