Grampa's Christmas Origins is a series of short comic stories which appear in The Simpsons Winter Wingding. The first stories appeared in the sixth issue of the series. The stories are written by Eric Rogers, with one of them (Christmas Trees) being co-written by Max Davison.
In the stories, Abraham Simpson tells his version of how various Christmas customs came to be, often interweaving his accounts with historical events or works of classic literature.
Stories
| Picture
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Subtitle
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Issue
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Synopsis
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Christmas Cards
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6
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Grampa tells how Christmas cards originated in Victorian England by a greedy industrialist who discovered the money-making potential of greeting cards, and then created a greeting card empire by exploiting street urchins for their cheap labor.
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Christmas Carols
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6
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According to Grampa, Christmas carols were first sung during the Black Death when a group of spoken word wassailers decided to set their poems to music and discovered it attracted rats. The authorities were thus able to round up the rats and end the plague.
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Christmas Cookies
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6
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In Grampa's story, the custom of leaving cookies and milk out for Santa began in an orphanage. One boy's candy cane flambé snack set Santa's mouth on fire, but other boys came to Santa's rescue with milk and cookies.
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Christmas Lights
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7
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Grampa's take on Christmas lights has the custom being started inadvertently in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, by two stranded Rigellians trying to create a beacon so they could be picked up and taken home.
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Christmas Eggnog
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7
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According to Grampa, eggnog comes from the eggs of an animal called the noggy. When Santa discovered that the eggs gave him super powers, he began drinking them every year so he would have the energy to make his deliveries.
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Christmas Trees
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7
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Grampa tells how Marco Polo brought back a bunch of fireworks from China as Christmas presents for his friends. The fireworks were accidentally all set off at once, lighting up the tree under which Polo had buried them, and the custom of people lighting up trees during Christmas was born.
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