If you celebrate Christmas—either for the sake of Jesus or just seasonal tradition—and you're lucky enough to receive a bounty of gifts from friends and family, it's time to make the yearly decision of when exactly you'll open presents.

While many Christmas traditions (the trees, ornaments, Santa) are essentially the same, at least in the United States, every family seems to have their own rituals or traditions about when to open their gifts.  

Some people wait until Christmas Day to distribute and open presents, while others are used to opening their gifts on Christmas Eve (a common German tradition). Still others split up the presents, opening a few on Christmas Eve, and the rest on Christmas Day, or even New Year's Eve. Some people exchange gifts on a separate day entirely.

To find out more about the how people celebrate the Christmas holidays, we asked our readers to let us know about their own unwrapping practices. Almost 500 people filled out our survey, and let us know how things traditionally go down during their Christmas. Here are the results.

Over half of the respondents said they open their gifts on Christmas Day. The rest said they either spread the presents between both days, or open their gifts on Christmas Eve. Just four percent of people opened them on some other day.

Some users also shared stories and feelings about their Christmas traditions, the best of which we've shared below. Check them out to see how similar your Christmas rituals are, and no matter how you spend the season, happy holidays!

From Those Who Open Their Gifts on Christmas Day

"My grandmother would give each grandchild a Hallmark keepsake ornament, which was opened on Christmas Eve. All other presents were opened Christmas morning."

"As an only child of divorced parents, my Christmas was always split in two, which was certainly not a bad thing! Christmas Eve I'm always with my mother. We attend an evening church service and make a special Christmas meal for just the two of us. We exchange gifts early Christmas morning. Around noon, my father comes to pick me up, and by the time I get to his house my step siblings are awake (hopefully). My step mother makes appetizers and snacks for the whole day, and we open gifts in the afternoon. We then have a Christmas dinner all together."

"We leave one present for each person under the tree until New Years when the tree is taken down. This keeps the tree from looking bare and motivates family members to help me take down the tree."

"My sister and I thought that the kids next door who opened presents on Christmas Eve were deviants with poor impulse control. Didn't know opening on Christmas Eve was a done thing until I was an adult."

"My dad's side of the family often light a candle at (Catholic) church on Christmas Eve; also we would drive around and look at Christmas lights in rich neighborhoods."

"All of us kids would take turns creeping down the stairs to investigate our stockings. If caught, you were responsible for Christmas Coffee and Cinnamon Buns."

"My dad's family had a tradition in which the first person on Christmas Eve to call out, 'Christmas Eve Gift!' would get to open one present that day. The rest of the presents waited until the holiday, itself."

"Sometimes we just say 'screw it' and open our gifts at different times because Christmas kinda lasts 12 days anyway and life is too short."

"My family has Swedish, Italian, and Scottish traditions. St. Lucia comes on the longest night of the year (Swedish), but because we are Italian, we call her Santa Lu-chee-ya. We sing, party together, eat Swedish food.

Advent celebrations, with weekly readings of bible verses and hymns along with lighting the advent wreath is a tradition. Young kids believe in Santa, but he only brings three gifts, since Jesus only got three gifts."

"Stockings before breakfast, then presents slowly throughout the day - we watch each person open each present. We save one 'last present' for each person under the tree to open right before bed on Christmas Day as the way to close out the holiday." 

"When we were little, my mom would leave our stockings at the foot of our bed, so that when we woke up on Christmas morning we'd have something with which to amuse ourselves until a more decent hour. A book, a video game, some cards...it was genius, I now realize."

"Even atheists like presents."

From Those Who Open Their Gifts on Christmas Eve

"It's quite common in Germany to open gifts on Dec 24th instead of 25th."

"We save our stockings and Santa gifts for Christmas Day, everything else is opened on Christmas Eve."

"My daughter, son-in-law and I still do Santa gifts. We open everything except those marked 'From Santa.' Those are left for Christmas morning."

"On Christmas Eve evening, Father Xmas visits every home personally to give the presents :)"

From Those Who Open Their Gifts on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve

"My Irish Catholic grandfather and Southern Baptist grandmother would serve lasagna at Christmas. (I'm not sure how this got started—no Italians anywhere in my family tree.) They made spaghetti one year when I was little and just starting to feed myself, and we had spaghetti on Christmas Eve for the next 15 years."

"We started opening present early when I was a kid because the parents split Christmas, so we would spend the week before Christmas with one, switch on Christmas day, and then the rest of break with the other. Have kept early presents because hey, presents."

"We open one gift on Christmas Eve. For one gift of the Magi. The rest from Santa, Christmas morning. Midnight Sleigh bells are rung and clattering of hooves are heard on the roof. Strangely enough, pebbles are found in the snow banks once the sun comes out."

"My favorite Christmas tradition is that the "Christmas Elves" come on Christmas Eve and give the family their new pajamas to wear for Christmas Eve/Morning. It is a tradition from when I was a baby, and I will be continuing it through my life."

"It's one present each for the kids on Christmas Eve and then the rest as soon as Dad has finished his coffee on Christmas morning. He used to torture my sister and I by drinking it as slowly as possible and going back for another cup when we got excited he'd finished his first one."

"We open one present each (not a "big" one) one Christmas Eve and the rest from under our tree on Christmas morning. We spend the rest of the day visiting family, opening and giving gifts along the way."

From People Who Open Gifts on Another Day Entirely

"We both grew up in culturally Christian households but are uncomfortable with that for ourselves because we outwardly and actively reject Christianity, so we do our winter holiday celebrating on New Year's Day since our families won't abstain from including us in their gift-giving."

"Christmas is traditionally only religious in our culture (i.e., church service and candy/chocolates). We do presents on New Years Eve, right after midnight."

Theodore Roosevelt was tough. As a deputy sheriff on the Western Front, he chased a trio of boat thieves down a flooding river for eleven days. Once, when a gun-toting cowboy made fun of his glasses, he beat him up bare-handed. Another time, he got shot in the chest while giving a speech, and just kept on talking. 

But on December 25th, 1902, one man got the better of Roosevelt—his eight-year-old son, Archie. And he did it all for the sake of a Christmas tree. 

These days, a tree is a vital part of any Christmas tableau. But back in the mid and late 1900s, that particular tradition hadn't quite taken root, Jamie Lewis explains on Forest History Society blog. While households with small children might put one up, others still considered the trees too pagan, too German, or just too difficult.

Starting at the turn of the century, Christmas trees also also faced an environmentally-minded backlash. In an editorial, the Minneapolis Times warned that the annual harvest "threatens to strip our forests;" soon after, the Hartford Courant bemoaned what they called "an altogether endless sacrifice… just to meet the calls of an absurd fad."

The public agreed: "Many among the general public opposed cutting trees for the holiday because of the injurious impact on forests, the destructive methods used to harvest them, or the overall perceived wastefulness of the practice," writes Lewis.

In 1899, one green-minded group took their grievance all the way to the White House, sending letters calling on President McKinley to publicly denounce the "Christmas Tree Habit." (While McKinley, childless by the time he took office, didn't put up a tree for himself, he was known to keep one around for the White House maids.)

