Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, your award winning Texas History Podcast. I'm your host Ken Wise

I appreciate you listening today. Things are jumping at the world headquarters of

Wise about Texas. Be sure and check out the YouTube channel.

I'm slowly but surely getting the episodes

posted up there along with some other short videos from various historic

sites and whatever else I can come up with.

So let me know what you like to see on

YouTube and we'll try to get it on there for you. I'm recording this podcast

shortly after or maybe still during what has been described by the weather folks as

historic levels of oak pollen in the air in Texas and usually having lived here all my life I'm pretty used to it but man is it

getting to me so if I sound a little bit hoarse today that's the reason and if we take a couple of pauses in here

believe me you'll appreciate the cough button it's been one of those springs so

far but we're doing great today I want to talk to you about a very cool

Easter tradition in Texas and that is the Fredericksburg Easter fires.

Every Saturday before Easter, the hilltops around the beautiful city of Fredericksburg come alive with large bonfires.

But there are some legends around how all of this started.

So to get wise about Texas today I think we may need to go all the

way back several centuries to the land that became Germany and the night before

Easter Sunday.

In the old days and by the old days I mean the second century a.D. Orthodox Christians talk about

tell a story about running out of oil to light lamps for Easter and the Bishop

this is in Jerusalem ordered the lamps filled with water, and that despite

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