 |
 |
|
 |
||
|
||
      | 888.365.0056 | Check Order Status |
|
||
 |
||
 Hampton's Picnic Set, from $18 |
• There are many rumors as to the origin of the word "picnic," but the word actually comes from the French word "pique-nique" - "pique" is based on the verb "piquer," which is also the origin of the verb "to pick" in English, and the rhyming "nique" was an archaic word for a "trifle." The term originated to describe a party where everyone brought along food, and began to signify a sort of outdoor meal in the 1800s. • Both Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were understudies in the William Inge play Picnic in 1960. They met, fell in love and soon got married. Both went on to film stardom, and the pair have collaborated on many projects, too. To this day they are regarded as one of Hollywood's happiest couples. • Michigan was the first state in the USA to have road-side picnic tables. An engineer named Allan Williams built one alongside U.S. 16 in Ionia County in 1929, and the idea was soon adapted by the State Highway Department. It has since been emulated by other states, and is considered an emblem of Michigan's hospitality. |
|
• The first lithographed American lunchbox appeared in 1902. It was shaped like a picnic basket and had an image of playing children painted on it. • In Hancock, New Hampshire in 1879, a family picnic was held by the Symonds family, and it gradually spread to involve the whole town, and then anyone who had ever lived there. The day become known as Old Home Day, and within twenty years, New Hampshire governor Frank Rollins had made the third week in August a state holiday known as Old Home Week. It is still celebrated today, with picnics and parades throughout New Hampshire. |
||
|
||
|
||
| • The Earth Day that is celebrated on April 22nd was started by US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who organized an environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. That political event gathered grassroots support, and out of its momentum, it eventually evolved into Earth Day. • However, a small group celebrates Earth Day on March 21st, the Spring Equinox, after a declaration by a man named John McConnell, who first used the term "Earth Day." The event he organized was also in 1970, and was proclaimed by the San Francisco city government (Saint Francis, for whom the city is named, is coincidentally the patron saint of ecology). Both Margaret Mead and former UN Secretary General U Thant have supported this day as Earth Day, and the UN rings bells every March 21st to commemorate the holiday. • A male duck is known as a drake. A female duck, however, is just known as a duck. • Ducks don't get cold feet. Or, if they do, they don't notice, because their feet have no nerves. |
||
|
||
|
||
• The largest flower in the world is the Rafflesia arnoldii. This rare flower is found only in the rainforests of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It can grow to be three feet across and weigh up to fifteen pounds! • The Rolling Stones titled their 1967 collection of recent singles and b-sides Flowers. The cover featured five flowers, with each of the Stones' heads replacing the five blossoms. The record included such hits as "Mother's Little Helper," "Let's Spend the Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday." • The origins of the design known as the "fleur de lis" (literally, "lily flower," in French) has been debated for centuries. It may even date back as far as Mesopotamian civilization. The design was extremely popular in medieval times, and was featured on the French coat of arms as early as the 12th century. |
||
|
||
|
||
|
•
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902) A suffragist and reformer, Stanton noticed from her earliest years that women were not treated equally with men. In 1848, she and others convened the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, bringing 300 individuals together, including Frederick Douglass. Stanton determined that the right to vote was the key to women's equality. Throughout her life, she wrote and argued brilliantly for women's equality through the right to vote, and formed a powerful partnership with Susan B. Anthony. • Ella Baker (1903 - 1986) Baker was one of the most admired and effective grass roots organizers in the history of social movements. Working behind the scenes to organize Blacks in the South in the early 1900s, she laid the foundation for the explosion of the Civil Rights Movement in the fifties and sixties. When those years arrived, she co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and also helped establish the movement's foremost student organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. |
|
|
• Katharine Graham (1917 - 2001) As publisher and then Board Chair and CEO of the Washington Post, Mrs. Graham became one of the most influential women in the country. Her courageous decisions to publish the Pentagon Papers and to proceed with the Watergate investigation earned her a reputation as a daring and thorough journalist, willing to take risks in order to give the American people full access to important information. • Althea Gibson (1927 - 2003) Gibson was a pioneer, both as an African-American athlete, and as a person. In 1957 she became the first African-American tennis player to win at Wimbledon and Forest Hills, and she soon became an accomplished professional golfer as well. Her influence as a role model for aspiring athletes has been profound. • Susan B. Anthony (1820 - 1906) Anthony was the women's movement's most powerful organizer whose lifetime of dedication, and work with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, paved the way for women's right to vote. Her words "Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less," expressed their ongoing struggle for equality. |
||
|
||
|
||
 Love Tokens, $15 |
