From Tamagotchis to Teddy Ruxpin, everyone remembers the coveted holiday toys of their childhood. Some parents stood in line for hours or paid premium prices for these sold-out items, while others simply waited out the hype (and the cost) to score one as a Christmas or Hanukkah gift.

Online shopping portal Ebates took a festive walk down memory lane and created the infographic below. It lists the most desirable children’s presents from 1983 and beyond, and even hints at which toy is likely the must-have item of 2016.

[h/t Entrepreneur]

This year, London’s East Village E20 is the perfect location to spruce up your beard with festive decorations and over-the-top trinkets. On Sunday, December 11, the neighborhood will host a stand at the Christmas Makers Market that will offer all the fixings for seasonal whiskers—including colorful lights. The yuletide makeover is totally free and available to anyone with a beard or pocket that needs a little extra cheer.

If you won’t be around for the holiday market, you can settle for purchasing some online.

[h/t Bored Panda]

Banner image courtesy of iStock.

Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 259th installment in the series.

DECEMBER 6-7, 1916: FALL OF BUCHAREST, LLOYD GEORGE TO PM

Following the German Ninth Army’s storming of the southern Carpathian mountain passes in October-November 1916, outflanking the Romanian armies to the east, the country’s defeat was only a matter of time – and not much, as it turned out. Indeed Romania’s collapse came with remarkable speed as the dismal year closed out, yielding another big victory for the Central Powers and making the end of the war look further away than ever.

The autumn of 1916 saw the tides of war turn sharply against Romania, after it unwisely threw in its lot with the Allies in August: as General Falkenhayn’s Ninth Army poured in from the north, the Danube Army under August von Mackensen (commanding mostly Bulgarian and Turkish troops divided into two army detachments, East and West) attacked from the south, driving back the Bulgarian Third Army as well as belated reinforcements from the Russian Dobruja Army.

By early December the Central Powers were closing in on Bucharest, with Falkenhayn’s Ninth Army and Mackensen’s Danube Army converging on the Romanian capital from the west and south, respectively. The Romanian First Army launched one final, desperate counterattack in an attempt to cut the tightening noose at the Battle of the Argeș River from December 1-3, 1916, but were ultimately undone by the absence of reserves at the critical moment (as well as the Russians’ refusal to join the assault). This brave but futile effort barely delayed the advancing Central Powers forces at a cost of 60,000 Romanian casualties, including dead, wounded, and injured.

The approach of Mackensen’s Bulgarians to the outskirts of the Romanian capital replayed scenes now all too common from the war, with yet another panicked mass evacuation from a big European city, adding Bucharest to the list that already included Brussels, Antwerp, Warsaw, and Belgrade, among many others (top, German troops occupying Bucharest; below, German cavalry enter the city).

One eyewitness, Lady Kennard, a British noblewoman volunteering as a nurse with the Romanian Army, described the chaotic scene in Bucharest’s central station, where a train had been designated to evacuate foreign citizens to Jassy (Iași) in northeast Romania, with the unfortunate omission of an engine to pull it:

At the station we found a seething crowd and a strain standing, into which all Bucarest was trying to get… We found the station-master and told him that we were foreigners, and he led us through dark passages (by this time it was six o’clock) to a distant platform, where we found a long line of carriages, engineless, dark and locked. Apparently no notice had been received that foreigners and diplomats were really leaving.

An engine was finally located and the carriages unlocked, but their ordeal was just beginning. Kennard recalled conditions that, if not quite as bad as those experienced by troops in the battlefield, were still very trying by civilian standards:

The key arrived and we surged in, a seething mass of people, moving in waves. The doors were banged on the coat-tails of the last man in, and the train started before we had even formed a proper queue in the passage. Most of the women were offered seats, the rest of the passengers stood or lay on the floor amongst the baggage; there was no water, there was no light, there was no food… One man had bought a string of sausages during those last frantic minutes at the Bucarest station, and a Russian officer produced some bread and a little chocolate. This is all the food that fourteen peopled shared for twenty hours!