There's no evidence that this lobby also reached out to Roosevelt, who became President in 1901, after McKinley's assassination. As it turned out, though, they didn't have to—Teddy and his wife, Edith, just weren't that into Christmas trees.

It's unclear what put the Roosevelts, who had six young children, off the custom. Although Teddy was a staunch environmentalist, he never specifically spoke out against harvesting Christmas trees—and Gifford Pinchot, whom he eventually chose to head up the U.S. Forest Service, was in favor of the practice. The true naysayer may have been Edith, who, Lewis postulates, probably had enough to deal with: "They've got a bunch of rambunctious kids, and this growing menagerie of animals as well," he says.

In years past, they had sated their kids' arboreal appetites by going to see the tree at the local Episcopal Sunday School, or at the home of Theodore’s sister, Anna Cowles, who always had a big one. But by 1902, dissent was quietly growing in the ranks. While the New York Sunreported early that "there will be no Christmas tree at the White House," Archie Roosevelt, the family's next-to-youngest child, was secretly taking matters into his own hands.

That year, the Roosevelt parents had arranged a tasteful Christmas for their brood. A December 26th letter from the President to James Garfield (whom he addressed as "Jimmikins"), sets the scene: bulging stockings, dancing in the East Room, and an electric train set for the children, rigged up by the White House electrician.

"But first there was a surprise for me," writes Roosevelt, "for Archie had a little Christmas tree of his own which he had rigged up with the help of one of the carpenters in a big closet."

According to Robert Lincoln O'Brien, then Washington correspondent for the Boston Transcript and a close friend of Roosevelt, this event was weeks in the making. A steward had smuggled a two-foot-tall fir top into the White House at the request of Archie, who had hidden it in one of the many unused clothes closets and slowly trussed it up.

The eight-year-old then gathered everyone around for the big reveal. "All the family were there… but none appeared more astonished than Mr. Roosevelt himself at the sight of this diminutive Christmas tree," O'Brien wrote in a 1903 account, published in Ladies' Home Journal.

"We all had to look at the tree," Roosevelt continues, "and each of us got a present off of it. There was also one present each for Jack the dog, Tom Quartz the kitten, and Algonquin the pony."

Roosevelt offered no further reaction to the tree, choosing instead to talk about his own chosen Christmas pursuits (a three-hour horse ride and several games of cudgels). Letters from later years indicate that Archie turned his triumph into a new tradition. In 1906, there were apparently two secret trees—Archie's closet tree, and a second made especially for their parents. By 1907, in a note to his sister, Roosevelt tosses off a cool "There was a Christmas tree of Archie's" as though it were old hat.

The press, though, couldn't get enough of the story. After O'Brien's version was published, every holiday season saw papers from coast to coast speculating as to whether Archie would pull his trick again. In 1904, the Washington Times reported a spat between Archie and his baby brother, Quentin: "This year [Archie] announced that he was 'too big for kids' things,' but offered to fix up a tree for Quentin," the Times wrote. "His younger brother, however, spurned this offer, informing Archie that if he wanted a tree he could make one for himself."

Like Washington's cherry tree chop, Archie's plant exploits eventually took on a life of their own. At least one writer has credited Archie as the first person to bring a Christmas tree into the White House. (That honor, though disputed, probably belongs to Franklin Pierce.) Others held that Theodore had been swayed by the anti-tree lobby, with some spinning elaborate yarns in which Archie and Quentin called on chief forester Pinchot, begging him to talk the Grinchiness out of their dad.

But these legends, cute as they are, miss the point of Archie's triumph: his true legacy comes from turning his father's best-known maxim against him. If you want to win against the most powerful man in the world, speak softly and carry a big stick—or a small tree.

The modern world is paradise for voyeuristic humans. But as of now, there's at least one thing people haven't gotten to see: we have never watched whale sharks have sex.

Now one aquarium is trying to change all that. According to the Japan News, Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium has recently begun displaying a pair of whale sharks, in the hope that they'll do the deed.

Whale sharks are the largest known fish species, and can grow to at least 42 feet—the length of an RV. They live about as long as humans do, and are filter feeders, surviving on copious amounts of tiny creatures, like plankton.

But scientists know very little about their lives, including how they mate or have offspring. Okinawa Churaumi, which is one the only aquariums in the world large enough to hold the creatures, has been raising several since 2005. They recently released one of their females into an ocean pen, to give the other two a chance to get closer.

"It's a rare chance in the first place for a mature pair of whale sharks to be kept together," aquarium curator Keiichi Sato told the outlet. He hopes for success, because captive breeding of whale sharks would allow him and other researchers to display and study them without having to deplete the wild population.

"My mind is now filled with thoughts of the two," he said. And I bet yours is, too.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Stanley Jacobs has been fascinated with ancient Egypt for as long as he can recall, but his obsession with one particular passage in one particular document started a little over 15 years ago. At an annual meeting of Egyptology enthusiasts, he hunted down, on the recommendation of a patient, an ancient Egyptian text about surgery known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus.

This document is “one of the two most important medical texts from ancient Egypt,” according to Egyptologist James Allen, and the case studies it contains date back 5,000 years, to the time when Egypt’s great pyramids were built. It's one of the oldest records of surgery in the entire world, and when Jacobs first read through, he was impressed.

A plastic surgeon himself, he found that most of the cases were about “really good reconstruction after traumatic injury, of the nose, the neck, the spinal cord,” and that its techniques were surprisingly well thought out for a millennia-old book. What really intrigued him, though, was a recipe at the back of the book, titled “Transforming an Old Man Into a Youth.”

This section of the papyrus is a long and complicated set of instructions for making what is, essentially, a face cream. The original translator of the papyrus, the Egyptologist James Breasted, hadn’t been much impressed by it, writing that the recipe “proves to be nothing more than a face paste believed to be efficacious in removing wrinkles.”

As a doctor who spends a lot of time thinking about skin, beauty, and age, though, Jacobs wasn’t so quick to discount it. “I realized that if they’re that serious about their surgical treatments, they’re probably serious about this,” he says. 

Jacobs wanted to try this recipe out himself, but when he examined the recipe, he ran into a problem. The key ingredient was “hemayet-fruit,” and he had no inkling of what that might be. 

Despite the recipe's alluring title, it's no shock that Breasted dismissed the recipe for “Transforming an Old Man Into a Youth." When he was working on his translation of the papyrus, in the 1920s, he was dazzled by the wonderful discoveries to be made in the text—some of the earliest anatomical and pathological descriptions on record, the earliest written reference to the brain. The Edwin Smith papyrus had been in private hands for decades when he was asked to translate it, and no one had recognized its significance.

Edwin Smith had been not an average American, it’s safe to say. Born in the early 1800s, during the “Era of Good Feelings” when America was flush with its success as a young nation, Smith left his home in Connecticut to study in Europe and settle in Egypt. In those antebellum years few other Americans would have chosen to study hieroglyphics and live under Ottoman rule, but Smith made a life as an expatriate in Luxor, across the Nile from Egypt’s most famous monuments, where he lived for 20 years.

