Latest / Privycast / Ep. 187 Toilet Brush Christmas Trees

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Ep. 187 Toilet Brush Christmas Trees · Privycast

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I've watched enough videos, I've seen enough information, and I have like researched enough about in-home Christmas tree fires to hear that and just have an incredible
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skepticism about that idea.
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Welcome back to Privy.
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Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
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I'm your host, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
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Welcome back everyone.
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Thank you so much for being here.
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I hope you've recovered from your gorging on festive holiday bird.
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And now that that's over and we've survived Brown Friday, it's time.
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These halls are decked, baby.
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It's cremice.
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It doesn't fit over my large hat.
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Happy privy Christmas, everybody.
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We're back.
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It's time tis the season.
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The holidays are here.
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At the point of this record, I will admit I'm really having to like get myself hyped about the holiday season and I'm having to like watch a lot of festive holiday movies.
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the such and it's fine.
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I know that I will be in the holiday mood because by the time you listen to this episode, it'll be fully over into a week into what I believe is undoubtedly to everybody and
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unquestionably the Christmas season.
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Now I believe the Christmas season starts before Thanksgiving, but there's a lot of people
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in these beloved United States that think, you gotta wait till after Thanksgiving.
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Well, this episode's released.
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It's after Thanksgiving.
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It's December.
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My holiday hat is on and it's privy Christmas.
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So, Hap, Hap, Happy Christmas to you.
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There's a lot to get excited about during Privy Christmas.
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We've had a lot going on in these parts.
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Pusle and Christmas Golems, psychedelic reindeer urine, Catalonian Christmas, the Christmas carp, Tio de Nadal, that Christmas pooping log, and other Christmas poop and
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bathroom related things to get your holiday cheer fired up just right.
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But that was then.
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This year, we're shifting from looking at a lot of the lore behind these things to looking at some technology.
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And so to kick off privy Christmas, we dive in and swirl our thing around.
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You know what saying?
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get into today's topic, we have to begin by looking at the history of the use of Christmas trees.
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Now, there's some argument about Christmas trees and when their original use started.
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Some argue that their original use was by the Egyptians or by the Romans or by the Vikings or by the Celts.
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And you see really here the problem is, is because
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Just because somebody decorates a tree doesn't mean it's a Christmas tree.
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And so all of that, like, Christmas trees originated with is stupid because it wasn't a Christmas tree, you see.
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A Christmas tree is only a Christmas tree if it is decked and donned in order to celebrate the Christmas season.
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Obviously it's in the name.
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It's also stupid because that's like saying, how far back did we decorate trees in order to celebrate and recognize stuff?
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Like, yes, Christians and early Europeans were not like the first to say, hey, we should hang something from that tree in honor of something else.
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No, there's no new ideas.
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I'm not pretending like we originated decorating a tree.
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That's like saying,
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The ancient whatever's decorated small rocks and so that's why we paint eggs at Easter.
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Like, it.
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Maybe.
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But they're not Easter rocks because they're just painting rocks.
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Heck, I bet there's some cultures that painted eggs before we painted Easter eggs.
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But does that make those cultures that they're doing Easter eggs to?
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No, because they weren't doing Easter, you see.
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There's a variety of tree decoration customs.
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After the birth of Jesus Christ, Christians often adapted customs that were found in their area or that they adapted and changed significantly to fit their need to help them
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celebrate key aspects of their faith.
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There are a variety of these customs, but one of them is the decorating and adorning.
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Christmas trees.
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And I want to tell you right now that this originates in solstice as a stretch.
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Solstice was often credited with using evergreen boughs to decorate and symbolize the coming seasons that would be green and fruitful and how these evergreens survived the
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winter season, the solstice if you will.
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They are the symbol of everlasting life for Celtic cultures.
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As we're going to see,
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Christmas trees being a symbol of everlasting life, not the best move.
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And this idea that it kicked off with solstice does little to say let's drag this tree that we chopped down in that thern forest into our living spaces where our dog and our cat
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and our rug and our coffee table and our kitchen table and our food and our children everybody's at.
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And let's attach things to that tree now dead placed in our front room.
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It's an odd tradition for sure.
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But I want to note, at the time of this episode's release, our tree's been up a minute.