With the ragged Romanian First Army beating a hasty retreat to the northeast as well, on December 6, 1916 Bucharest fell to German troops after scattered fighting, beginning two years of occupation and hardship for its residents. Of course the situation was little better for those who fled, with thousands of civilian refugees starving or dying of disease amid the chaotic retreat. Worse, the survivors were crammed into the remaining unconquered provinces of the kingdom’s rural northeast, a backwards region with primitive infrastructure and inadequate housing.

Romania’s Queen Marie, who lost her infant son to disease just as the final retreat began, remembered the horror of these months:

Those who have never seen them have no notion of what Rumanian roads can become in winter, of how difficult is all circulation, how communication becomes an effort almost beyond human strength – and this winter was a winter of terrible snow and frost. Part of our army had to be quartered in small, miserable villages, cut off from everything, buried in snow, transports were almost impossible, untold of hardships had to be borne… Food was scarce, hardly any wood for heating, soap was a thing almost not to be found, linen was a luxury of better days – illness in every form broke out amongst the soldiers and many died before we could give sufficient aid!

As with any hastily improvised movement of masses of people, accidents happened – with gruesome results. Later in December Lady Kennard described the fate of a train full of refugees that plunged off the rails:

Last night we visited at sunset such a scene of horror as can never, and should never, be described. A train from Bucarest – the last to start… – collided and derailed… No one knows how many hundreds died there by the roadside, some in the flames of the engine’s exploded petrol tank, the greater number crushed into one huge formless mass of flesh and horse-hair, splintered bones and wood.

Kennard added that this was just the final horror endured by the hapless refugees:

The train had started from the capital three whole days before. Family groups clustered on the roofs of carriages… Many died prematurely from exposure, and the few survivors from the final tragedy told nightmare stories of children’s corpses brushed past the carriage windows when the train swept under bridges whose height no one had had the though to measure mentally before they braved the roof.

As Romania’s armies collapsed, Romanian and Allied officials scrambled to deny the country’s wealth of natural resources to the enemy – especially its supplies of petroleum, the largest in Europe (outside Russia’s Caucasus region), which were critical as a source of both fuel and industrial lubricants. Conscious of the growing food shortages afflicting the Central Powers, they also worked to destroy huge quantities of wheat and other grain.

The project of wrecking the Romanian oilfields was organized by a British engineer and member of Parliament, Colonel John Norton-Griffiths, who traveled to Romania and led a team of foreigners and locals in a desperate campaign of large-scale industrial sabotage. Using techniques like filling wells with cement and setting them on fire, Norton-Griffiths and his men managed to destroy 70 refineries and 800,000 tons of oil, or roughly 3.5 million barrels (below, oil wells burning). However with typical efficiency the Germans were able to return many of the wells to service within six months.

The wrecking campaign, unfolding amidst the chaos of a general retreat and mass refugee movements, certainly made for some spectacular scenes. Yvonne Fitzroy, volunteering with a group of Scottish nurses in Romania, recalled the sights as they fled a burning town in eastern Romania in her diary entry on December 8, 1916:

As soon as carriage was past, we got the door open again. The horizon was in a blaze, oil-tanks, granaries, strawstacks, everything burnable was set light to. It was very terrible and very beautiful. Peasants, men, women, and children were running alongside the train in a panic, trying to clamber into the already overcrowded trucks, others had given up the struggle, and collapsed by the side of the line, or had settled down into that familiar dogged tramp with the blazing sky behind them.

LLOYD GEORGE REPLACES ASQUITH

Meanwhile December 7, 1916 saw the Great War claim yet another political casualty, as British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, who had presided over Britain’s entry into the conflict, resigned amid growing criticism of his handling of the war effort. He was replaced by David Lloyd, the Welsh Radical who had previously served as Secretary of State for War, and before that Minister of Munitions (below).