Early in his time in Luxor, in 1862, Smith bought a beautifully preserved papyrus manuscript, covered in red and black ink. He knew enough to determine it was a medical document. But when he showed it to more experienced scholars, they didn’t recognize it as anything special. In their own notes, as Breasted wrote later, they “gave no hint of its extraordinary character and importance…. Thereupon it seems to have been totally forgotten by the scientific world.” 

Breasted first saw the papyrus, which he called “magnificent,” when the New York Historical Society, having inherited it from Smith’s daughter, asked him to translate it. Only after he began his work did he recognize that one side of the papyrus was filled with some of the oldest medical records ever discovered. The papyrus itself dated back more than 3,500 years, but the surgical case studies were even older—already, when this copy was made, they had been handed down for a thousand years. 

Compared to the case studies, which were unique in their age and their scientific rigor, the texts on the verso side of the manuscript, the “incantations and recipes,” as Breasted called them, were nothing special. These, he wrote, were “a magical hodgepodge” of instructions for guarding against pests or treating “female troubles.” They were added at a later date and, to Breasted, seemed to reflect the preferences of the papyrus’ owner, rather than important medical knowledge passed down through the centuries. 

But Breasted wasn’t necessarily right to dismiss them. Even if they weren’t of the same value as the older case studies, recipes for face creams or female troubles were more closely aligned with the medical beliefs of the age than they are now. “They involved the same specialized knowledge of ingredients, amounts, and dosages as medicinal recipes,” says Allen, the Egyptologist, who teaches at Brown University. “As far as we know, dermatology was not a separate branch of medicine, or specialty, in ancient Egypt. Physicians who knew how to concoct a remedy for stomach aches could also come up with one for skin disorders.”

To Jacobs, the recipe for transforming a man to a youth did seem to involve some serious science. The key ingredient, hemayet, is subjected to a complicated series of manual and chemical procedures—husked, winnowed, sifted, boiled in water, dried, washed, ground, and boiled again. As much as a recipe, it looked like a set of chemistry instructions.

The first translation of hemayet he found, though, identified it as fenugreek, which didn’t make sense to Jacobs. Fenugreek is a wispy plant, its seeds easily harvested: it wouldn’t have needed to be winnowed and boiled so aggressively. But no one seemed to know what else it might be. Jacobs started calling Egyptologist after Egyptologist, asking if they knew what this word might mean, and no one did. Finally, about eight years after he first became curious about the recipe, someone directed him to Allen, who in 2005 had published a new translation of the papyrus.

Allen had an answer, based on the work of an earlier scholar, more experienced than the one who had guessed fenugreek. Hemayet was bitter almonds.

It made sense. Unlike fenugreek, almonds would need to be winnowed and husked, crushed and boiled, for any sort of face paste to be made. And there was another instruction that resonated with bitter almonds, too: the recipe said the boiled and dried hemayet fruits should be washed thoroughly in the river, until the water in the jar had “no bitterness at all therein.”

But there was another stumbling block, as Jacobs learned when he tried to procure bitter almonds to test. In the United States, they were illegal. 

Bitter almonds are smaller, darker, and flatter than the sweet almonds that grow in California, the ones you’re supposed to eat as a healthy snack. Bitter almonds can also kill a person, quite easily. They contain hydrogen cyanide, and eating just seven or so nuts can be lethal.

Jacobs had to order the nuts from China, under a special research permit. “It was creepy,” he says. “I obviously didn’t want anybody to know I had them." He sent a few to the chemist he had begun working with to understand the papyrus’ formula, and the rest he kept in his cupboard at home.

But once Jacobs and his colleagues processed the nuts, just as the papyrus instructed, they found that all that washing leached the poisonous compounds from the almonds. The bitterness leaving, Jacobs says, meant the poison was gone, too.

After the transformation, one of the compounds produced from the nuts was mandalic acid. For a dermatologist, this compound, a known extract of bitter almonds, would already have been familiar—starting just a few years before Jacobs got interested in the papyrus, dermatologists had started testing it as a treatment for acne and other skin problems. For Jacobs, it was a revelation: since first discovering the secret of hemayet, he has developed a patented formula for mandalic acid-based skin care products and written about his quest in a forthcoming book, Nefertiti's Secret.

This story, in the end, is one more warning against dismissing knowledge that was not considered "scientific" by the scholarly (and stuffy) men of the 20th century. Even in their less surgical treatments, the Egyptians were sophisticated: millennia before our modern dermatologists, they had discovered a chemical compound that can make skin tighter and more elastic—in other words, that can transform the skin of an old man into the skin of a younger one.

This death mask is an artifact of one of the more dramatic moments in the life of George-Jacques Danton, the man without whom the French Revolution would not have happened, many scholars say.  

George-Jacques's wife Antoinette Gabrielle Danton died in labor on the 10th of February, 1793, along with the infant son that would have been the couple's fourth child. Her rebel husband was away in Belgium at the time, on a military observation mission for the Revolutionary Government. The widower did not hear of his wife's death until five days after the fact.

In the few years leading up to her death, George-Jacques had neglected his wife in favor of mistresses. Yet contemporary accounts report that he flew into a terrible, violent grief and immediately ordered a coach back to Paris.

He reached Paris the next evening, and began to tear apart his home in rage at his abandonment of her and grief at her death. Biographer David Lawday describes the scene in Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror (h/t Rodama 1789):

"Through his tears, a solution formed: he would make a likeness of her, a bust he could for ever embrace and ask for forgiveness.  The next evening he hurried to see a sculptor he knew, an artist with a workshop in the Saint-Marcel section.  The sculptor shook his head. Madame Danton had been dead for a week, he reminded his frantic visitor, in her grave for three days past."

From there Danton and the sculptor preceded to the graveyard, where the most powerful man in Paris bullied his way in. Several biographies report that after they grave was dug up, Danton forced the casket open and embraced his dead wife, possibly kissing her, before the sculptor went to work forming the mold for her death mask.

The mask was completed in short order, and bore a striking resemblance to the late Madame Danton. Unfortunately George-Jacques was unable to enjoy it for long. He was executed when revolutionaries turned against him during the Terror just over a year later, under suspicion of corruption. No death mask was made of Danton's giant, scarred face, but his last words spoken to his executioner, are famous: “Show my head to the people. It is worth the trouble.”

George-Jacques would have been happy with where the final representation of his wife ended up though. The bust of Madame Danton now resides in the Château de Vizille, a castle museum dedicated to the arts of the French Revolution.

Inspired by the icy allure of the landscape, the rejuvenating hot springs, the majestic fjords, and the surreal dance of the northern lights, more and more tourists are heading over to Iceland. So many in fact, that it is estimated that in 2016, there were more American tourists who visited the country than there are people living in it. 

But what makes Iceland so alluring can also make it dangerous. Looking for unique adventure opportunities, many tourists have fallen prey to the country’s unpredictable nature and met a tragic death.

Of course, dying while abroad is probably every traveler’s biggest fear, no matter the destination. It turns out, however, that there are places you really don’t want to die in. And Iceland is one of them. Why the discrimination against the beautiful island? Its funeral practices can sometimes make the difficult process of transporting a body even more complicated.

