Editor’s note, April 4, 2026, 6 am ET: This story was last updated on March 30, 2018, and we’re revisiting it for this Easter.

Easter season is upon us, and if you’re like a majority of Americans who celebrate the holiday, you’ll probably purchase some candy for the occasion. And that stash will likely include the neon-sugar-coated hallmark of the season: Peeps.

But while their blobby shapes and bright colors are easily recognizable, their backstory might not be so familiar — or as straightforward as you’d think. Read on to find out more about these squishy harbingers of spring.

Mmm, sugar-coated marshmallows with eyes

In their traditional form, Peeps are shaped like baby chickens and made of a soft marshmallow rolled in colored sugar, with eyes made of edible wax. They are typically sold in packs of five conjoined marshmallows. One serving of Peeps (five pieces) contains 140 calories, no fat, and 34 grams of sugar, which makes sense since their two main ingredients are sugar and corn syrup. Peeps also contain gelatin, which makes them unsuitable for vegans.

Peeps are manufactured by the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania-based Just Born candy company, which was founded in 1910 by a Russian immigrant named Sam Born and also manufactures such trick-or-treating offenses as Mike & Ikes and Hot Tamales.

According to Just Born’s company history, Born is to thank for several confectionary feats we now take for granted, including producing chocolate sprinkles and that type of chocolate sauce that hardens into a crunchy shell when it hits ice cream; he also invented a machine to put sticks into lollipops, without which our national lollipop game would be sadly deficient.

In 1953, Just Born bought the Rodda candy company, which was based in nearby Lancaster and produced jelly beans as well as a line of handmade, chick-shaped marshmallows. Born’s son Bob Born figured out how to mechanize the marshmallow creation process, which shortened the manufacturing time from nearly 27 hours to six minutes. (Bob also ditched the wings that used to be piped onto each Peep, which further streamlined the process.)

Not just for Easter anymore

Much like that other tooth-achingly sweet seasonal treat candy corn, Peeps have expanded beyond their original limited availability to become a year-round sweet. They come in different colors (blue, pink, lavender), flavors (cotton candy, gingerbread, “lemon delight,” chocolate-covered, candy cane), and shapes — Peeps bunnies were introduced in the 1980s, and now the line includes hearts, pumpkins, Minions, and more.

But the original yellow chicks (whose flavor is simply “sugar”) are still the most popular, and the candy is still most commonly associated with Easter. The website WalletHub estimates that more than 1.5 billion Peeps are eaten every Easter.

Still, Peeps are rather divisive. While they have their die-hard fans, many others devote an astonishing amount of energy to railing against them. Take, for instance, the 2012 Guardian article “Sorry, but Peeps are disgusting,” or the Facebook groups dedicated to Peep hate. Angela Hill of the Oakland Tribune finds them unsettling:

I dislike them intensely. And they know it, which merely bolsters their resolve. I can see it in their beady little food-colored eyes — their defiance, their sheer pluck. You can’t get just one Peep, you know, and that’s no accident. They come in packs. One might even say, battalions.

And then there’s this vivid description of consuming a Peep, courtesy of the Dallas Observer: “It’s like eating a tablespoon of sugar lovingly dusted atop a mouthful of your gramma’s cellulite.”

Useful as food and fun

Peeps are as versatile as their flavor is one-note. If you’re a Peep purist, you can just eat them straight from the package — either fresh or stale and slightly crunchy, as some people prefer. (Matthew Pye, Just Born’s VP of trade relations and corporate affairs, told HuffPost that 70 to 75 percent of people prefer “fresh” Peeps, which still leaves a sizable portion of Peep eaters who opt to consume them on the crunchier side of the sell-by date.) If you’re of legal drinking age, you could pair them with wine or beer.

If you want to get creative, Peeps-centric recipes abound, from the relatively innocuous (Peeps Krispies treats) to the elaborate (a Peeps sunflower cake) to the straight-up revolting (“Peepza” — literally just Peeps on a pizza — and “Peepshi,” a Willy Wonka fever dream wherein faux sushi is constructed from Peeps, Nerds, Fruit by the Foot, etc.). Momofuku Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi suggests skewering them to roast over a fire or flattening them and drying them in the oven to make “Peep chips.”

But if you’d rather not eat them at all, you can still experiment with Peeps in the name of science. One time-honored tradition is to put them in the microwave to see what happens. (Spoiler alert: They get big. Like, really big.) This practice has also led to the exotic sport known as Peep jousting:

In 1999, Emory University researchers Gary Falcon and James Zimring performed perhaps the most exhaustive Peeps testing in human history, exploring the candies’ durability in the face of a variety of substances. According to the Emory Report:

To test Peep solubility, they began with simple tap water, then moved on to boiling water, then to acetone, sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide, but were left dumbfounded by Peeps’ apparent invulnerability to each.

Then they tried Phenol, a protein-dissolving solvent lethal to humans in amounts as small as a single gram. Peeps proved mortal to such a substance — well, almost. One hour after plunging an unfortunate Peep into its grisly demise, all that remained in the beaker was a pair of brown carnauba wax eyes floating in a purple Phenol soup.

If you’re more of a right-brained soul, you might consider using the confections to create an artistic masterpiece. In 2006, the Washington Post launched an annual “Peep Show” diorama contest, asking entrants to create a 3D scene in which all the characters are Peeps. The contest sometimes drew several hundred participants, whose submissions ranged from a Peep van Gogh to a Peepified scene from the movie Up. (You can see past winners of the diorama contest here.) The competition was such a cult favorite that when in 2017 the Post decided to discontinue it, the fine folks at Washington City Paper took it upon themselves to keep the tradition going. (You can see the winners of 2018’s contest online, including an ode to the year’s Best Picture winner titled “The Shape of Sugar.”)

