We had one of the homemade felt trees with the snap ornaments that my mom made back in the late sixties / early seventies. My youngest sister still has it.
I’m not sure if it’s so much of a Catholic thing or a Germanic (and surrounding countries) thing. There was always one at my paternal grandparents’ and they were Lutheran / deist but PA Dutch / Polish. The RC (mostly Irish) side of the family wasn’t really into them.
Similarly, my father’s side (Czech Catholics) didn’t have them, but we got a cardboard one every year from my maternal grandmother (German/French descent, married to a United Church of Christ minister of Swiss/German stock).
It’s not the size of the chocolate. It’s that it’s undermining the message we preach all year that chocolate is a sometimes food by making it an everyday food for almost an entire month.
I’m of Swiss-German descent, but I don’t know of anyone in my father’s family out in California who followed that tradition. But we were never out there for the holidays, and since my grandfather had moved out to LA when it was still a small town a century ago, he could have left the tradition behind back in New York, where the family lived literally for centuries.
Not as a child. I totally get one now, with chocolates. What can I say. It’s nice to have a chocolate a day.
Could be. My wife’s family is not anywhere close to being Catholic, but has some Swiss ancestry, and some Mennonite ancestry, and her parents grew up near Gettysburg. I never remember seeing any when growing up in NY, but I tried to avoid the stores around Christmas time.