Try to imagine a Christmas where you don't hear about sugar plums.

Or try to imagine sugar plums without thinking of Christmas.

Or come to think of it, try to imagine a sugar plum. What comes to mind?

Plums with sugar on them? Some sugary treat in the shape of a plum? Well, it's neither of those,

and isn't it strange that this thing that's so familiar to all of us in some way, something

you've probably heard about every year since birth, is also almost completely unknown.

You have almost certainly never seen or tasted a real sugar plum.

Nowadays, sugar plums and Christmas go together like rum and eggnog,

but of course it wasn't always that way.

The backstory is as full of surprises as a stocking hung by the chimney with care. I'm Brian

Earl. This is Christmas Past. My first vision of a sugarplum dancing came from a pop-up book

of a visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clark Moore. Well, they didn't dance, not really. They

rotated on a spinning cardboard wheel.

It was a book my mother read to us every Christmas Eve.

Now my brother reads that same book to his children.

I was so excited when Mom gave it to me, and now I read it with the kids.

A lot of great memories with this book.

The pop-ups, some of the pop-ups are old and they don't work anymore.

There's a sort of a dream spot over their head where you can rotate candy and sugar plums.

And the sugar plums dancing in the head move around, so it looks like it's like moving in their

head and all the candy they're imagining of.

But the first time the world heard of sugarplums, it was in a pamphlet published in England in 1608.

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