Traditional Viking funerals consisted of cremating the deceased in a funeral pyre. As of 1,000 AD, when the country officially converted to Christianity, burials became more and more common.

Today, funeral and burial practices usually follow the traditions of the National Church of Iceland, the country’s predominant denomination. These traditions include the kistulagninar, a small wake attended only by the closest family members and friends; the burial of the body or, if cremated, of the urn where ashes are contained; and, the posting of an obituary in a newspaper. There is also the tradition of not embalming the body—a practice that has proven to be quite inconvenient for foreign families that face the tragedy of losing a loved one in Iceland.

The Disposition of Remains Report: Iceland provided by the United States Embassy warns American nationals that “embalming is not performed in Iceland so decisions about disposition of remains must be made quickly.” The maximum period before burial is eight days, so family members have a week to make all the arrangements pertaining to the treatment and shipping of the body and fill out all the necessary paperwork, often from abroad. Under special circumstances, like the need for an autopsy, this period can be delayed, but getting permission may prove difficult and requires even more paperwork.

In the western world, embalming is used in almost all burials, usually to preserve the body long enough for wakes and visits. According to Magnus Magnusson of Útfararstrofa Kirkjugardanna, a funeral home in Reykjavik, embalming is almost never done in Iceland— it is simply not necessary.

"We don't have a hot climate here and we don't have much humidity," he says. "When someone dies, it's usually not long before they are in the morgue and in the cooler, so there's just no need for embalming."

It's also just not the way things are done in Iceland, which is a country in which traditions hold firm. In Burial Practice in Contemporary Iceland: Tradition and Conflict, Silke Schurack argues that the "tendency to hold on to traditions for the sake of these traditions [...] may play some role in the cause for the lack of alternative burial options.” She explains that funeral procedures in Iceland are very strict, and often include requirements that are unnecessary, and even impractical. For example, family members are required by law to buy a casket for cremation. These caskets are usually very expensive and simply burned along with the body. Urns are required to be buried and those wishing to bury the urn in their backyards or to scatter the ashes may do so only with special permission.

There seems to be little reason for these strict rules other than the fact that it is tradition. As Schurack claims, Iceland’s mostly homogenous population and its long history of fighting for independence have created a culture in which keeping traditions alive is of utmost importance, “especially in matters touching such ‘traditional’ issues as burial culture.”

This doesn't mean, however, that Icelandic people are completely unwilling to perform embalming, it's more about knowing who to speak to. Magnusson says that if a foreigner or even a national wishes to be embalmed, it is definitely possible to do so. It's just that, unlike in many other western countries, the hospital and not the funeral homes perform the procedure. This is why foreigners who are used to handling the procedure with morticians can sometimes be left confused and in despair. 

So what can foreigners do if tragedy befalls a relative while they're in Iceland? Act quickly, talk to the hospital about embalming the body, and contact a funeral home as soon as possible. As a U.S. Embassy spokesperson stated, morticians are really the best people to talk to for any questions and concerns that don't pertain particularly to the law.

It’s a winter tradition to build snowmen, go sledding, and get into massive snowball wars. Not just for humans, but for baby monkeys. At the first sight of snow, young Japanese macaques will start gathering and packing the white powder into a ball, take it to the top of a slope, and watch it tumble down.

During the winter in valleys of Japan's Shiga Highlands, you’ll find juvenile Japanese snow monkeys—also referred to as snow babies—roll and make snowballs. As the narrator in the BBC video above explains, such behavior. “has become a part of their unique culture." At the 1:07-mark, you can see one fuzzy baby macaque take his snowball to the top of a hill, watch it roll, before chasing after it.

“At first they’re just curious, then they get creative,” the narrator says. “Snow monkeys are quick learners.”

The species is privy to an array of intelligent behaviors in addition to playing with snowballs. They will bathe in hot springs to keep warm in frigid winter temperatures, and swim to keep cool during summer. Researchers have also observed adult macaques wash and dip their food in saltwater to both clean and enhance the taste. In communities, individuals will emit “coos” to talk to each other while feeding or moving.

But researchers say rolling snowballs is just a way for young macaques to socialize and have fun.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

This bomb shelter was originally built by the Germans around World War II. When the war was over and the Czech Republic (at the time Czechoslovakia) came under Soviet influence, the bunker was taken over by the People’s Army and planned to be a top secret hideout in the case of nuclear war.

The underground structure was intended primarily for local government elites under the communist regime, capable of housing a maximum of 500 people for around three days and nights. Today it is open to the public as a retro hotel, and not much has been changed from the original look.

Rooms still have the original bunk beds and half-century-old phones to contact the reception area. It is a unique opportunity to get a real in-person experience of a life in shelter. And in case of nuclear war, entry and accommodation are provided for free. Let’s hope that there will never be a need to serve this original purpose.

During the Cold War, when Cuba and what was then Czechoslovakia were part of the Communist bloc, the two shared business ties, which, today, linger on in the form of around $276 million in Cuban debt. 

But Cuba, these days, doesn't necessarily have $276 million in cash lying around to settle up, so, recently, according to Agence France-Presse, the country made the Czech Republic an offer: to settle up in rum.

How much rum? According to AFP's calculations, around 135,000 tons of rum, or enough for 130 years of Czech consumption. 

And, indeed, a Czech official told local press that it was an "interesting option," though one that probably won't come to pass. The Czechs, it turns out, do want some cash, or, maybe, the BBC reports, pharmaceutical drugs. 

Marketing the rum to Czech buyers is just one problem.

“These are relatively unknown brands which might be good, but we would have to advertise them and generally launch them into the market,” the country's deputy finance minister told AFP.

Some debts take more than rum to repay. 

Snorkelling on the coral reefs at Pigeon Island National Park  is absolutely fantastic wherever you are on the islands. But the main attraction is the island's many juvenile and adult blacktip reef sharks. These sharks are up to five feet long and are reliably seen in an area next to the larger of the two islands, known as Shark Point Reef.

This nonaggressive species seems to be quite accepting of humans in the water, and snorkelers have an almost guaranteed opportunity to see them—sometimes as close as a couple meters away in water as shallow as a meter deep. It is one of the few places where totally inexperienced snorkelers can have as good a chance of a shark encounter as fully qualified scuba divers.

Pigeon Island National Park actually consists of two islands: large and small. It is a marine national park in Sri Lanka located in the general area of the city of Trincomalee and contains some of the best remaining coral reefs of Sri Lanka. Many of the 100 species of corals and 300 coral reef fishes recorded around the area are found in this national park. The coral reef is visited by Hawkesbill Turtle, Green Turtle and Olive Ridley Turtle and the island is important breeding ground for the rock pigeon. The area was badly affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 but has now largely recovered. 

Many luminaries are buried here at the stately Princeton Cemetery, from the only U.S. president to serve non-consecutive terms, Grover Cleveland (the 22nd and 24th president of the United States) to computer scientist and theoretical physicist John von Neumann, as well as U.S. history's most in-vogue antagonist, Aaron Burr.