But the Post wasn’t even the first newspaper to hold a Peeps contest — that honor goes to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, whose staff writer Richard Chin dreamed up the competition in 2004. And the New Yorker argues that the tradition of sugar-based dioramas goes back much further, to the 17th century:

By the early Renaissance, inventive European court confectioners were crafting elaborate sculptures for special meals, often designed to echo or compliment the themes of the musical or theatrical entertainments that would accompany a banquet. These could also be allegorical in nature, depicting religious scenes or commemorating military victories. At the wedding of Maria de Medici to Henri IV, in Florence, in 1600, the groom was not in attendance, but he was represented by an impressive sugar sculpture depicting him on horseback.

In a less, uh, artful contest, in 2016 Maryland’s National Harbor hosted the first World Peeps Eating Championship. The winner, Matt Stonie of San Jose, took home $3,500 for consuming an impressive (or disturbing) 200 Peeps in five minutes.

Sugar and strife

Things have soured a bit for the sugary candy lately. In recent years, Peep-maker Just Born has been mired in a sticky legal battle with its union workforce over the company’s longtime pension plan. This fascinating Washington Post article goes into it in depth (and is worth reading in full if you’ve made it this far into an article about Peeps), but I’ll explain it briefly here.

Just Born has what’s called a multiemployer pension program, which allows employees enrolled in the program to move among participating companies and carry their benefits with them. In 2016, citing rising labor costs, Just Born tried to bar all new employees from joining the pension plan, funneling them to the 401(k) program instead while sidestepping a $60 million fee required by federal law to make the move. The union workers went on strike (adopting the utterly perfect chant “No justice, no Peeps!”); the strike came to a messy end four weeks later after several workers crossed the picket line and the rest eventually went back to work for fear of losing their jobs.

Then the tangled legal bit began. Per the Post:

The pension, which is administered by a group of labor officials and corporate executives from the 200 participating companies, has sued the company, alleging it improperly tried to stop enrolling new employees in the pension without paying the withdrawal fee. The company has sued the union, demanding “monetary damages” and alleging the strike was illegal.

The outcome of the case could have big ramifications for companies with multiemployer pension programs and the nearly 10 million American workers those programs cover. If Just Born manages to get out of that $60 million fee, other companies could follow in its footsteps, putting the benefits payouts for millions of American works in doubt.

Again, the Post article is worth reading in full — but rest assured that despite the company’s legal troubles, you don’t need to start stockpiling Peeps just yet.

Where do Peeps fall in the Easter candy hierarchy?

The website Ranker maintains a fluctuating list of the top Easter candies, which confusingly includes both “chocolate-covered marshmallow Peeps” and “bunny Peeps” as separate items. However, that list also considers the unholy monstrosities known as Jordan almonds and thus must be discounted entirely.

But only one Easter candy has the distinction of featuring in the premiere of the controversial Roseanne revival, whose first episode sees main character (and noted Trump supporter) Roseanne Conner chowing down on some Peeps for breakfast. Which, regardless of your politics, seems like a risky move from a nutritional and dental health perspective.

Update, April 4, 2026, 6 am ET: This article was originally published on March 30, 2018, and updated to reflect updated information where available.

Editor’s note, December 25, 8 am ET: This story is being republished for the holiday season. It was originally published in 2020.

It might seem unbelievable given that the “Christmas creep” now begins before Halloween, but the true Christmas season actually starts on Christmas Day itself. That’s right: December 25 marks the official start of the 12 days of Christmas, the Christian tradition that shares its name with a relentlessly stick-in-your-head Christmas carol.

Here are a few things you may not know about the song and the season.

What are the 12 days of Christmas?

The 12 days of Christmas is the period in Christian theology that marks the span between the birth of Christ and the coming of the Magi, the three wise men. It begins on December 25 (Christmas) and runs through January 6 (the Epiphany, sometimes also called Three Kings’ Day). The four weeks preceding Christmas are collectively known as Advent, which begins four Sundays before Christmas and ends on December 24.

Some families choose to mark the 12-day period by observing the feast days of various saints (including St. Stephen on December 26) and planning daily Christmas-related activities, but for many, things go back to business as usual after December 25.

“The 12 Days of Christmas” is also a Christmas carol in which the singer brags about all the cool gifts they received from their “true love” during the 12 days of Christmas. Each verse builds on the previous one, serving as a really effective way to annoy family members on road trips.

The lyrics to “The 12 Days of Christmas” have changed over the years

The version most people are familiar with today begins with this verse:

On the first day of Christmas,

my true love gave to me

a partridge in a pear tree.

The song then adds a gift for each day, building on the verse before it, until you’re reciting all 12 gifts together:

Day 2: two turtle doves

Day 3: three French hens

Day 4: four calling birds

Day 5: five gold rings

Day 6: six geese a-laying

Day 7: seven swans a-swimming

Day 8: eight maids a-milking

Day 9: nine ladies dancing

Day 10: 10 lords a-leaping

Day 11: 11 pipers piping

Day 12: 12 drummers drumming

The history of the carol is somewhat murky. The earliest known version first appeared in a 1780 children’s book called Mirth With-out Mischief. (A first edition of that book sold for $23,750 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2014, but you can also buy a digital copy on Amazon.) Some historians think the song could be French in origin, but most agree it was designed as a “memory and forfeits” game, in which singers tested their recall of the lyrics and had to award their opponents a “forfeit” — a kiss or a favor of some kind — if they made a mistake.

Many variations of the lyrics have existed at different points. Some mention “bears a-baiting” or “ships a-sailing”; some name the singer’s mother as the gift giver instead of their true love. Early versions list four “colly” birds, an archaic term meaning black as coal (blackbirds, in other words). And some people theorize that the five gold rings actually refer to the markings of a ring-necked pheasant, which would align with the bird motif of the early verses.

In any case, the song most of us are familiar with today comes from an English composer named Frederic Austin; in 1909, he set the melody and lyrics (including changing “colly” to “calling”) and added as his own flourish, the drawn-out cadence of “five go-old rings.”