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And at the time of this episode's record, it's been up a minute.
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And at the time of this episode's writing, the tree had been up a minute.
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Our tree went up on Veterans Day this year.
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And while I'm on the topic, thank you for your service.
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Christmas trees originate back to Germany, where Christians and others seeking to celebrate the winter season would decorate evergreen trees with apples, wafers, and other
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festive holiday sweets.
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One of the very earliest written records of the Christmas tree comes from Riga, Latvia, where the merchants of the area
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decorated a tree with roses and danced around it.
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Does that ring around the rosy?
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I don't think so.
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I think that was about dying or something like that.
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I don't know.
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It's hard to remember these things.
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You know, like I only have so much room in my brain and an absurd amount of it is occupied by senseless Pokemon facts that I probably don't need, but I can't seem to get rid of.
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I am programmed.
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But one of the earliest written records about the Christmas tree comes from Regalatvia.
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where merchants of the area would decorate tree with roses and danced around it.
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And this ended and the celebration culminated with them lighting the tree on fire.
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The brooding of a thing will be a common concern throughout our Christmas tree conversations today.
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If trees were scarce in the region, they would build pyramids of wood and stack things on them to decorate the stack, if you will.
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You know, every time I take a dump, I decorate the stack.
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You know what saying?
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You get that toilet paper up on top there.
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I'm decorating the stack.
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Drop the stack, decorate the stack.
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You got to decorate the stack.
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Some people state that families in Germany and modern day Latvia at this time brought these
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trees and these stacks and these things that they had begun to decorate indoors to try and celebrate when the weather got bad.
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Others cite Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation as the one who is credited for bringing evergreens indoors where he would, quote, hang candles in the branches on
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Christmas Eve.
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This is written about in Luther's writings, Lutheran writings in the time.
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They as a denomination and the German roots that they have really popularized this practice.
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And I gotta say, I've watched enough videos, I've seen enough information, and I have like researched enough about in-home Christmas tree fires to hear that and just have an
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incredible skepticism about that idea.
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This is apparently from his seeing the stars.
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So the idea here is that Martin Luther
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would go out on these like wintery German walks and he would look out and he would see the stars through the evergreen trees and he thought, you know, it'd be cool if I wasn't cold
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and in the snow and I could chop that tree down and take it back to where I live and put it inside my home and attach fire to it to emulate the look of the stars shining over the
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course of German history with these trees.
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It seems maybe they put two and two together.
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And they realized that like hanging live active fire from the increasingly what is, what is growing increasingly more and more crispy by the day tree.
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And dry wood was a bad idea.
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And they began to decorate it with less flammable things, like apples.
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So good.
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You know what's weird?
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Apples already grown a tree, but they took them off that tree and stuck them on a pine tree.
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Kind of weird.
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Kind weird if you think about it.
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Kind of weird.
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It's believed these apples were left over from the miracle plays that were performed around this time of year to remind
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those watching and those participating of key Bible stories.
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The apples playing a prominent role in the Garden of Eden scene and following narrative.
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Eve eats the apple, gives them to Adam.
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It's interesting that they became the ornaments of these trees.
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Over time, ornaments developed and were more and more centered on food or were food related.
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I remember when I was a kid, my grandma Joan had these like weird Christmas tree ornaments that I always thought they were cookies.
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And I remember one time like, like, and I don't know what possessed me because God knows that generations of us cousins had handled these strange ornaments.
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But I remember one time I licked it, like I pulled it out of the Christmas box and I'm like, hmm.
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I just gave it a lick and it was so salty, but they looked like little cookies, like little homemade cookie ornaments, like salt cookie ornaments.
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I don't know, but I remember my grandma Joan had these and we would always hang them on her Christmas tree.
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And as more and more people back in the Germans history began to observe the Christmas season by decking their halls,
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with fresh chopped pine, the people in the area ran into a number of snags.
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One large snag is people back then would just go out into the German, European, and later on American wilderness, select a tree and chop it down and haul it back on the top of
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their carriage or, you know, station wagon.
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This is what our forefathers did.
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They went out into the great American wilderness and chopped down a tree.
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No rules, no oversight, no question about where the tree came from or how many trees come from that area.
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Are you going to plan a new tree to replace the one that you chopped down?