Established in 1757, Princeton Cemetery is the resting place of some of New Jersey's oldest families and most famous residents. The history of the cemetery is also intertwined with nearby Princeton University, which was named the College of New Jersey until 1896.

Most past presidents of the College and University are buried in the President's Plot along Wiggins Street, including John Witherspoon, the only member of the clergy to sign the Declaration of Independence, and Aaron Burr, Sr., second president of the college. His son, the former Vice President and dueler of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Jr., is also buried in the plot next to his father's crypt. The Aaron Burr Association placed a plaque there in 1995.

Other members of Princeton's academic community are buried here, including computer scientist and theoretical physicist John von Neumann, the founder of the U.S. Olympic Committee William Milligan Sloane, and Nobel Prize in physics winner Eugene Paul Wigner. Some graves also have an element of whimsy, such as the line integral sign on scientist Natalia Romalis-Reytblatt's headstone, and the epitaph on William Hahn's headstone saying "I told you I was sick." 

Knocknakilla Stone Circle is a small prehistoric complex consisting of a stone circle, two standing stones, and a cairn.

Probably erected in the Middle or Late Bronze Age (1600 - 1800 BCE), they were likely used for rituals or ceremonies. Typical of these types of monuments, the alignments of the standing stones and circle were probably influenced by observations of solar and lunar cycles. 

The stone circle has five large stones, although two have collapsed. The entrance to the circle faces northeast. In 1931, the interior of the circle was excavated and was found to be paved with stones, with quartz pebbles concentrated around the entrance, but no artifacts were found. The two standing stones–one of which fell about 50 years ago–are to the southwest of the circle. The cairn is just east of the stone circle and is defined by a circle of eleven stones.

Knocknakilla is derived from the Gaelic "Cnoc na Cille," which means "Hill of the Church."

When Herschel Grynszpan was 17, he killed a German diplomat, whose death was used as a pretense for Kristallnacht, the 1938 attacks on Jews in Germany that began the Holocaust. Grynszpan himself was taken to a concentration camp, where he was thought to have died in the early 1940s.

But a newly discovered photo from 1946 suggests that he may have survived the war.

Christa Prokisch, an archivist at the Jewish Museum of Vienna, found the photo in the museum’s collection. When she saw the face of the young man in the photo above, she told the Guardian,“I recognized him immediately.”

With Armin Fuhrer, a German historian and journalist who has written a biography of Grynszpan, she sought to prove her instinct right. As the Guardian reports, they had a face recognition test conducted on the photo, and it showed a 95 percent match with other photos of the young man.

Grynszpan was born in Germany, to parents who had immigrated there from Poland, but by the time he was 17, he was a stateless person living in Paris. As a Jewish person born in Germany, he wasn’t entitled to citizenship there; when he was a teenager, Poland passed a law stripping Polish people who’d lived abroad for more than five years of their citizenship.

In France, Grynszpan was living with his uncle in a Yiddish-speaking community while waiting to immigrate to Palestine, when his family was deported from Germany. They were sent to a refugee camp on the Polish border, in squalid conditions. Grynszpan went to the German embassy in Paris, perhaps intending to kill the ambassador, and shot a high-ranking diplomat instead.

Arrested by the French police, Grynszpan was eventually taken by the Gestapo to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp; the last evidence of his life dates to 1942. His parents, who emigrated to Israel after the war, had him declared dead in 1960. But there have always been rumors that he survived the world and was still alive in France, Germany, or Israel.

If Grynszpan did survive the war, it opens a new mystery: how did he do it?

So you’ve given into the foodie inside and are planning a culinary trip to the land of gastronomical heaven: France. But besides enjoying galettes in Brittany and sipping champagne in Champagne, how can you know where to best enjoy the wonders of French cuisine?

For starters, you could use this Gastronomical Map of France. With wonderful illustrations, the map details the major products of the country in the regions that they are produced.

Though the map was made by Jean François Tourcaty in 1809, it is surprisingly relevant in the 21st century. Of course, there are some discrepancies between the map and today's France that reflect the course of history.

For example, Brussels and Geneva are included within the boundaries of the country, and modernity has made certain places unfit to continue providing some of these gastronomic products. No one wants Parisian fish taken from the polluted waters of the Seine, and hunting at Versailles has not been a pastime for many years.

For the most part, however, the change has not been drastic. You can still find expansive vineyards in the Bordeaux region, herbs in the southeast, and beer in the north. The map also gives geographical references to products that we all know and love, such as cognac, brie, and roquefort, which originate from cities that bear their names.

The map was made for and included in a philosophical and literary book on food, Cours Gastronomique. The tome was written by Charles Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, who is believed to have been the illegitimate son of Louis XV.

The Cours Gastronomique is dedicated to the Caveau Moderne Society, which saw a group of men get together once a month to enjoy a sumptuous meal, as well as song and wine. This society disappeared and was revived numerous times between 1729 and 1939, and was widely recognized in France and abroad. Women were not allowed to partake in the festivities, despite the important role they held in the production, distribution, and preparation of French cuisine.

The cartouche on the left side of the map includes a cave in which a table with wine and food are served under the name Caveau Moderne, and rocks in which the names of some of the members of the society are engraved.

Food was the central part of the events of the society, which was epicurean by nature. Gastronomical topics would be discussed as part of larger philosophical and scientific debates. As a member of the society, Cadet de Gassicourt was a fervent believer that the study of food was invaluable to scientific progress. Food was not just a bodily need, but a source of great knowledge for the advancement of society. 

The Gastronomical Map of France, which is part of the wonderful Cornell University PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography, is “less a geography lesson than a testament to the depth and variety of French food and wine,” according to the collector's notes. Printed 10 years after the French Revolution, it shows a country unified by its culinary strengths.

If you ever want to know which French regions produce bovine products, which ones have wild boars and hares, and where to find varieties of wine and cheese, you need only look at this map. Not only is it beautifully detailed and historically interesting, it is also one of the most delicious maps you will encounter.

Walk the streets of downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, today and you’ll find little evidence that the town’s residents of yesteryear conducted business in first floors that are now below sidewalks and parking meters. For that, you have to go underground.

“So this is Loveman's,” says Cheri Lisle-Brown, property manager for the 130-year-old Loveman’s Building, which was originally a department store, in the heart of Chattanooga’s downtown. She walks through a pair of metal doors. “This is the original freight elevator. Watch your step.”

Below, the basement of the 19th-century building is made from a mix of cinderblock, brick walls and Tennessee limestone. It has the feel and smells of other old basements. Unlike other basements, however, the northern outer wall has openings in the brick—doorways or large windows—framed with wood leading to an alcove. What looks like a place to enter the building or let in light sits underground. 

At some point in time, possibly between 1875 and 1905, Chattanooga built up its roads and abandoned the first stories of the buildings in the downtown of the city, turning them into basements. Today, no one knows exactly why or how it happened. The popular theory is that Chattanooga raised its city a story to escape the devastating flooding the Tennessee River wrought every few years. Evidence also points to an attempt to escape the diseases of the day, cholera and yellow fever.

