Category: Historical Tidbits

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The Dragon Hunt

Dragon from San Francisco New Year parade, 2020. Kajmeister photo.

A few weeks back, while still wrapped in the blanket of dinosaur research, I started thinking about serpent gods, flying monsters, and dragons. I wondered how scholars had addressed this question, but when a few glances at research led to papers on children’s stories and the ancestral memory of tree shrews, I gave up quickly. It was Christmas; I had presents to wrap and muffins to bake. Those few who discussed the possible origins of dragons appeared limited to art museums, mythology experts, or psychologists, rather than historians or paleontologists.

But last Thursday was of all things, Appreciate a Dragon day, according to Sandra Boynton. And we are finishing the Year of the Dragon, after all, with January 29th ending this most auspicious year and moving on to a different animal in the Chinese calendar, Year of the Snake.

Perfect timing to take another dive into the topic.

It seemed a simple question. After all, dinosaurs once covered the earth, which, at the beginning of the Triassic, was a single land called Pangaea. The continents split up after the dinosaurs proliferated, so dinosaur fossils now cover the globe, with similar species now found flung far apart in Argentina, the Rockies, and the Gobi Desert. Dragon stories also span the globe. It seems a question with a fairly obvious answer: Were human ideas and stories about dragons influenced by dinosaurs, by fossils found by ancient, primitive paleontologists?

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Under Wraps

Late Victorian era, photo from hhhistory.com.

Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things…

The extra-hard crossword puzzle contest this week courtesy of the WSJ is “Under Wraps,” so while I was pondering its solution, I started thinking about wrapping paper. I discovered, as I poked around sites which did addressed this topic (sponsored by Hallmark etc), that many had bits and pieces but none seemed to thread them together. You need the Victorians, you need the Flexography press, the toilet paper, the papyrus reeds, the red symbology of China, and the Roman army. Nobody mentioned them all. So let me rectify that gap.

I set out to answer two specific questions. First, when did we–Americans if you want to be specific–start decorating holiday gifts with colored wrapping paper and ribbons? And, secondly, how did cultures over time convey their gifts? Who started wrapping, when and how?

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The Mother of Thanksgiving

Author’s Note: This post is a few years old, but I can’t improve on the “true story” of Thanksgiving. Other than to say she apparently lobbied for pumpkin pie, but that’s another story.

Sarah Josepha Hale, engraving from Library of Congress

Mary had a turkey browned
From three hours in the oven
Her guests were drooling all the while
For gravy and the stuffin’

Hale’s famous poem, variation by kajmeister

Perhaps Americans would still have invented Thanksgiving without Sarah Josepha Hale. After all, proclamations of Thanksgiving had been declared by the Continental Congresses by Samuel Adams and John Hanson and the like:

It being the indispensable duty of all nations, not only to offer up their supplications to Almighty God, the giver of all good, for His gracious assistance in a time of distress, but also in a solemn and public manner, to give Him praise for His goodness in general, and especially for great and signal interpositions of His Providence in their behalf; therefore, the United States in Congress assembled, taking into their consideration the many instances of Divine goodness to these States in the course of the important conflict, in which they have been so long engaged and so on and so forth etcetera etcetera etcetera…

November 1782, text for the Thanksgiving or National Prayer Day observation (Wikipedia)

That seems a rather dry plateful of harvest to start with, taking some 250 words until it even gets to the Thanksgiving part of the equation. Why, there’s hardly any gravy at all, although there does seem to be quite a bit of lard in it, so maybe the pies were flaky.

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