Lloyd George had first joined the government as Minister of Munitions in the spring of 1915, when Asquith was forced to reshuffle his cabinet and form a coalition government by the “shell crisis,” a scandal involving ammunition shortages in the early part of the war. Lloyd George’s energetic maneuvering subsequently helped depose Sir John French, replaced by Douglas Haig as commander of the British Expeditionary Force, and sideline Secretary of State Lord Kitchener (whom Lloyd George succeeded after his death in June 1916).

By now however the fiery Welshman had come to view Asquith himself as the main obstacle to the successful prosecution of the war – in large part because the Prime Minister was more given to plodding deliberation, preferring to adjudicate disputes between rival factions rather than take a position himself. This approach was reflected in the unwieldy War Committee, a special group intended to take executive control of the war effort, which had however ballooned from its original three members to sometimes over a dozen participants, and tended to defer more decisions than it made.

Beginning in November 1916 Lloyd George engineered the overthrow of Asquith with help from political allies including the Unionists (who advocated Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom) Bonar Law and Edward Carson, as well as Law’s ambitious young protégé Max Aitken. In the end it was a palace coup, revealed to a mostly unsuspecting public when On December 7, 1916, King George V asked Lloyd George to form a new government.

Lloyd George would see the British war effort through to the end, and played a major role in crafting the punitive Treaty of Versailles, which many historians believe set the stage for the Second World War. In the short term, however, his appointment was viewed as another indication that the war was destroying the old political order – and there was no end in sight. One ordinary soldier, Edwin Abbey, an American volunteering with the Canadian Army in France, wrote in a letter to his mother on December 10, 1916:

We have a tendency, I think, to be too optimistic and too comfortable and sure of things. That is especially so in England. As a matter of fact, though we shall win in the end, there is struggle and bitterness ahead for us all. I think the new English Premier will be a great advantage to us. Every one has been inspired with his ability to get ahead with things. The crying need everywhere to-day is for leaders, and they are pitifully few.

See the previous installment or all entries.

Meet Salto, a tiny jumping robot inspired by nature. Robotics experts at the University of California-Berkeley designed the adorable, one-legged bot to leap like the bush baby, or galago. Those small primates, native to eastern (and parts of Sub-Saharan) Africa, possess the ability to soar nearly 7 feet into the air in a single hop. Salto reportedly has the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded, and according to LiveScience, researchers hope to someday harness this ability to quickly scan rubble in search-and-rescue missions.

Salto (which is short for Saltatorial Locomotion Terrain Obstacles) stands 10 inches high, and weighs a mere .2 pounds. But what the robot lacks in size, it makes up for in nimbleness. Salto can leap to heights of more than 3 feet—and then jump again, and again. (Other robots can technically jump higher than Salto, but they have to “wind up” before repeating the process.) The speedy automaton can also climb at a rate of nearly 6 feet per second, faster than any other machine of its kind.

Salto is the brainchild of UC-Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, and its members recently published news of its existence in the journal Science Robotics. The study’s lead author—Duncan Haldane, a robotics PhD student—said he was inspired to create a machine like Salto after conversing with first responders at an urban search-and-rescue training site. He envisioned a gadget that was tiny (and quick) enough to move through the rubble without dislodging it.

A machine like the one Haldane described would have to have superior jumping abilities, so he and his lab mates searched the animal kingdom for an animal with the requisite “vertical jumping agility”—a term they use to describe “the ratio of the maximum jump height to the time it takes to complete one jump.” The winner ended up being the bush baby, which can leap between tree branches at 7 feet per second.

The secret to the African primate’s famous jump is its legs: They’re able to crouch ultra-low toward the ground, which allows them to store energy in their tendons and release it en masse seconds later.