Cities build upon themselves. For example, they pave over cobblestones that were once dirt paths. For Chattanooga, located a few miles from the Tennessee-Georgia state line, the foundations of the buildings echo the story of a construction project more unusual than most.

The best proof of Chattanooga’s hidden layer can be found in the basements of its older buildings. Yet the city’s original first floor is largely off limits to the curious because the locations are on private property. 

And there’s the mystery of it. Documentation of the construction is scarce. City records don’t point to any motion where city leaders resolved to raise the streets. Newspapers from the time discuss the proposal but did little to document the earth moving project. This leaves modern city historians unable to answer basic questions like “when did this occur?” and “where did the city get the soil?”

“It required concerted effort—and that’s the big question mark—because there’s not a lot of evidence for it,” says Nick Honerkamp, professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, of the massive infrastructure project.

Indeed, utility workers would occasionally find items like a cut tree trunk eight feet below ground, he notes. Honerkamp’s predecessor, Jeff Brown, first posited the theory that the city initiated a project that raised the streets and made first stories basements after he noticed the doors and windows in basements of Chattanooga’s downtown. “It doesn’t make sense to have a window or a door that leads to dirt,” Honerkamp says.

As part of this theory, some people think that the dirt excavated from the Hamilton County Courthouse was pushed downslope to fill the streets below. The building, according to Honerkamp, features a large basement. “That dirt had to go somewhere and the easiest place to put it was downhill,” he says. The file Chattanooga Public Library’s keeps on the project suggests the soil might have been lifted from one of the nearby hills.

Braving floods was a risk of doing business in Chattanooga during the 1800s and early 1900s. “We had dramatic floods virtually every decade,” says Maury Nicely, a Chattanooga-based lawyer and amateur historian. Chattanooga made its fortunes from the railroad system connecting it to the rest of the South and the Tennessee River. The main streets running from train depot to river were “low-lying troughs” that filled during large floods, according to Nicely.

Ultimately, it was a problem that was solved in 1933 when the U.S. Government created the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built hydroelectric dams along the river and stymied the floods. 

But in 1875, city leaders were wrestling with what to do after flood waters once again ripped through their town. Robert Hooks, the city’s engineer, floated the ideas of building a levee and raising the streets in the March 4 edition of the Chattanooga Times. “The streets of Chicago, Boston, and many other cities have been raised, both for the purpose of escaping flood and for improving their system of sewerage,” Hooks wrote.

That week, Chattanooga’s Board of Mayor and Alderman considered a proposal to raise 15 miles of street 10 feet high, paid for by the property owners, but the resolution was put off. As Hooks noted earlier, these projects were cost prohibitive.

More motivation arrived in the summer of 1878, when yellow fever spread across the Mississippi River basin, striking its victims with jaundiced skin and black vomit, and killing thousands. In Chattanooga, 140 people in the city of 12,000 died. 

People at the time didn't know the true carrier of the disease, Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes, which can spread the Zika virus of today. But Chattanooga's then-Registrar of Vital Statistics, J. H. Vandeman, was onto something when he wrote: “The more filth, the more yellow fever; the lower the ground, the poorer the drainage and water supply, there you would find this disease the worst.”

In 1878, people were already trying to raise up the land in downtown Chattanooga, but it was going in fits and starts. During his postmortem of how yellow fever infected the city, Vandeman described how even in the city's downtown the ground never completely dried. He pointed out one building in particular, which is today known as the Loveman’s Building.

The building had been recently built with a commercial first story below the level of the street. It was not a good place to do business, however. It “is constantly exposed to dampness of the soil underneath, amounting at times to large collections of water,” Vandeman wrote.

The lot 100 feet to the east was not helping, either. The developer there placed fill so that the lot stood three feet taller than the ground of the Loveman’s Building. This cut off drainage. In other words, people were filling up Chattanooga a little at a time. Those who did not do so were left with damp ground.

As a result of the epidemic, Vandeman called for the city to improve its sanitation. Build out the sewer system, he wrote, and “increase our surface drainage.” 

Unlike a city such as Paris, with its maze of catacombs and sewers, Chattanooga’s underground is mostly contained to a dozen or so basements today. Other basements were never first-story floors because they were dug out at a later date. “It’s a lot more localized than most people think,” Nicely says.

As with many places in cities, unused spaces are not long left unused. Today, a portion of the Loveman’s Building is used as storage for the current tenants of the building. Before she had the basement sealed, “I used to get a lot of flooding,” says Lisle-Brown, who managed the property for 10 years.

This is part of the nature of cities: they change and adapt to challenges, says Honerkamp. Sometimes it’s subtle, other times it’s dramatic. “To me, it represents a corporate, combined effort—between city and private individuals—to address a basically pretty horrific problem that was messing up the economy and driving people crazy.”

In 2006, scientists working on the ANTARES neutrino telescope found themselves facing a problem: their brand-new instruments were observing way more light than they had expected. This was particularly confusing given that ANTARES is sunk in pitch-black water, two and a half kilometers below the Mediterranean Sea.

You see, this is no ordinary star-scanning telescope. Rather than hunt for distant cosmic objects, the ANTARES observatory uses highly light-sensitive devices to detect something from space right here on earth: the light emitted by a cosmic neutrino—a subatomic particle, much like a charge-less electron—as it passes through seawater.

 The ANTARES physicists knew when they started that they might see a bit of light from other sources, like deep-sea fishes. But the glow they were seeing was intense enough to hinder their work. Where could it be coming from?

Luckily, unlike most observatories, ANTARES employes oceanographers, geologists, marine biologists, and climatologists in addition to astrophysicists. With further study, these experts discovered that the light was coming from a massive bloom of deep-sea bioluminescent bacteria, stirred into action by water that was being transported from the surface into the deep.

What had first appeared to be a roadblock turned out to be a breakthrough: for their studies of the deep-sea bloom, the ANTARES collaboration was awarded a special prize by the science magazine La Recherche, which awards exemplary scientific research annually, in 2014. Theirs was the longest-ever observation of such a bloom in the deep sea, and without ANTARES, scientists likely would have missed it.

This is what makes this observatory so extraordinary; it is a true interdisciplinary collaboration, providing data for a group of fields that might otherwise seem wildly unconnected.

“That’s the funny part of this work, because when talk about my project with oceanographers, they say, ‘a telescope, really?’” says Severine Martini, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Research Institute who has used ANTARES for her studies of bioluminescent bacteria. She was among the group that studied the deep-sea bacterial bloom. “Meanwhile, when we talk about bioluminescence and oceanographic phenomena to astrophysicists, we get sort of blank looks. But that’s the good part of working with different fields. We are trying to solve different problems, but we are working together.”

The bottom of the ocean might seem like a strange choice of location for a telescope. But when you’re looking for neutrinos, the deep sea is actually the ideal place from which to search.

Astrophysicists are intrigued by cosmic neutrinos, believed to be produced by high-energy and violent occurrences in space; the only two confirmed sources are the sun and a distant supernova, but physicists are eager to discover where else these particles are coming from. The problem is that neutrinos are only one of the many particles constantly bombarding the earth—and unlike many of these other particles, like x-rays or cosmic rays, neutrinos only interact very weakly with matter, making them particularly hard to detect among the noise.

