5 Facts about Fall

With the beautiful colors, cozy feelings, and awesome flavors, Fall is a crowd favorite. Whether you’re planning your next trip to the pumpkin patch, organizing your Halloween costume, or gearing up for Thanksgiving, there is something for everyone! To help you become even more of a Fall expert, let us fill you in on some facts about Fall that you might not have known before.

1. “Pumpkin spice” flavor doesn’t actually contain pumpkin.

Companies that produce edible items (lattes, cookies, doughnuts, etc.) that are pumpkin spice flavored very rarely use pumpkin in their recipes. This flavor consists of a spice blend usually including nutmeg, cinnamon, dry ginger, and cloves. Often the products also contain a synthetic version containing chemicals. These chemicals make your brain think that the flavor is pumpkin. A sad twist on our fall favorites! Luckily there are a lot of ‘copycat’ recipes that actually include real pumpkin and real ingredients. You can recreate some of your favorites at home with less chemicals.

2. Fall means tourism!

There are many destinations that have spectacular fall leaves, attracting dozens of tourists each year. People travel from all over to see the colors and collect some great photos. It’s no beach, but the beauty appeals to travelers, and towns that have beautiful fall colors rake in a lot of money due to tourism in this season.

3. The Fall leaves colors exist all year.

The reason we can’t see the colors is because there is chorophyll blocking our vision from them, and when the time comes, the chorophyll actually fades, exposing the beautiful reds, oranges, and yellows we all know and love. The chorophyll fades because of changes in the length of daylight and changes in temperature, (the leaves stop their food-making process). So it’s not that the leaves change their color, it’s that the chorophyll disappears.

4. Fall isn’t caused by the earth’s distance from the sun.

The distance from the sun doesn’t affect seasons at all. What affects the seasons is actually the earth’s tilt relation to the sun. It gets warmer in each hemisphere when the earth tilts towards the sun and colder when it tilts away.

5. Fall is a specifically American term.

In the 1600s poets coined the phrase “fall of leaves.” This was later shortened to just “fall.” While Autumn was the popular word in Britain, the American colonies and the English did not keep in good communication with one another and so changes between the languages started to occur. By the 1800s the word “fall” had made its firm roots in the American English language.

Now, (after fighting about whether or not candy corn is a delicious sugary sweet or a disgusting and overrated fall favorite) you have some talking points for your next Fall party. Or should we say your next Fall of Leaves party?