As a plant lover, one of my favorite parts of the Christmas holiday season is poinsettias. Their bright colors and soft, broad leaves are such a happy, welcome sight in a season where the only things that are still green are spiky and prickly evergreens. You will only find these plants as indoor decorations, however, because poinsettias cannot handle cold weather. So how did a tropical plant come to be a symbol of a winter holiday?
Poinsettias are native to southern Mexico and Guatemala, where they are a perennial shrub that can grow 10 to 15 feet tall. They were cultivated by the Aztecs, who called them cuetlaxochitl (pronounced “kwet-la-sho-she”), which means “mortal flower that perishes and withers like all that is pure.” When the Spanish Catholic missionaries came, they were struck by this flower that naturally bloomed during the Christmas season. The arrangement of the red leaves around the small flowers also reminded them of the Star of Bethlehem. They began decorating their churches with them. The flower became known as la flor de Nochebuena, which means “the Flower of the Holy Night.”
La flor de Nochebuena was brought to the United States in the early 1800s. U. S. ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett, discovered the flower while visiting the town of Taxco. He sent a cutting of the plant back to his greenhouse in South Carolina before he was expelled from the country for interfering in Mexican politics. He propagated the plant and shared it with other growers, calling it the Mexican Fire Plant. As the plant grew in popularity, it was renamed poinsettia in Joel’s honor, and December 12th, the day of his death, became known as Poinsettia Day.
While Spanish missionaries associated the plant with Christmas, and Joel Robert Poinsett gave it its name, it is father and son, Albert and Paul Ecke, who we can thank for the poinsettia’s current widespread availability and popularity. They developed a method for growing poinsettias in pots with a shorter, more-branched growth pattern and began raising them on a commercial scale in the tens of thousands. Before this development, they were sold as cut flowers, which limited their longevity and availability.
The Ecke’s pushed the association of poinsettias with Christmas by sending the flowers to Bob Hope’s The Tonight Show for a Christmas special and other TV studios. Today, over 70 million poinsettias are sold each year, making it one of the most popular potted plants and an enduring symbol of the holiday season.
Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, or to stump your in-laws.
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