“Animals adapted specifically for jumping have this kind of super-crouch posture,” Haldane explains in a video recorded by UC-Berkeley. “The longer they stay in a crouch, the more energy they can transfer into their tendons and the more energy they can return for jumping. So we built into Salto the capability for a super-crouch.”

Salto’s “tendon” is a latex spring that’s attached to its motor, which twists before it lifts off to create—and release—jumping energy. It can’t jump quite like the bush baby, which can jump 2.24 meters per second. However, Salto comes close, with 1.75 meters per second.

Watch Salto in action in the video below.

[h/t LiveScience]

Growing up, Alton DuLaney received many beautifully-wrapped presents. “My dad was a great gift wrapper,” he tells mental_floss. “He always made the holidays and birthdays really special.” Those wraps clearly stuck with DuLaney, who grew up to become creative director at Kate’s Paperie and, in 2008, took home the top prize in the Scotch Most Gifted Wrapper Contest (he wrapped, among other things, a Baby Grand piano).

These days, the artist and University of Houston teacher is helping novices nail their gift wraps via tutorials on Craftsy.com. DuLaney’s motto? Put the present in presentation. “Gift giving should not be stressful,” he says. “It should be something fun. When you gift wrap something, it shows that you put some individual time and attention to make it something special. If you have fun with it, your gift recipient is probably going to have fun with it, too.”

1. PREP YOUR WORKSPACE …

“Create your workspace before you create,” DuLaney advises. Because he prefers to stand, he makes a sturdy, waist-high table or countertop his base. Whatever you choose to work on, make sure the surface is clean. Ditto your hands: “You don’t want to get lotion or anything that might be on your hands onto the beautiful paper or ribbon,” DuLaney says.

2. … AND HAVE THE RIGHT TOOLS ON HAND.

No workspace is complete without the proper tools. DuLaney always has a ruler and two pairs of scissors—one for paper and one for ribbon. “Sometimes your paper will have glitter or other things on it that will dull your scissors,” he says. “When you cut your ribbon, you want to have a very super-sharp pair of scissors to get a nice, clean cut.” To tell the difference, he ties a tiny bit of ribbon around the handle of the ribbon scissors.

DuLaney also has two kinds of Scotch tape at the ready: Double-sided for complicated areas, and gift wrap tape with a matte finish “so even when it’s on the outside of the paper, it virtually disappears—you don’t see it.” He also keeps embellishments on hand to decorate the outside of the gift (more on that in a bit). “I like to gather all of those things before I start, and that way, once the creative juices are flowing, you don’t have to stop and say, ‘Where are my scissors? Where’s my tape?’” he says.

3. USE A MEDIUM GRADE PAPER.

If your paper is too thin, it will tear easily, allowing package corners to poke through; too-thick paper, on the other hand, leads to a bulky wrap. DuLaney prefers a medium-grade paper with a bit of a metallic finish, which creates nice, sharp creases.

4. CONSIDER DOING A PRACTICE RUN.

“This is going to sound crazy, but I always tell people to practice,” DuLaney says. “At the end of the season, I’ll go buy gift wrap on sale, and [next year], I’ll practice my wrapping before I start wrapping.” DuLaney advises practicing with ribbon, too.

If he has a special paper—something hand-painted or hand-stamped—DuLaney will do a dry run with regular paper to see how it will work. “Then I’ll unwrap [the gift] and use that paper as a pattern, just like if you were working with a piece of fabric—you would use a paper pattern to make your fabric pattern,” he says.

5. CAREFULLY MEASURE YOUR PAPER.

To get the most use from your roll, wrap packages with the longest side of the box facing the cut edge of the paper whenever possible. Then, before making your cut, pull the paper up over the sides of the box to measure: You want just enough paper on either side so they slightly overlap in the middle—meaning, each side will be a smidge longer than half the width of your box. “If [the package is] big, I’ll actually break out a ruler, to make sure I have more than half,” DuLaney says. He always errs on the side of too much paper—you can always trim later.