The song is not a coded primer on Christianity

A popular theory that’s made the internet rounds is that the lyrics to “The 12 Days of Christmas” are coded references to Christianity; it posits that the song was written to help Christians learn and pass on the tenets of their faith while avoiding persecution. Under that theory, the various gifts break down as follows, as the myth-debunking website Snopes explained:

2 Turtle Doves = The Old and New Testaments

3 French Hens = Faith, Hope and Charity, the Theological Virtues

4 Calling Birds = the Four Gospels and/or the Four Evangelists

5 Golden Rings = The first Five Books of the Old Testament, the “Pentateuch,” which gives the history of man’s fall from grace

6 Geese A-laying = the six days of creation

7 Swans A-swimming = the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven sacraments

8 Maids A-milking = the eight beatitudes

9 Ladies Dancing = the nine Fruits of the Holy Spirit

10 Lords A-leaping = the Ten Commandments

11 Pipers Piping = the 11 faithful apostles

12 Drummers Drumming = the 12 points of doctrine in the Apostle’s Creed

The partridge in the pear tree, naturally, represents Jesus Christ.

This theory seems tailor-made for circulation via chain emails, but it actually makes little sense once you examine it. Snopes has a great explanation of the many, many holes in its logic. The most egregious: First, the song’s gifts have nothing to do with their Christian “equivalents,” so the song is basically useless as a way to remember key pillars of the faith. And second, if Christians were so restricted from practicing their faith that they had to conceal messages in a song, they also wouldn’t be able to celebrate Christmas in the first place — much less sing Christmas carols.

The late historian William Studwell, known for his Christmas carol expertise, also refuted the coded message idea. As he told the Religion News Service in 2008:

This was not originally a Catholic song, no matter what you hear on the Internet. … Neutral reference books say this is nonsense. If there was such a catechism device, a secret code, it was derived from the original secular song. It’s a derivative, not the source.

Sorry to spoil your dinner party fun fact; while I’m at it, I might as well tell you “Ring Around the Rosie” isn’t about the Black Plague, either.

Giving someone all the gifts in the song would be … pricey

To calculate the cost of all the gifts in “The 12 Days of Christmas,” I’ll turn to the PNC financial services group’s annual Christmas Price Index, which PNC has been putting out since 1984; it calculates the cost of all the gifts in the song based on current market rates. Given the current pace of inflation, this smorgasbord of gift-giving is extra-costly this year: The total for 2022 comes to a whopping $45,523.27, up 10.5 percent from 2021 prices, or $197,071.09 if you count each mention of an item separately (which would amount to 364 gifts in all) — a 9.8 percent increase from last year.

The rising price of items like gold and fertilizer means those five rings ($1,245, a 39 percent increase) and the infamous partridge in a pear tree ($280.18, up nearly 26 percent) are costlier than ever. Some things haven’t changed at all, though — as the index points out, the federal minimum wage hasn’t increased since 2009, meaning the rate for eight maids a-milking is holding steady at a relative steal of $58.

No matter the cost, though, actually giving someone all this stuff is probably not a great idea; just think of all the bird poo.

Are there any other versions of “The 12 Days of Christmas”?

The structure of “The 12 Days of Christmas” lends itself easily to parodies, of which there have been many. There’s Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck version, Twisted Sister’s heavy metal take, and, of course, a Muppets version (featuring John Denver):

Others have attempted to interpret the 12 Days of Christmas via food, with dishes like deviled eggs representing geese a-laying and so on. Then there’s the “12 Days of Christmas diet,” which the Atlantic’s Olga Khazan attempted in 2013. She calculated the calories in a serving of each bird mentioned in the song and offset them with the calories burned by the various activities (milking, leaping, etc.). Turns out all that poultry is somehow less indulgent than the typical American holiday meal. She sums up:

If you ate all of the birds in one day, including the pheasant pie, but not including all the trimmings for the other dishes, and subtracted the energy you expended milking, dancing, leaping, and drumming, you’d have consumed 2,384 net calories. That’s really not bad, considering the average American Thanksgiving dinner adds up to about 4,500 calories.

It seems even more reasonable, relatively speaking, when you consider that if you wanted to burn off your meal by just singing its namesake tune, you’d have to make it all the way through the song roughly 300 times — about 17.5 hours of caroling. And that’s a gift I doubt anyone would welcome.

Update, December 1, 2022, 11:05 am: This story, originally published in 2020, has been updated with the 2022 numbers from PNC’s Christmas Price Index.

Editor’s note, August 1, 2023: Paul Reubens died on July 30 of cancer. He was 70. Our story on Reubens’s most famous creation, Pee-wee Herman, originally published on March 19, 2016, follows.

Pee-wee Herman, created and embodied by Paul Reubens, came into the world in 1977, when Reubens was a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe. Reubens and Phil Hartman, a friend and fellow Groundlings performer (who died in 1998), conceived of the character together; Pee-wee was a hit with Groundlings audiences and soon became a regular on the Late Show With David Letterman and other talk shows. The character’s stage show, developed at the Groundlings Theatre, eventually moved to LA and was taped for an HBO special.

Pee-wee made his first onscreen appearance in 1980’s Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie; by 1985, Reubens had his first feature film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. That, in turn, spawned the kids’ show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which aired Saturday mornings on CBS from 1986 to 1990.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Pee-wee or Reubens without mentioning the scandal that briefly derailed Reubens’s career and drove him out of the public eye for a time. In 1991, Reubens was arrested for masturbating in an adult movie theater in his hometown of Sarasota, Florida. News of the arrest — and a mug shot featuring the star with long hair and stubble, a deliberate departure from his natty onscreen persona that was made all the more disturbing by the context — quickly rounded the tabloids.

Though Reubens hadn’t appeared in character as Pee-wee for a year and a half at that point, CBS was still airing reruns of his show; once news of his arrest broke, CBS quickly pulled the reruns, causing many to mistakenly assume his show had been canceled because of the incident. Reubens was subjected to ridicule, and TV studios and merchandisers rushed to distance themselves from the Pee-wee character.

However, some of Reubens’s famous friends came to the actor’s defense, including Cyndi Lauper, who had sung the theme song for Pee-wee’s Playhouse (under the name Ellen Shaw), and — now rather cringe-inducingly — Bill Cosby, who at the time released a statement that read in part, “Whatever (Reubens has) done, this is being blown all out of proportion.”