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They went out and they started hacking it.
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That custom of going out and chopping down your own Christmas tree caught on in a big way.
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So much so that there were questions around deforestation in parts of Germany and other parts of the world due to the practice.
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Another concern, and I know I've mentioned it already on this episode, but like it stands that it should get mentioned again, is the flipping house fires due to, interestingly,
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The idea of hanging open fire on a dry crusty tree.
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I cannot stress how stupid of an idea I think that is.
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Like even today, modern, like putting up a Christmas tree that is like a live quote unquote live tree, there's no such thing as a live tree.
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All trees are dead as soon as you cut them down.
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They're just in various stages of realizing and evidencing that they are dead to you, the homeowner who has put them in their home.
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I digress.
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But Christmas tree fires were so prominent from formerly live trees that an article in Minneapolis in the Minneapolis Times in 1899 pleaded for someone, quote, anyone to make a
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fireproof tree for indoor use and make artificial indoor trees fireproof.
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They did.
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The early forms of artificial trees were likely goose feather trees used in parts of Germany in the eighties.
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These would have had goose feathers dyed green in a range to look like a small tree.
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They would use metal rods with the bird feathers poked out of them to get this tree or tree adjacent look.
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The problem, as we noted, had extended outside of Europe.
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this time.
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The problem of Christmas trees and Christmas tree fires.
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Turns out house fires and deforestation are not a localized issue.
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Good to know.
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Thank you, internet.
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Again, it became such an issue that newspapers in the United States writing about these fires wrote that the time was right for someone to invent a flame retardant tree.
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Will we stop strapping
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flaming candles to the tree.
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Heck no.
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Will we quit putting these dry, crispy jokers in our living rooms along with all of our personal belongings?
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Absolutely not.
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Will we give up the act of strapping fire to that crispy tree in the middle of our living spaces?
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No way.
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So how will we proceed?
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Well, it turns out
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An American inventor by the name of August Wengenroth out of Troy, New York had been hard at work on an artificial Christmas tree.
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His patent granted in April 4th, 1882 was one of many of a variety of patents being put together throughout the world at this time.
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And in short, in the words of art from Christmas vacation, it was an ugly tree anyway.
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The thing was a certified Charlie Brown mess.
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And while most of these early forms of fake tree were some sort of wood or wire contraption to hold a number of branches in place and have them generally hang outward,
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It is in the branches that they had some level of creativity.
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These Christmas fakes became more and more popular.
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They took on a variety of material styles in construction.
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And one of these tree styles became known as a brush tree.
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This was sort of an ambiguous thing as it sort of referred to multiple different items and ideas throughout history.
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There's two types of what is commonly called a brush tree.
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One is called a bottle brush tree.
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And these are those weird, like short little Christmas trees that are like, like they got the circle base and then the stick and then it's got the like very wiry bristly like cone
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that is the tree.
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You've seen these, like, and if you grab it, it makes like autistic kids have full sensory overload.
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Or like when you go to your grandma's house and she has these weird little trees and you like back up to them and they get all like snagged in your shirt to where you like have a
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Christmas tree attached to your butt when you walk away.
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Right?
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Everybody knows that phenomenon.
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It's a common thing.
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I'm sure that didn't.
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That's not what we're talking about when we talk about toilet brush trees.
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There was a company.
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founded out of England called the Addis Brush Company, who is allegedly credited with the patent question mark for a toilet brush tree.
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The Addis Brush Company or Addis Housewares as it is known today was founded by William Addis in 1780.
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He was a rag merchant and produced the first modern toothbrush and eventually
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went into making high quality English brushes.
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The company passed hands back and forth from one son to the next over the course of the next hundred years.
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Then in 1920, the Addis family moved to Hertford, took over a factory there, and in 20 years they came to invest in modern technology and worked in plastic molding and
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manufacturing.
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Just in time for the World War, that would happen.
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One of the things they brought with this new technology and the brushwork they have done in the past was the invention of what became known as the toilet brush Christmas tree.
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This thing was obviously an iteration from the goose feather and wire tree days, but there's a bit of time before the Christmas tree toilet breast situation.
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When they made those technological switches, it was around the time of World War I and World War II, and they began to adapt
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some shapes and things of their brushes to what was needed.