To make matters worse, neutrinos are also produced in the atmosphere, and can be hard to distinguish from their cosmic counterparts.

Here’s where the ocean comes in. Neutrinos are the only particles that can pass straight through earth itself, so ANTARES uses the earth as a shield, searching for “upward-going” muons--particles very similar to electrons, but without mass--that neutrinos produce as they pass up through the earth. To detect these muons, the observatory’s photomultipliers look for a tiny burst of light called Cherenkov radiation, produced when a charged particle is moving faster than the speed of light in water.

Positioning a neutrino telescope at the bottom of the sea is therefore like positioning it between two strainers, which filter out only what it is interested in recording.

So putting the telescope at the bottom of the sea theoretically makes it more useful for observing outer space—but it also makes it a lot more useful for observing the bottom of the sea. “In a broad sense, we are opening a new window on the universe,” says Antoine Kouchner, a professor and researcher in cosmology at the Université Paris Diderot, and the spokesperson for the ANTARES collaboration. “But being an observatory cabled to shore enables real time data and monitoring. And that’s where it becomes interesting to sea science.”

Most information from the deep sea comes in small bites; usually, instruments or vehicles are sent to the bottom for only a few hours at a time. Information about the deep sea is therefore usually scattered and disconnected, both spatially and temporally.

In contrast, the ANTARES observatory has been transmitting data constantly, day in and day out, over the course of years. This information could prove particularly relevant for scientists studying climate change, who need data sets that span many years in order to sift out what is changing in a warming ocean.

“Basically, having an electric plug and an Ethernet cable available at 2500m depth is a big step forward for the earth and sea science studies,” joked Paschal Coyle, particle astrophysicist and former spokesperson of the collaboration. “It was a surprise to me that this community was not already doing what we were doing.”

Thanks to the many sensors that ANTARES provides—monitoring oxygen, temperature, pressure, salinity, seismic activity, and much more—the scope of non-physics projects at ANTARES is now broad, from tracking sediment flow on the seafloor to recording sperm whale calls as they hunt in the deep.

And they’re still studying those tiny spots of light that were noise to the astrophysicists. During her Ph.D. at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography, Martini discovered a new form of bioluminescent bacteria that she has been observing almost continually in the deep using ANTARES. In her most recent paper, in November, Martini described the bioluminescence activity of these bacteria for a consecutive year using ANTARES data. She found that the bacteria emitted light even under stable conditions, and that bioluminescent bacteria were more active than bacteria as a whole—suggestion that light emission provides some sort of ecological benefit.

“I think it’s interesting because we discovered something nobody would have ever looked for,” said Martini. “The ecological role of bioluminescence is well described for a lot of macro-organisms, but for bacteria we still don’t really know why they are emitting light.” One theory suggests the bacterium glow when many of them attach to food particles, in hopes of attracting a larger, hungry animal like a fish. For a bacterium, being eaten is a good thing, as being excreted later on can help it spread to new environments.

The next step for ANTARES is a big one: the collaboration is building a new observatory, dubbed KM3NeT. The new observatory will be 50 times larger than ANTARES and located at three sites, in France, Sicily and Greece. Over its ten years of operation, ANTARES was unsuccessful at detecting cosmic neutrinos; with the new observatory, the collaborators hope to finally solve the puzzle of the particles’ origin, and to learn more about their fundamental properties.

Additionally, the marine and earth science community has been involved in the development of KM3NeT from the beginning. The new stations will host even more sensors, including a camera made for detecting life, radioactivity detectors, and a remotely-operated vehicle—which Coyle, who is serving as the spokesperson for the new observatory, compared to the Disney robot Wall-E—that will be able to explore the seafloor and film what it finds.

“The potential of interdisciplinary, synergetic science with cabled deep sea marine observatories is tremendous,” said Coyle. “ANTARES has pioneered the way, and I am sure many surprises on this front will be forthcoming.”

With the oceans absorbing  huge quantities of heat and acidifying carbon dioxide, changes seem almost certain. But with these collaborative observatories monitoring constantly—acting, as Coyle put it, as “the guardians of the abyss”—perhaps they won’t be so much of a surprise.

In the center of the town of Bergen, Norway, the sweet smell of cloves, cinnamon, and allspice emanates from an old public swimming pool arena. Inside is a massive baked and sugar-coated city made out of gingerbread—claimed to be the largest gingerbread village in the world.

Every year since the Christmas tradition began in 1991, Bergen’s community comes together to construct the miniature wintery wonderland. In the video above of this year’s Pepperkakebyen (Norwegian for “the gingerbread village”), you can take a virtual tour through the rows of delicious houses, towers, trains, cars, and ships that are almost entirely made from real gingerbread. The city contains over 2,000 gingerbread houses flanking a mountainside and dotting around a lake.  

Building gingerbread houses has been a holiday pastime since the early 1800s. It’s said that after the publication of the Grimm’s fairytale Hansel and Gretel, German bakers began creating ornamented candy houses out of gingerbread. The city of Bergen has taken the tradition to a whole new level. 

In 2012, builders showed the labor and collaboration of the construction process in a behind-the-scenes video. Thousands of individuals—“kids from one to ninety-two,” the video captions—contributed to the sweet village.

Even though the inedible components have prevented it from beating New York’s Gingerbread Lane (a 1,020 gingerbread structure) for the Guinness World Record, Bergen’s Pepperkakebyen is still an enormous and impressive feat. You can see the Gingerbread City on display at the Sentralbadet from November 19 till December 31.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

As any cursory watch of an episode of Happy Days will tell you, we’re obsessed with the look of leather—but perhaps not fans of the way leather is produced.

Much like a meal at McDonald’s or a fur coat, we’re more impressed with the final result without any worries about where it came from—because thinking about where it came from potentially raises some heavy ethical questions.

For the plastics industry, it’s long been the perfect opening for a synthetic alternative, and there are plenty of varieties out there, most made from variations of vinyl. Pleather has put up quite a fight in an effort to upholster our cars and replace the linings of our shoes, thanks to the fact that it’s cheap and can be chemically treated in ways that leather can’t. So why hasn’t it won out quite yet?

Well, in some ways, it has. Just not in the places you might expect.

If it weren’t for Fabrikoid, there’s a good chance the chemical conglomerate DuPont might never have become a household name—and General Motors might’ve gone bankrupt long before the financial crisis of 2008.

Like plastic and fabric melded together using a chemical process, the history of the first pleather and GM’s DuPont era are hard to tear apart.

Here’s how it happened: The company’s first modern-day president, Eugene du Pont, died in 1902, offering the company something of a clean break from the past. The firm wanted to find more mainstream uses for their chemical know-how, but that proved challenging at first. Hilariously, for example, the company produced a 1910 manual titled “Farming With Dynamite,” which sounds like the punchline to a great joke.

That same year, however, DuPont was able to find a durable path forward with its purchase of the Fabrikoid Company. The leather substitute maker was a great fit for the company, but not a perfect one, as the material was a little lacking. But DuPont’s chemical experts worked to turn the pleathery acquisition into something groundbreaking.