Reubens may never fully escape the scandal, but he and the character of Pee-wee have managed to remain a regular presence in Hollywood nonetheless. Reubens has worked steadily (with a couple of breaks in the early ’90s) since the late 1970s on a wide variety of projects. He’s played roles in comedy favorites like 30 Rock, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, the short-lived Bryan Fuller series Pushing Daisies, and contemporary hits like The Blacklist and Gotham. He’s also done voice acting on a number of animated shows and brought his Pee-wee Herman Show to Broadway in 2010.

The character was a critical and box office success

In creating Pee-wee, Reubens, in a somewhat genius stroke, figured out that the line between the world of late-night television and early morning children’s television was blurrier than most people realized — and thus, a specific kind of humor could appeal to both audiences. And his cockeyed comedic sensibility — “an unreasonable love of repetition, absurdity, narrative disjuncture and jokes that either last way too long or flit by in a short-attention-span-accommodating blink,” as the New York Times Magazine described it — fit the bill exactly.

His idea paid big dividends: Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (which marked director Tim Burton‘s feature film debut and was scored by Danny Elfman) was a bona fide box office success, grossing $40 million off its $6 million budget — the 19th-highest-grossing movie of its release year, 1985, ahead of other cult classics like Weird Science, The Black Cauldron, and The Sure Thing.

The subsequent TV series, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, became a hit precisely because of Pee-wee’s wide-ranging appeal. As Caseen Gaines recounts in the book Inside Pee-Wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon:

An onslaught of positive press and word of mouth began to bring more adults to Saturday morning television. Although adults were not the target audience, and were considered worthless viewers as far as the advertisers were concerned, they were bringing their children, nieces, and nephews to the show. Within weeks, the show started climbing in the ratings, ultimately surpassing The Smurfs before the first season concluded.

Critics took notice as well; Pee-wee’s Playhouse won an impressive 15 Daytime Emmys during its four years on the air and was nominated for many more.

Reubens deliberately kept almost every aspect of Pee-wee ambiguous

As Reubens has said of his famous character, according to Wired’s great history: “To me, there was a conceptual aspect to Pee-wee. … If you thought Pee-wee was a kid, fine. If you thought Pee-wee was a man trying to be a kid, great. If you thought Pee-wee was developmentally challenged, fine, whatever.”

That character’s open-endedness is part of why Pee-wee’s Playhouse attracted so many disparate audiences; another aspect of his popularity is that Reubens championed a brand of weirdo inclusion that appealed to kids and adults alike.

This came through in the show’s cast — which featured more African American performers than many TV shows airing today (including future stars such as S. Epatha Merkerson and Laurence Fishburne) — as well as its conception of sexuality, which was always a bit murky and fluid. Pee-wee, after all, looked like a grown man, included plenty of sexual innuendo in his show, and in 1988’s Big Top Pee-wee shared an onscreen kiss of record-setting length with actress Valeria Golino. But he also cavorted around his house in bunny slippers and in the Pee-wee’s Playhouse episode “Pajama Party” decided he loved fruit salad so much he would marry it.

Judd Apatow, who produced Pee-wee’s Big Holiday for Netflix, aptly described the character’s appeal to the New York Times Magazine: ‘‘When I was younger, I didn’t put my finger on why I liked Pee-wee so much — it just made me laugh.” He continued:

But looking back, it’s a group of strange people who are having a great time and being really nice to each other, and as a slightly weird kid I must have understood that. I liked watching someone so different whom the audience loved. The idea that unique people were getting applause, that the crowd was going crazy for Pee-wee, made me feel you didn’t have to be the football-team quarterback.

Pee-wee’s Playhouse conveyed the feeling that differences large and small were not just accepted but appreciated; it’s not hard to see why it would strike kids as comforting and adults as groundbreaking.

Fifty years is a long time. It’s half a century. It’s the average life span of a chimpanzee. It’s enough time to create one (1) Mariah Carey (maybe?). And as of this year, it’s also how long people have been ordering Shamrock Shakes at McDonald’s.

Every March since 1970 — along with St. Patrick’s Day, possibly corrupt college basketball tournaments, and the opportunity to misquote Julius Caesar — the seasonal tradition has returned to McDonald’s. Despite not being the fast-food chain’s best-known (or, arguably, best) limited-time product, it’s garnered a cult following over the years. So in honor of its golden anniversary at the Golden Arches (and our collective slow march toward death), let’s take a look at its backstory, which is surprisingly rich for a novelty fast-food beverage.

A green-tinted tradition born in the ’70s

The Shamrock Shake, as manufactured by McDonald’s, is a pale neon green milkshake, served with whipped cream. It comes in three sizes ranging from small (460 calories and 13 grams of fat) to large (790 calories and 22 grams of fat).

The Shamrock Shake is only available seasonally, typically arriving on the McDonald’s menu sometime in February and remaining there at least through St. Patrick’s Day (March 17), generally disappearing again in mid- to late March. After debuting in 1970 and returning annually for the next two decades, it was briefly discontinued in the 1990s but brought back in the 2000s due to customer demand. In 2012 it was made available at every McDonald’s nationwide, but it’s currently a regional offering in the US. It’s also available at some stores in Canada and Ireland.

In 1980, McDonald’s also introduced the Shamrock Sundae, a vanilla sundae drizzled with disconcertingly green syrup, but due to low sales it was discontinued after a year. Now it’s mostly relegated to awesomely ’80s commercials like this one:

What flavor is the Shamrock Shake?

This might seem obvious — it’s mint, right? — but Googling the query turns up quite a few debates on the matter. Some people claim it has a hint of lime, others say it’s as minty as toothpaste, and still others think it’s just a vanilla shake dyed green. Turns out these have all been correct at various points in history: At least one account says the original recipe contained lemon-lime sherbet; the formula was changed in 1973 to be just vanilla with food coloring. Not until 1983 did the shake become the mildly minty confection we know today.

Per the McDonald’s website, the shake’s three components are vanilla reduced-fat ice cream, “Shamrock Shake syrup,” and whipped light cream. It probably would not surprise you to know that all of these ingredients contain various forms of high-fructose corn syrup.

