Happy new year! Now let's go drop a canal boat from the roof: The mysteries of Blogsburg, pt. 2

Maybe less of a mystery and just more of a curiosity than anything, Central Pennsylvanians love to drop big things from high buildings on special occasions. Specifically, they do the dropping on New Year's Eve and the item dropped is somewhat (somehow?) representative of communal pride. New York may have its Big Apple, Washington used to have its very sad and incredibly boring postage stamp, and Raleigh, North Carolina, may have its even sadder acorn (it's the "City of the Oaks," although everyone in my family thinks a giant chitlin' might have been a better, more representative choice), but Central Pennsylvania will always have its

• Wrench (Mechanicsburg)
• Chocolate kiss (Hershey)
• M&M (Elizabethtown)
• Strawberry (Harrisburg)
• Anchor (Shippensburg)
• Lollipop (Hummelstown)
• Huckleberry (New Bloomfield)
• Cigar (Red Lion)
• Canal boat (Liverpool)
• Pretzel (Cleona)
• Pickle (Dillsburg)
• Sled (Duncannon)
• Red rose (Lancaster)
• White rose (York)
• Black rose (and a little too S&M for my tastes) (Hanover)
• (And my personal favorite) Bologna (Lebanon)

(Editor's note: I wish I could take complete credit for this list; some of this I culled from a December 2005 article in the Harrisburg Patriot-News, my only source of information apparently. Some from the Wikipedia. And still more from friends and natives to the region.)

Yes, it's all plenty goofy and strange, and the reasons attached to some of the dropped item seem quite mysterious (sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, folks), at least if you're lazy like me and not willing to do any research into the matter. But you gotta love a part of the world that has a sense of humor and doesn't take itself too seriously.

Maybe if we all just dropped a few more bolognas, pickles, and canal boats from on high, we'd be a kinder, friendlier world.

Coombayah, coombayah.