6. PLACE YOUR PACKAGE TOP DOWN—AND NEVER PUT TAPE ON IT.

When it’s finally time to wrap your gift, place it top down on the paper. Next, pull one edge of the paper just beyond the edge of your gift; fold it to hide the cut edge—the white part, which DuLaney calls “the meat” of the paper. Most people would tape that to the package, but DuLaney advises against that. “When you take that paper off, you want both the ribbon and the paper to just fall away and reveal what’s inside it,” he says. Instead, grab the other side of the paper and pull it under the side with the folded edge. Align the folded edge with the end of the package and tape.

Next, rotate the box to one of the open sides and fold the short sides down to create long flaps; repeat on the other side. “This keeps the package from sliding around inside the paper,” DuLaney says. Fold the flap closest to you downward; then, fold the one closest to your work surface toward you and tape. That way, “when you turn the gift over, and place the bow on top, the side flaps are going down, so you don’t see into the workings of the gift wrap.” Finally, using your finger and your thumb, crease the edges of your wrapped package. You can watch DuLaney walk Jimmy Kimmel through the process above.

7. IF YOU RUN OUT OF PAPER, MAKE IT LOOK LIKE YOU MEANT TO DO IT.

If you mess up and don’t cut enough paper (or are at the end of your roll), it’s no big deal. There are solutions that make it look like that was part of your plan all along—like creating a belly band. “I cut a strip of paper, fold under each edge, and sometimes, I’ll pleat that into a tuxedo fold in the middle, and I’ll tape that to the other paper,” DuLaney says. When he does this, he wraps the gift top-side up. “I’ll have the gift right-side up and will construct the paper on top of the gift, so the belly band becomes the centerpiece.” Have a slice of exposed package on the ends? Use a wide ribbon or embellishments to disguise it.

8. WHEN WRAPPING CYLINDERS, PLEATING IS KEY.

There are two ways of dealing with a cylinder: What DuLaney calls the bon-bon method—“where you scrunch the paper on each end and tape the ribbon on it” so it looks like a candy—and pleating. Trust us when we say pleating is easier to do than it is to explain—check out this video for a tutorial.

9. ADD EMBELLISHMENTS.

Once you’re finished wrapping, put the present in presentation by adding embellishments to the outside of the package. This could be as simple as a ribbon, but DuLaney often kicks it up a notch. “I like to give a little gift on the outside that’s a hint of what’s on the inside,” he says. “If I’m giving a book, I might embellish the gift with bookmarks; if I’m giving a journal, I might embellish with a couple of writing instruments on the outside.” Sometimes, his embellishments follow gift wrapping trends. “There are a lot of wood grain papers on the market this season,” he says. “You can wrap with that and embellish with a sprig of rosemary from your garden or a bough of holly from your holiday tree.”

10. EMBRACE UNUSUAL SHAPES.

Wrapping boxes is easy, but what happens if what you need to wrap isn’t box-shaped? DuLaney has several methods for dealing with this. The first—and easiest—is to grab a gift bag. “When I do a gift bag, I gift wrap my gift bag,” he says. “I’ll add a ribbon or a bow around the handle, or I’ll replace the handle with a matching ribbon.” Other times, he might wrap something tangentially related to a gift to place under the tree before revealing the real deal. “If I’m giving someone a tennis racket, I’ll wrap a tennis ball, and when they open that, I’ll present them the racket with a bow on it,” he says.

Another method is to wrap your gift to look like exactly what it is. “Last year on Jimmy Kimmel, I wrapped a vacuum cleaner, and it looked exactly like a vacuum cleaner,” DuLaney says. “[The gift] is a gorgeous paper sculpture when you’re done, but of course there’s no mystery as to what’s inside it.”

If you prefer to camouflage a gift, prepare to get creative. “I’ve done a bicycle before where I wrapped it in all of this craft paper, created cardboard cutouts, and basically turned it into a deer with a scarf wrapped around its neck,” he says. “You’re so distracted by that—you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a reindeer!’—that you don’t even think bicycle until you’re inside it.”