In 2017, McDonald’s experimented with several chocolate Shamrock shake versions, including a Shamrock chocolate-chip frappe, a Shamrock hot chocolate, and a Shamrock mocha — plus a special straw specifically designed for the shakes. This year, the chain is offering the OG shake plus an Oreo Shamrock McFlurry, in case your utensil of choice is spoon rather than straw.

The history of the Shamrock Shake is more detailed than you'd expect for a fast-food novelty beverage

When McDonald’s introduced the shake in 1970, it was called the St. Patrick’s Day Shake; it received its new, catchier name a few years later. The Shamrock Shake is also partially responsible for creating the network of Ronald McDonald House Charities, which provide housing and other services to sick children and their families.

In early 1974, the daughter of Philadelphia Eagles tight end Fred Hill was undergoing treatment for leukemia, and Hill and his wife, Fran, were spending most of their time in the hospital. They wanted to find a housing solution for other families like them, so Hill turned to his teammates to help fundraise for alternate accommodations.

Eagles general manager Jim Murray had the idea to harness the power of McDonald’s advertising; through a friend at the company’s ad agency, Don Tuckerman, Murray learned that the next McD’s promotion would be to add the Shamrock Shake to the menu for St. Patrick’s Day. Murray worked with McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc and regional manager Ed Rensi to organize a week-long promotion wherein all proceeds from Shamrock Shake sales would be donated to the Eagles’ fundraising efforts.

They raised enough money to buy a seven-bedroom house near the hospital, which in 1974 became the first Ronald McDonald House. The nonprofit network has since expanded to include 357 houses in multiple countries.

Though Shamrock Shake sales no longer benefit the nonprofit network, the two have been linked in recent publicity stunts — like this one from 2010, in which a 24-foot shake was dumped into the Chicago River in honor of a McDonald’s donation to build a new Ronald McDonald House in the city.

This year, McDonald’s is doing a splashy fundraiser for the charity: Per CNN, it’s auctioning off an 18-karat gold, gem-encrusted Shamrock Shake cup supposedly appraised at $90,000, with all proceeds going to Ronald McDonald House.

According to the eBay auction page, the cup, which is sized to fit around the plastic container your garden-variety Shamrock Shake is served in, is adorned with “50 green emeralds and white diamonds — representing 50 years of Shamrock Shake flavor and delicious whipped topping. There are 50 yellow diamonds in each of the Golden Arches for 50 years of being a fan fave at McDonald’s.”

As of the morning of February 28, the cup was going for $32,100 with 52 bids; if you happen to have tens of thousands of spare dollars lying around and want to get in on the action, the auction is open until March 6.

The secret to the shake’s popularity: artificial scarcity

More than 60 million Shamrock Shakes have been sold since 1970, according to Fox News. David Zlotnick, senior director of global public relations for McDonald’s, told Vox that it’s “one of McDonald’s most popular seasonal menu items and has gained a cult-like following over the years,” though he declined to provide any hard numbers. He also said the Shamrock Shake is most popular in Philadelphia, the birthplace of its “origin story,” so to speak.

The primary driver of the shake’s popularity is its “seasonality,” a.k.a. limited availability. Not only is the drink only available for a short time each year, it’s also not offered at every McDonald’s, which has led to more than one journalist chronicling an ill-fated search for the shake.

The shake has even been the subject of a scandal or two. In 2010, Jimmy Fallon caused a Shamrock Shortage at the McDonald’s in New York’s Union Square when he bought 100 of the shakes to hand out to members of his Late Night audience after taping that evening’s show. And in 2017, McDonald’s drew mockery and ire for a (since-deleted) Twitter video advertising its new chocolate Shamrock shake, featuring a man in a tartan hat with bagpipes sipping his beverage as Stonehenge appeared in the background. That the Shamrock Shake is not exactly a symbol of authentic Irish culture doesn’t lessen the ridiculousness of a fast-food chain using Scottish cultural signifiers and one of England’s most famous landmarks to hawk its tangentially St. Patrick’s Day–related novelty drink.

Controversy aside, the shake’s cult fandom pales in comparison to that of the McRib, which is arguably the most well-known limited-time offering ever to grace a McDonald’s menu. Many news outlets (including Vox) have tried to explain its meaty mystery. But this fascinatingly in-depth piece from the Awl’s Willy Staley, though focused on determining whether the unpredictable emergence of the McRib is tied to the price of pork, sums up the psychology behind the sandwich as well as its fellow limited-time menu items, Shamrock Shakes included:

We’re marks, novelty-seeking marks, and McDonald’s knows it. Every conspiracy theorist only helps their bottom line. They know the sandwich’s elusiveness makes it interesting in a way that the rest of the fast food industry simply isn’t. It inspires brand engagement, even by those who do everything they can to not engage with the brand. I’m likely playing a part in a flowchart on a PowerPoint slide on McDonald’s Chief Digital Officer’s hard drive.

In other words, the Shamrock Shake is a classic example of the “art of artificial scarcity”: By limiting the Shamrock Shake and McRib to certain times of the year, McDonald’s ensures added interest and higher sales. (Plus, it gives us great Onion articles like this one.)

Don’t I remember a weird green mascot of some kind?

You’re thinking of Uncle O’Grimacey. Blobby and bright green with an Irish accent, O’Grimacey was the uncle of Grimace, the big purple … creature … that frequently appeared in the McDonaldland series of TV commercials that McDonald’s began airing in the early 1970s.

The web series Irate the 80’s explains how O’Grimacey was introduced in the ’70s and became the star of several McDonald’s TV commercials and merchandise items before being phased out in the ’80s. (If you fear clowns, beware: Ronald McDonald appears in this video.)

The actor who voiced Uncle O’Grimacey, Lennie Weinrib, also lent his voice to numerous cartoon characters including Scooby-Doo’s nephew Scrappy-Doo, Bigmouth from The Smurfs, and Gomez Addams from the animated Addams Family series.

