Every reindeer on this branch is female. Reindeer are the only deer in the world in which the females grow antlers too — and the timing is the giveaway. Bulls shed theirs in late autumn,...

One woman wrote letters for thirty-six years to make this a holiday. Sarah Josepha Hale edited the most widely read magazine in America and used it, year after year, to argue that the country ought...

Before the pumpkin, it was a turnip. The jack-o'-lantern came over from Ireland, where the story goes that a man named Stingy Jack got himself barred from both heaven and hell and was sent off...

New Year's Day has not always been in January. For most of English history the year turned on the 25th of March — Lady Day, the old quarter day, near enough the spring equinox. That...

John Adams thought we'd be celebrating the second. The Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2nd, 1776. Adams sat down that evening and wrote to Abigail that the second of July would be the...

The yellow was there the whole time. A green leaf is full of color you cannot see. The carotenoids that make it gold and orange are present all summer, doing their work quietly underneath, hidden...

He is a shoemaker, and that is how you catch him. Most people picture the leprechaun as a small man with a pot of gold. In the old stories he is something more particular: a...

He carries two kinds of arrow, and only one of them is the good one. Ovid worked this out two thousand years ago. Cupid's quiver holds arrows tipped in gold, which kindle love, and arrows...

The basket started out as a nest. The Easter rabbit came over with German settlers in the 1700s and put down roots in Pennsylvania. In the old country he was the Osterhase — a hare,...