Of course, you could buy a box to put your unusually-shaped gift in, but what’s the fun in that?

11. USE DULL SCISSORS TO CURL RIBBON …

When using curling ribbon, sharp scissors are not your friend. They won’t just tear the ribbon—they could cut your finger, too. Dull scissors are the way to go. “When the ribbon comes off the spool, the outside of the ribbon is the finished side,” he says. “The part that goes to the inside of the spool is where you want to put your scissor or your curling tool. I put the scissor under the ribbon, put pressure on it from above with my thumb, and pull. The trick is to only do it once.”

12. … BUT DON’T THINK CURLING RIBBON IS YOUR ONLY OPTION.

Depending on what kind of look you’re going for, you might opt for a silk ribbon (to which you’d add angled or forked tails) over a curling ribbon. DuLaney likes to use a wire-edge ribbon, which can help those who aren’t used to tying perfect bows create prettier shapes. “The bow holds its shape really well,” he says. “You can hand-shape the tails that are coming off that bow, and they will hold that shape. A satin ribbon is really beautiful, but can be slippery, and curling ribbon has a limp finish to it, which can look sloppy in the end. With wire-edged ribbon, you can create the bow and then really shape it into something you love.”

13. DON’T CUT YOUR RIBBON OFF THE ROLL UNTIL YOUR BOW IS DONE.

Do you eyeball how much ribbon you think you’ll need, cut it off the spool, and hope for the best? Rookie mistake. When he’s tying a bow, DuLaney starts at the top of the gift and gives himself 12 inches of extra ribbon that stays attached to the spool. And, oh yeah, he does his criss-crossing and knotting of the ribbon on top of the gift. “People have a tendency to do that on the bottom of the gift, but then, when they’re done, there’s a bump under there,” he says. “Your gift rocks—it doesn’t sit flat.”

Here’s how DuLaney does it: “I hold the ribbon to the top of the gift with my thumb, wrap my ribbon around the bottom, and bring the ribbon back up to the top of the package, then criss-cross the top of the gift,” he says. “Then I wrap the ribbon lengthwise around the gift, around the bottom, back up to the top, and then I will do my first half knot with the ribbon. I will then tie the bow, and then—and only then—will I cut the ribbon from the spool.”

The U.S. still lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to paid maternity leave, but several companies are starting to step it up. This includes IKEA, the Swedish brand which, up until now, followed the sort of bare-minimum family leave policy you’d expect from a big-box retailer with a 29 percent turnover rate. But as The Washington Post reports, the business recently announced a major change that affects their U.S. employees: Starting this January, workers in IKEA’s U.S. corporate office and stores will be offered up to four months paid or partially paid family leave whether they’re a new mom, dad, or non-birth parent of any gender.

A handful of tech companies have made headlines in recent years for their generous policies that extend paid leave benefits to all parents. But in the retail sector, where employees are often viewed as replaceable, progressive benefits like these are rare. IKEA U.S.’s human resources manager Nabeela Ixtabalan told The Washington Post that the move is being made to retain more workers and eventually lead to less spending on recruiting and training efforts. Even more importantly, she says, the company hopes the change will bring them closer to their goal of fostering a “healthy and safe workforce.”

IKEA’s previous family leave policy didn’t offer much to new parents: short-term disability leave for mothers who had recently given birth and five days of paid leave for all other parents. Under their new rules, biological parents, foster parents, and adoptive parents who’ve worked with the company for at least a year will be eligible to receive six weeks of fully-paid time off followed by six more weeks with 50 percent pay. New parents who’ve been with IKEA for three years will have access to those same benefits for eight weeks at a time.