I’m only reading this to find out where to get a Shamrock Shake

Well, hey, you made it almost all the way to the end! You can order a shake via the McDonald’s app; there’s also a separate finder app available on Google Play. Or you could just make your own — the internet is replete with recipes in every variation you can think of.

And while making your own might require a little more effort than just pulling up to the McDonald’s drive-thru, a homemade version is almost guaranteed to have less high-fructose corn syrup. Plus (and perhaps more importantly), it can be made any time of the year you please, thus finally freeing you from the tyranny of artificial scarcity.

In the fall of 2018, America was infected with Mega Millions fever. The jackpot for the Mega Millions — one of the two biggest nationwide lottery games, along with Powerball — had climbed to an astonishing $1.6 billion, the highest in history, and across the country, cartoon dollar signs were popping into people’s eyes.

After weeks of breathless media speculation, it was announced: A single ticket, sold at a KC Mart in Simpsonville, South Carolina, had won the grand prize — a feat with the approximate odds of one in 302.6 million.

Yet the ticket went unclaimed for months. A winner only has 180 days to come forward with the prize ticket; otherwise, the money would be dispersed among the states based on ticket sales, and the expected windfall for South Carolina ($61 million) and even the clerk whose convenience store sold the golden ticket ($50,000) would evaporate.

Finally, on March 4, just under the cutoff, a woman came forward to claim the prize. But because South Carolina law allows lottery winners to remain anonymous, we may never know the name of the person whose stroke of luck let her walk away with a lump sum of nearly $878 million, the largest payout to a single winner in history.  

Four days later, news outlets had moved on: to the story of an unemployed 54-year-old man who won $173 million off a Mega Millions ticket he bought — and mistakenly left — at a Quick Check in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and was able to reclaim after a Good Samaritan turned in the ticket for the store to hold.

We love stories like this. Lottery wins are a staple of local news coverage, and periodically, when the jackpot climbs high enough, the national press gets in on the action too — and even people who otherwise would never think of it might find themselves shelling out for a ticket. It’s that potent combination of envy and hope; in a world where the American ethos of hard work and perseverance paying off seems increasingly like a lie, where the chips seem stacked against us anyway, why couldn’t it be me, or you, who somehow beats the odds and finds riches beyond measure at a Quick Check off the interstate?

But while the game of lightning-strike fame and fortune might seem like a product of the modern culture that birthed Instagram and the Kardashians, the roots of the lottery in America are as old as the country itself.

A brief history of the lottery

First, a few definitions. Per the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries (NASPL) “lottery” can refer to three things:

1) An entity that operates or administers lottery games — usually a governmental or quasi-government agency or a corporation licensed by a government. 2) A game in which all plays have an equal chance of winning. 3) A game with three components for the players: a prize to be won, a chance to win and not win, and an element of consideration (such as buying a ticket) to enter the game.

Under the umbrella of lottery games are many types: number or daily games (such as Pick 3 and Pick 4), instant games (scratch-off tickets), keno (in which players pick numbers to match numbers chosen by the game from a certain quantity of numbers — 10 of 20 of 80, for instance), online games, and more. The ones that collect the biggest jackpots in North America, and thus the ones you’ve probably heard the most about, are the Mega Millions and Powerball games (more on these below).

While the ways to play have expanded over time, along with the jackpots, the basic concept of lotteries is swirled into the DNA of the country; they were first used to fund the colonies and eventually became the province of the newly formed states. As Jonathan Cohen detailed in a great piece for Vox, they served (and still do) as a sort of voluntary tax, bringing in significant sums for the government without the type of pushback that raising tax rates elicits:

Once states took control of the lottery system, they could authorize games as they saw fit in order to help specific institutions raise money. State governments owned lottery wheels, which were used for drawing tickets, and politicians would lend them to the organizations the state permitted to hold drawings.

Though conservative Protestants have opposed gambling for centuries, many of the first church buildings in the United States were built with lottery money. Many of the world’s most elite universities, too, owe their existence to lotteries. Parts of the campuses of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Dartmouth were paid for with lottery money, and the New York legislature held multiple lotteries to fund the creation of what is now Columbia University. And because lotteries were tied to specific institutions — or even specific buildings — the public had obvious evidence of their effectiveness in avoiding taxes and building the new nation.

Lotteries fell out of favor around the 1850s and were outlawed in the 1890s, and it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the modern lotto emerged: first in 1934 with the Puerto Rico Lottery, then 30 years later with the New Hampshire Sweepstakes. Lotteries were then still illegal at the federal level, but the Department of Justice determined the New Hampshire contest would be permissible as long as tickets didn’t cross state lines (people in Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York were arrested for being in possession of New Hampshire lottery tickets).

According to NH Magazine, it proved to be a huge draw: People flocked to the Granite State to take part in the sweepstakes, which was a horse race; names of ticket holders would be drawn and randomly assigned to one of the 11 competing horses, and dollar amounts were designated for first place ($100,000), second place ($50,000), and so on. If their horse won, so would they. By the time the race began, the state had sold $5.7 million in $3 tickets. Among that first lotto’s grand prize winners were a barber named Frank Malkus and his wife Eleanor, who won $100,000 off a stallion named Roman Brother (about $819,000 today).

After that, the lottery began to catch on in other states. According to the NAASPL, Massachusetts pioneered the scratch-off game in 1975; the “quick pick” numbers option, which now accounts for 35 percent of all lottery sales, launched in 1982; and three years later, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont banded together for the first multi-state lottery, the Tri-State Megabucks.

These days, 44 states and the District of Columbia run their own lotteries. The six states that don’t — and where you also can’t play Powerball or Mega Millions — are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Utah, and, somewhat incredibly, Nevada, home to the gambling paradise of Las Vegas. The reasons vary, per the BBC; Alabama and Utah’s absences are motivated by religious concerns; the state governments of Mississippi and Nevada, which allow gambling, already get a cut of that revenue and don’t want a competing entity to cut into the profits; and Alaska, thanks to its budget surplus from oil drilling, lacks the “fiscal urgency” that might motivate other states to adopt the lottery.

So people in those states who want a crack at the multimillion-dollar jackpots regularly offered by the major multi-state lotto games, Powerball and Mega Millions, are out of luck.