• King Edward VIII of Britain abdicated the throne in 1936 less than a year after he became king, so that he could marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, with whom he had been having a relationship. After substantial public and governmental debate throughout 1936 about a king marrying a divorced woman, Edward decided to avert a constitutional crisis and give up the throne for Wallis. Recent evidence indicates that at the time, Wallis was also having an affair with at least two other men besides the king. The pair did, however, remain married until his death in 1972. • James Buchanan is the only president in the history of the United States who did not marry. As a result, historians have speculated that he may have had a few homosexual relationships in his lifetime, and a few have linked him with his vice president, John C. Breckinridge. |
|
• Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas knew each other so intimately that Stein actually wrote Toklas's "autobiography." One of the most prominent lesbian couples in history, they lived together for thirty years, often playing host to some of the day's leading literary and artistic figures, such as Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. • Although they never had children together (he helped raise the children from her first marriage), George and Martha Washington were an extremely devoted pair. During the Revolutionary War, the two often went months at a time without seeing each other, but he famously carried a locket with her picture in it wherever he traveled with the Continental Army. |
||
|
||
|
||
 Pink Heart Vase, $28 |
• Valentine's Day originates from both Christian and Roman traditions. The Catholic Church recognizes three different saints named Valentine, including one who, legend has it, sent a letter to a woman that was signed, "From your Valentine." • In the Middle Ages, one Valentine's Day custom was for young men and women to draw names from a bowl to see who their valentines would be. They would then wear these names on their sleeves for one week. "To wear your heart on your sleeve" now means that it is easy for other people to know how you are feeling. |
|
• Alexander Graham Bell applied for his patent on the telephone, an "Improvement in Telegraphy", on Valentine's Day, 1876. • Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America. • The Italian city of Verona, where Shakespeare's lovers Romeo and Juliet lived, receives about 1,000 letters addressed to Juliet every Valentine's Day. |
||
|
||
|
||
|
• The polar bear is the only bear that has hair on the soles of its feet. This protects the animal's feet from the cold and prevents slipping on the ice. • In Siberia, it can get so cold that the moisture in a person's breath freezes instead of forming vapor. It can actually be heard when it falls to earth as ice crystals. • Outer space can get extremely cold, as low as 3 Kelvin, or -453 Fahrenheit, but mankind has actually created even colder temperatures in laboratories on Earth. Theoretically, the coldest possible temperature is 0 Kelvin, or -459 F, known as absolute zero, but this can never be achieved in reality, due to the laws of thermodynamics. • Hell, Michigan, was in the news during the extremely cold winter of 1995-1996, when it froze over. |
||
|
||
|
||
|
• In a famous syndicated New Year's Day column, newspaperman Westbrook Pegler repeated the same sentence 50 times. It was, "I will never mix gin, beer, and whiskey again." Pegler won the Pulitzer prize in 1941. • The tradition of the New Year's Resolutions goes all the way back to 153 B.C. Janus, the mythical king of early Rome, was placed at the head of the calendar (hence the name of our first month), and with two faces, Janus could look back on past events and forward to the future, so he became the ancient symbol for resolutions. • A song called "New Year's Resolution" was recorded by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, known as the King and Queen of Soul, respectively. In the role of a passionate but tumultuous couple, the legendary singers make promises to "love each other week after week," and "try harder not to hurt each other." (They were never romantically attached in real life, though they enjoyed an uncanny synergy when they sang with each other.) The track was included on their "King & Queen" duet album in 1967. |
|
|
|
||
|
||
 Flake Ornaments |
• The original Santa Claus, St. Nicholas, was born in Turkey in the 4th century. He was known to be generous and fond of children, and was captured, imprisoned and tortured by the Romans before being set free by the Roman emperor Constantine. Our present image of a jolly man in a red suit was largely created by Clement C. Moore in his 1822 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which we now usually call "'Twas the Night Before Christmas." • The modern Christmas tree is believed to have originated in Germany during the Middle Ages. The tradition most likely came to the United States either with Hessian troops during the American Revolution or with German immigrants to Pennsylvania and Ohio in the years soon after. By the 1920s, nearly every home celebrating Christmas had a tree. • The world's largest menorah is on display at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City each year during Chanukah. It weighs 4000 pounds and stands 32 feet high. |
|
• Before settling on the name of Tiny Tim for his character in "A Christmas Carol," three other alliterative names were considered by Charles Dickens. They were Little Larry, Puny Pete, and Small Sam. • Long before it was used as a "kiss encourager" during the Christmas season, mistletoe had long been considered to have magic powers by Celtic and Teutonic peoples. It was said to have the ability to heal wounds and increase fertility. Celts hung mistletoe in their homes in order to bring themselves good luck and ward off evil spirits. |
||
| More Uncommon Knowledge: 1 2 3 4 5 6 | ||
 |
0 items 0 recipients subtotal: $0.00 |
 |
||
 |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
||
|
||
| Shipping Options | ||
| Request a Catalog | ||
| About Us | ||
| Our Uncommon Mission | ||
| Careers | ||
 |
Follow us on |
|
 |
Follow us on |
|
 |
Subscribe to This Just In |
|
|
|
| Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions Affiliate Program Site Map Customer Reviews Online Catalog Contact Preferences | Order By Phone: 888.365.0056 |
| ©2000 UncommonGoods™ L.L.C. 140 58th Street Building B Suite 5A Brooklyn NY 11220 |
8 AM to 1 AM EST Mon-Fri 9 AM to midnight EST Sat-Sun |