It helped that the material represented something of a bridge between explosives and consumer goods: Fabrikoid was made with a combination of pyroxylin (a nitrocellulose coating that had previously been used as a plastic explosive called guncotton) and a fabric pigmented with the help of castor oil. After a bit of tweaking, DuPont had a leather alternative that was good enough to put in a car.

DuPont soon found other uses for its chemicals, including another variation on pyroxylin called Pyralin, an early ivory-like form of plastic.

Fabrikoid’s connective tissue proved key for the du Pont family as it staked out a path to the consumer market in the form of the automobile. Starting in 1914, the family began acquiring a significant amount of General Motors stock, soon gaining full control of the company by taking advantage of its precarious financial situation. The family saw some pretty synergistic opportunities in GM—the kind that eventually draw antitrust regulators.

“Our interest in the General Motors Company will undoubtedly secure for us the entire Fabrikoid, Pyralin, paint and varnish business of those companies, which is a substantial factor,” DuPont executive John J. Raskob wrote in 1917.

Raskob was right about that synergy: GM bought many of its raw materials from DuPont for decades, and the C-suites of the two companies soon had much in common. For example, Pierre S. du Pont was GM’s president at one point, and Raskob, who started as Pierre’s personal secretary, was for a time in charge of the finances of both companies.

Synergy or no, Fabrikoid was along for the ride. DuPont saw significant success with its pitch for using faux leather as the upholstery option of choice in automobiles, with leather alternatives making up 70 percent of the car market by 1915, much of it made by the chemical firm.

“It has the artistic appearance and luxury of real grain leather, and in addition is waterproof, washable, and will outwear the grade of ‘genuine leather’ used on 90 percent of the cars that ‘have hides’,” the company stated in an ad that year.

But neither the investment nor Fabrikoid were built to last. Eventually, newer pleather technologies reached the public, many of them using stronger vinyl mixtures, and by the 1940s, Fabrikoid was old news.

Around that time, the whispers around DuPont and GM’s overly cozy relationship reached fever pitch, and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations started to take an interest.

A breakup that big, however, isn’t one that happens overnight. It wasn’t until 1957—more than 40 years after the du Ponts bought their first interests in GM, and after an antitrust trial that went all the way to the Supreme Court—that the ultra-cozy relationship was broken up. The du Pont family finally divested themselves of GM stock in 1961.

Raskob’s laying-it-all-out-there quote was cited in the Supreme Court’s decision.

Fabrikoid was a footnote in DuPont’s history by that point—but an important one. It was the first of many success stories for DuPont in the textile space—paving the way for later substances like nylon, polyester, and Teflon.

Not bad for fake treated cowhide.

DuPont wasn’t alone in popularizing pleather, though; alternatives were commonly pushed by all sorts of firms.

And sometimes, the thing that really stood out wasn’t their fake leather, but their brilliant marketing. For example, Naugahyde, a product created by Uniroyal in the 1930s, became notable for its ad mascot, a fake animal called the “Nauga” that, unlike most animals, loved shedding its hide.

“Naugas do give up their hydes. But they do it willingly and they shed their skins quite often,” a description of the “Nauga” on an old version of the Naugahyde website stated. “They live to give again and again. In fact, Naugas are so willing to please that they often shed their hyde several times a year. No self-respecting hunter would ever try to hurt a Nauga.”

The “Nauga"—an unusual animal with an impressive leather-style hide—was the work of 1960s ad man George Lois, who came up with the strategy to promote Naugahyde, a particularly snazzy looking variant of pleather. The story of the animals was almost too successful, and as a result, Snopes has a page letting the public know that naugas are, in fact, fictional. Naugahyde, a creation of Uniroyal from the 1930s, is still sold today, and the Nauga dolls tied to the old ad campaign remain popular collector’s items.

Back in the Nauga’s heyday, clever marketing was necessary to get the public to even think about buying pleather. But these days, the has gotten a bit of an upgrade in the world of fashion—as well as a slightly different name. In a 2013 interview with The Cut, fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra sang the praises of the advantages pleather (er, excuse me, "poly-leather”) has over similar materials, including traditional leather.

“The poly-leather is incredibly luxurious, the way that it wears over time,” he said. “It doesn’t wrinkle. It travels really well. It’s waterproof, so if you wear it in the rain it completely repels water. There’s something sort of magical about its properties.”

Altuzarra has even combined pleather with real fur in some of his pieces. The Cut’s Jillian Goodman describes pleather as “one of the rare trickle-up fabrics, moving in the last decade from the sex shop on the corner to racks at Barneys.”

Often, faux-leather is purchased with the goal of not hurting any animals, which seems like a perfectly valid reason for not wearing leather if you’re not into that sort of thing.

But from a resource standpoint, it’s a lot more complicated than that. In 2011, Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard raised the question of whether pleather was really all that much better for the environment than its derided carnivore cousin. She notes that, from a raw materials standpoint, buying a single pair of leather shoes that last a decade or longer versus a pair of faux-leather shoes that last maybe six months, it’s not really a contest.

“You’re better off focusing on something you know you’re going to keep for a long time, that’s going to stand up to the care or not need as much care,” Texas State fashion merchandising professor Gwendolyn Hustvedt told Sheppard.

And then there’s the problem of chemicals, which is Greenpeace’s main beef with the use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in many leather products. In a 2002 interview with the Environmental Magazine, the organization’s Lisa Finaldi noted that the toxins expelled in the creation of PVC are far worse than the environmental impact of killing a cow.

“Leather has environmental problems as well, but it doesn’t have the global impact of PVC,” Finaldi explained.

If you’re feeling ethically challenged by both the pleather and the leather in your life, perhaps the solution here is to meet the two materials halfway. There’s a name for that, actually: It’s called bonded leather, and it’s the result of recycling old leather, adding a new fabric backing, and combining it with chemically treated plastic. It looks nice enough, and it’s often used to upholster furniture. And recyclers can even gather up used leather from old shoes to help create the material.

That said, Consumer Affairs argues that if you’re buying a couch and quality is your goal, you’re better off with the real thing.

But on the other hand, at least you wouldn’t be killing any more cows.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Hard to believe, but Godzilla is now eligible for Social Security. He first emerged from his atom bomb disturbed slumber in 1954, and 29 films later—despite his senior status—he’s still “King of the Monsters.”

No place knows this better than Godzilla's hometown of Tokyo, where a giant head of the scaly menace has been seen towering over the Toho Building in the Shinjuku Ward. Toho is the Japanese studio behind the Godzilla franchise, and they added their trademark character to help publicize their Shinjuku movie theater complex.

The head harkens back to the classic Godzilla, instead of the more lateral and lizardly look he took on in the 1998 version. He evokes the beloved and cuddly “guy in a rubber suit” look, with some added light-up eyes and glowing claws. And every few minutes he lets out his signature screechy roar, a little bit car crash, and a little bit nails-on-chalkboard.

The Godzilla head is 40 feet tall, which is life-size if you consider that the original monster topped out at 165 feet--about a 16-story building. He can’t quite stomp on his Toho creators downstairs, but he can still give them a good scare.