And what, you might ask, is the difference between the two games, anyway? According to Slate, there’s not much. Powerball draws five balls from a lot of 69, versus five from 70 for Mega Millions. And while the two were introduced at different times (Powerball in 1988, Mega Millions in 1996), and were originally mutually exclusive — states where one game could be played couldn’t offer the other — that hasn’t been true since they merged jurisdictions in 2009. Now they’re offered everywhere that also has a state lotto, and per Slate’s Nick Greene, there’s little appreciable difference between them, which is likely intentional to motivate sales:

If it seems like everyone rushes to play Powerball one month and then stocks up on Mega Millions tickets the next, that’s because it’s intentional. The cycle of highly publicized mega-jackpots followed by a trickle of lesser winnings is by design. Powerball reduced its odds to produce bigger prizes in 2015, and Mega Millions followed suit two years later. The result is a kind of seesaw effect, in which the games’ terrible odds allow their jackpots to grow ever-bigger.

Opponents argue that the lottery preys on the already marginalized

Lotteries may be great for states, whose coffers swell thanks to both ticket sales and winners, but that money comes from somewhere, and study after study has suggested it’s largely from low-income people, minorities, and people with gambling addiction.

Vox’s Alvin Chang looked at the data for Connecticut, which has some of the richest and poorest neighborhoods in the country, and found that lotto ticket sales are disproportionately concentrated in zip codes with more low-income and minority residents.

A Business Insider analysis of census data, which divided the total income from all the lotteries in a state by the estimated number of residents, found that Massachusetts spends the most on lottery tickets by far, an average of $767 per person in 2016. West Virginia is in second place at $594, and Rhode Island is in third at $513. All that spending adds up to tens of billions of dollars for state governments, which largely goes to education (though it still represents just a tiny fraction of overall state spending).

While probably few would argue that more funding for education is a bad thing, the demographics of regular lottery players are concerning to the games’ opponents. A Bankrate survey found that among households in the lowest income bracket, 28 percent play the lottery once a week, and those seemingly insignificant ticket purchases add up to more than $400 a year — money that could go toward paying off debt or accumulating savings.

The NASPL disputes these findings. Its website links to a 2016 Gallup poll that found lower-income and less educated Americans were less likely to say they had bought a state lottery ticket in the past year — about 40 percent for people with a household income of less than $36,000 per year, versus 56 percent and 53 percent for middle- and high-income people, respectively.

Still, the lottery’s business model relies on a base of regular players. As Les Bernal, an anti-state-sponsored gambling activist, told Pew Charitable Trusts, state-sponsored lotteries rely heavily on super users, “getting up to 70 to 80 percent of their revenue from 10 percent of the people that use the lottery.” The problem is so pervasive that some state lawmakers have even put forth proposals to limit lotteries, or at least restrict new modes of play like credit card sales of tickets and online games.

And even for those rare few whose hopeful ticket purchases actually pay off, their issues might just be beginning.

The “curse” of lottery winners

Stories of lottery winners may inspire envy, but there’s no shortage of schadenfreude either — which brings us to the cottage industry of horrific stories about “cursed” lottery winners.

While curses aren’t real (as far as I know), winning the lottery has historically seemed to precede a string of terrible luck for many otherwise ordinary people. To preface: In a majority of states, lottery winners are legally not allowed to remain anonymous. As Aditi Shrikant wrote for Vox:

Winners must sign the back of the ticket to officially claim it, then contact their state’s lottery commission, which announces the lottery is closed by saying who won. In only eight states — Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas — are winners allowed to conceal their names, but even then, they can only stay anonymous below a certain earnings threshold or for a certain time period.

It makes sense from the states’ perspective: Putting a face and a name to that big ol’ pile of money makes it easier for other people to imagine themselves in that lucky person’s shoes, and can thus drive the ticket sales that put money in the state budget. To wit, past winners’ full names, hometowns, and even photos are listed right on the Powerball and Mega Millions websites.

But this also means that winner is now low-grade famous — and a potential target for robbery, kidnapping, scam artists, and even murder.

There was Abraham Shakespeare, who won $31 million in 2006 and whose body was found in 2010 concealed under a concrete slab; and Jeffrey Dampier, who after he won $20 million was kidnapped and then shot in the head by his sister-in-law and her boyfriend; and Urooj Khan, who dropped dead the day after winning a comparatively tame $1 million and was later found to have been poisoned by cyanide.

Perhaps the most widely reported tale of woe is that of Jack Whittaker, a kindly West Virginia man who became somewhat of a folk hero in his state after winning $314 million in 2002. As April Witt wrote for the Washington Post Magazine in 2005, Whittaker’s seeming stroke of good luck destroyed his life: He was robbed and sued multiple times, he got a DUI, his business and his marriage fell apart, and his granddaughter Brandi died less than two years later from a drug overdose.

And this isn’t even to touch on the more straightforward issue of financial mismanagement. Per the National Endowment for Financial Education, 70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years. As Jim Shagawat, a financial adviser with Windfall Wealth Advisors, told me, this could be attributed to the fact that “a lot of lottery winners simply don’t have life experience having a lot of money. They do things like give away too much to family and friends, or have scam artists take advantage of them, or they get a feeling like this money’s unlimited and start spending it all.”

Low-income people living paycheck to paycheck — again, the people who are most likely to play the lottery regularly — may not have much experience with investment or savings. “If you’re a trust fund baby, you’re kinda taught about the team of advisers you need” to manage your money, Shagawat told me. Many of us might be able to handle smaller sums but aren’t equipped to deal with, say a windfall of $15 million. “All of a sudden, the way you did things just won’t work anymore.”

Don McNay, a financial adviser and the author of Life Lessons From the Lottery, put it even more bluntly. “The money just overwhelms them,” he told the New York Times’s Joe Nocera in 2012 of lottery winners. “It just causes them to lose their sense of values.”

