A very merry Cool Weird Awesome Christmas to you!
May your every wish on this December 25 come true.
And if your wish was to hear a story about a guy nicknamed “Hot Dog Santa” giving out free food to Boston’s needy children at Christmas, then consider that wish granted.
His name was Axel Bjorklund; he was born in Sweden and came to the US around age 20.
He eventually settled in Boston’s North End neighborhood, like many other immigrants from a wide range of countries had done.
And, like many of his neighbors, Bjorklund was getting by more than he was getting ahead.
By 1921, he was running a hot dog cart in the neighborhood; it was a living, but he wasn’t exactly swimming in money.
Still, from his cart on a street corner, Bjorklund saw kids going hungry, and he wanted to help.
So he let it be known that for Christmas that year, he would give away 500 hot dogs to needy children.
According to the Boston Globe, he soon had a parade of youngsters following the cart around town, including some kids who were so hungry they got back in line for seconds after they’d finished their first hot dogs.
For the following Christmas, Bjorklund doubled his giveaway to a thousand dogs.
Each year got a little bigger than the last until the man with the cart was giving away 3,000 hot dogs for the holiday.
The newspapers dubbed him “Hot Dog Santa”; there were articles all over the country and beyond, even in Bjorklund’s native Sweden.
Critics have pointed out that those feel-good news stories didn’t ask why all those kids were so hungry in the first place, and why the only guy apparently willing to do anything about it was a hot dog vendor who was only just subsisting himself.
And he was: Bjorklund kept giving away hot dogs when he couldn’t pay his own rent, and when he was so ill that he was in and out of the hospital.
Hot Dog Santa’s last Christmas on the job was in 1929.
When he passed away in November 1930, the Swedish Charitable Society raised money so Bjorklund wouldn’t be buried in a potter’s field.
Not a very happy story, really; it’s sort of Charles Dickens plus wieners.
But you have to take your hat off to the guy.
When he saw a problem in front of him, he didn’t wait around for somebody better off than him to fix it.
He said, these kids need food, and I’ve got hot dogs. And he put the two together.
So maybe we can use what we have to help somebody who needs it too.
A couple hundred hot dogs would be a start.
Every family has its own take on the holidays.
One Redditor shared a story about how their family liked to spend part of their Christmas gathering listing the weirdest and funniest mistakes they’d all made during the year.
From those nominees, they chose a winner of the “family Goober award,” and presented the winner with a large trophy.
Hot Dog Santa Brings Christmas Cheer to Children (Newspapers.com)
30 People Are Sharing Weird And Wholesome Traditions That Make Their Christmas Special (Bored Panda)
Thanks so much to our Patreon backers for all the gifts and support this year!
Photo by Boston Globe via Newspapers.com