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One of these were the need for longer wire brushes that would fit into the barrel of a gun for cleaning during the war.
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So then when and why did this brush company turned houseware company turned manufacturing company turned war item cleaning company
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all of a sudden decide, you know what?
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We're going to get into the Christmas tree game.
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The Addis company purchased a smaller English company that made Christmas trees in the 1970s under the assumption that they would be able to use a lot of their systems and
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manufacturing to make these trees cheaper and more efficiently.
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Turns out the company made their trees out of tinsel and the process didn't have a direct connection into being implemented into their brush technology and manufacturing.
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The tinsel tree business never really took off.
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and it still hasn't.
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And they never technically produced a Christmas tree under the Addis Brush Company.
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These toilet brush Christmas trees were in fact probably a thing they made.
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They're pictured of them, associated with Addis, but it wasn't a regular product.
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It's very skeptical that they sold this thing for profit.
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But when you look at one of these trees, if you walk down the aisle at Costco or if you look at any artificial tree, you will recognize that this toilet bowl brush was a stepping
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stone in Christmas tree technology.
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This is not the pine cone structure of some of the brushes.
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We are talking like a wire brush that in any other context would be a straight line and they have bent it into a U shape at the end.
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Now imagine if you took that off the end of the stick, straightened it out,
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and painted it green and attached a bunch of them to a center point and you would have a Christmas tree in the making.
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In fact, you would have the exact Christmas tree my grandparents had when we set up their stuff as grandkids every year.
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But where the Addis Brush Company and Addis Housewares as it's known today walked, a different American company ran.
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Addis Brush Company was failing in the 1950s.
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They'd begun producing
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those small bottle brush trees, but they were for sure a fad.
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They then pivoted to green polyvinyl for their trees, but the look was less than desired, which is a nice way of saying no one wanted it.
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They wanted that wire toilet brush look in their Christmas tree.
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And after a few failed products, they sent a machinist to close the factory, a man named C.
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Spiegel.
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The American Brush Company of which C.
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Spiegel worked for, when he showed up, he looked around and said, you know what, we're not closing her down.
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He argued for keeping the Christmas tree operation up and running, but he wanted to improve it.
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He improved the appearance of the toilet brush tree and made the machinery run faster through minor tweaks in the system.
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Management appreciated his work and his division of the company became called the American Tree and Wreath Company.
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Spiegel's American Tree and Wreath.
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In time, Spiegel's trees were producing 800,000 trees per year, which is about one in every four minutes.
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So while Addis introduced a lot of these processes,
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The American Brush Machineries division, the American Tree and Wreath Company, perfected and began to produce these
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And so we're left with the age old debate of real or fake.
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Personally here at privy, the idea that the toilet brush, the humble scrubby wand is a predecessor to the Christmas fake really sways our vote.
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for the fake tree this season.
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In fact, it was such a thing that now when you see a tree in this name, in this style, it is referred to as a toilet brush tree.
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Now the real question that I've seen a lot of either AI or very artsy fartsy folks on the internet, can you recycle and repurpose a Christmas tree into a toilet brush?
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It's a question that we were all wondering, go full circle.
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But to kick off this privy Christmas,
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We close this discussion of the toilet brush tree and all the Christmas fakes that we enjoy as a result of the work of the Addis Housewares and Spiegel's American Tree and
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Wreath Company.
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Thank you.
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And thank you listener for being here.
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Thanks for listening.
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Merry Christmas.
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As always, we would welcome you to leave us a rating review.
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Five star options are preferred.
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It'd be a great gift to receive from you this season.
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As a thank you, we'll give back to the Wounded Warriors and Living Water International as a reminder to keep pooping in the free world.
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This free world was not always free and in pursuit of cleaner water for all, not everybody has it, but everybody should.
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Check out the website privy-cast.com.
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Send us an email privycast.gmail.com.
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Follow the show on social media at privycast.
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You can follow me.
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I'm at owl at seven.
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We want to thank Kevin and Pottington for the use of their music.
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You can find it in the ding dong below.
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This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
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Keep pooping in the free world.
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Own your stank, wipe your dingle balls.
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And now, as always, don't forget to flush.
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I'm hoping that if I keep telling people to flush, I'll end up on the nice list.