Gaming the odds

Given that the chance of winning the kind of jackpot that can turn you into an overnight millionaire is infinitesimally small — you’re statistically far more likely to be struck by lightning or guess every single team in your Sweet 16 March Madness bracket correctly — it’s perhaps not surprising that there’s a long history of people trying to hack the lottery, sometimes quite literally.

HuffPost’s Highline tells the story of a couple in their 60s who made nearly $27 million over nine years via games in their home state of Michigan because the husband noticed a flaw in the games’ rules. Their tactic: bulk-buying tickets, thousands at a time, to ensure the odds were in their favor, basically turning playing the lottery into a full-time job. They soon began traveling regularly to play a similar game in Massachusetts, where a group of MIT students had figured out the same thing simultaneously.

The two competing parties’ large bets in the game, called Cash WinFall, eventually triggered an investigation by a Boston Globe reporter and turned into a national scandal; the state lottery commission went on to suspend the licenses of several stores that had sold tickets to the two groups and then announced it would phase out Cash WinFall entirely.

There was also a woman with a PhD in statistics from Stanford who won the Texas lottery four times in 10 years to the tune of nearly $20 million (and who, unlike the MIT and Michigan players, has not been forthcoming about her methods).

Stefan Mandel, a Romanian economist living in Australia, won not only the $27 million jackpot but also $900,000 in additional prizes by systematically buying up every possible number combination in the Virginia lottery. As Zachary Crockett wrote for the Hustle, Mandel was subject to investigation by 14 law enforcement agencies but ultimately found not guilty of wrongdoing; Crockett writes that “in his home country of Australia, he became something of a folk hero: A widely-circulated cartoon depicted him as a kangaroo hopping out of the US with a pouch full of cash.”

And in 2017, PennLive published a whole investigative series on the surprisingly high number of lottery players who’ve won multiple times — too many times to be statistically plausible (though there’s not yet hard evidence of illegal doings).

Of course, there have been some high-profile cases of straight-up cheating too. There was the infamous “Triple Six Fix” incident of 1980, in which Nick Perry, the announcer of Pennsylvania’s “Daily Number” game, cooked up a plot to weight the ping-pong balls used in the drawing to ensure his victory. Aided by the lottery’s “shockingly lax” security, Perry pulled it off, winning $1.8 million with the portentous drawing of “666” — but officials were immediately suspicious and launched an investigation that ended in a criminal conviction for Perry.

Perhaps the biggest lottery scam in the US was orchestrated by a programmer named Eddie Tipton in what’s now known as the “Hot Lotto fraud scandal.” As the New York Times explains, Tipton worked for the Multi-State Lottery Association as a security employee and figured out how to game the lottery via inserting fraudulent code into the random number generator machine to game the system in lotteries across multiple states. Across the long-running scam, he got friends and family members to collect the winning tickets, and eventually was busted after trying to collect a $16.5 million ticket in 2010. Tipton was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2017 (though he could get out on parole much earlier).

While Americans may enjoy a good grifter story, those who game the lottery don’t seem to inspire the same grudging admiration — perhaps because the odds are so long to begin with that for those who do play by the rules, it feels a lot more personal when someone profits by flouting them. HuffPost’s Jason Fagone put it well: “Even if the lottery is a shitty deal and a sucker’s bet, at least everyone who plays is getting the same shitty deal.”

Still, even the wild improbability of winning and the stories of some occasional bad actors is apparently not enough to dissuade many people with a couple of dollars in their pocket and a misty dream in their heart. After all, this weekend’s Powerball jackpot is already up again, to nearly $500 million. As the fraudster Nick Perry’s lottery catchphrase used to go, “If you’ve got it, come and get it; if not, better luck tomorrow.”

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For film buffs, it’s also a chance to revisit perhaps the greatest pie fight ever committed to film: the second reel of Laurel and Hardy’s 1927 Battle of the Century. The clip above shows how the fight — which starts, naturally, with someone slipping on a banana peel — spirals outward from the initial pie-ing into total chaos.

The pie-in-the-face joke has been around since the 1910s and was seen as somewhat tired even before Stan Laurel got to it. As Atlas Obscura recounts, filmmakers had very specific criteria for the pastry projectiles they’d use onscreen:

Filmmakers preferred custard pies for flinging. They were appropriately messy and, without a top crust, likely less painful than a lattice-edged cherry pie would be to the face. In one biography of the silent film comedy star Buster Keaton, author Marion Mead recorded his pratfall-ready custard pie recipe. In it, two baked pie crusts were welded together with a solid foundation of flour and water. Then, they were filled with an inch of thick flour-and-water paste. If the pie was to be thrown at a blonde or a man in a light suit, a chocolate or strawberry garnish was added. For a man in a dark suit, the pie would be garnished with lots of whipped cream for the wreckage to show up well on camera. He also gave advice on how to throw it: like a Roman discus, for instance.

But Laurel envisioned something far bigger than the typical gag: not just one or two pies but thousands of them — 3,000, to be exact, an entire day’s stock from the Los Angeles Pie Company. The gambit paid off, as the stunt garnered acclaim, but after Battle of the Century‘s original theatrical run finished, the footage was nearly lost to history.

As Matthew Dessem recounted in a piece for Slate (which is worth reading in full), after Battle of the Century left theaters in 1928, filmmaker Robert Youngson was probably the last person to see the full version. He reprinted a few scenes from the pie fight to use in his 1957 feature The Golden Age of Comedy. Shortly afterward, the original negatives were found to be decomposing so badly that they were scrapped completely.

It wasn’t until nearly 60 years later, in June 2015, that a full version of Battle of the Century‘s second reel resurfaced, in the private collection of amateur film preservationist Gordon Berkow, who died in 2004. Jon Mirsalis, who had been cataloging Berkow’s collection, assumed the reel was a print of Youngson’s work — but when he opened the canister, he found twice as much film as he was expecting, and soon realized he’d found perhaps the only remaining full copy of the second reel.

Thus, one of the most important pie fights in the history of cinema was preserved for the enjoyment of future generations. To see the full second reel, you’ll probably have to wait for a film festival, but you can find a longer edited version on YouTube, which gives some context for the pie fight. And for a cut that gets right to the crust crux of it, watch the video above.