Up to 16 weeks of time off sounds like a good deal for an hourly worker, but the policy could have unintended consequences. Half of their regular pay isn’t enough for many workers to survive on—especially with a new addition to the family—and employees with the lowest wages may be most likely to skip out on the full benefits. But IKEA says this is something they’ve already considered, and they plan to allow workers to supplement the partial pay window with unused vacation and sick days. If more retailers follow IKEA’s lead, the positive impact could be felt beyond each company’s individual workforce—more comprehensive paid leave policies throughout the U.S. could save America billions each year.

[h/t The Washington Post]

Most titles we use in front of people’s names in English are abbreviations of longer words. Dr. stands for doctor, Mr. for mister, and Mrs. for mistress (though we stopped pronouncing it that way). What does Ms. stand for?

Nothing but itself. The title Ms. was made up, not as a shortening of another word, but as a way to avoid commenting on the marital status of a woman. Traditionally, Miss was the proper term for an unmarried woman, and Mrs. was for a married woman. Ms. did not become generally accepted as a title until well into the 1980s, after years of lobbying for its use by feminist activists.

The origin of the title, however, can be traced all the way back to 1901, when it was proposed in the Springfield Sunday Republican as a way to avoid an embarrassing faux pas when speaking about a woman whose “domestic situation” was unknown. It was noted that the pronunciation mizz, a sort of slurring indeterminacy between miss and missus, was already a common way to avoid making such a social blunder. Ms. put a formal label on what people were already doing, though its acceptance in formal circles took nearly a century.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com

The season’s first vigorous winter storm came to life over the northern Plains at the end of November and left a trail of destruction in its wake. The air pressure at the center of this photogenic low-pressure system dipped to the strength of a formidable hurricane—bottoming out at 974 millibars on Monday, November 28, 2016—allowing the storm to unleash a slew of deadly weather from the Dakotas to Alabama.

FALL’S FIRST TORNADO OUTBREAK

At least five people were killed on Tuesday, November 29, when more than two dozen tornadoes touched down in parts of the southeastern United States. The storms developed in Mississippi early in the day on Tuesday and steadily marched across Alabama and Tennessee through the night-time hours.

Three of the people who died on Tuesday were caught in a mobile home during a tornado in Rosalie, Alabama. A mobile home is just about the worst place to take shelter from a tornado. These structures are not built to withstand intense thunderstorms or tornadoes; according to the National Weather Service, it only takes winds of about 100 mph to severely damage or destroy a mobile home.

We’re used to hearing about tornadoes in the South during the spring months, the time traditionally known as tornado season, but the late fall and early winter actually marks the beginning of a secondary tornado season, due to intense storms like the one we saw at the end of November. Warm and humid air surging north from the Gulf of Mexico set the stage for intense thunderstorms to develop. Once a strong cold front helps lift the unstable air skyward, storms gather strength. On November 29, powerful winds changing speed and direction through the atmosphere gave the thunderstorms the twist they needed to spawn tornadoes, damaging winds, and hailstones as large as baseballs.

NORTH DAKOTA SNOWSTORM

On the colder side of things, the storm system dumped up to 2 feet of snow across parts of the Plains and Rocky Mountains on November 28 and 29. North Dakota caught the brunt of the winter weather, with much of the sparsely populated state picking up between one and two feet of snow. A resort in the northwestern part of the state measured two feet of snow, and the state capital of Bismarck, near the center of the state, saw 18 inches of snow by the time the skies cleared.

Residents of the northern Plains are used to snow, but not this much all at once. This was the 10th-largest snowstorm since records began in Bismarck back in 1886. It seems early for the rest of the country, but November is a busy time for snow in North Dakota—in an average year, both Bismarck and Fargo receive about half a foot of snow during the month of November. In fact, five of the 10 biggest snowfalls ever recorded in Bismarck occurred during the month of November.

Even though this storm creeped its way into the records, local news reports that it didn’t cause too many problems around the state, aside from some school, business, and road closings. That may be because North Dakota is the fourth-least populous state in the United States—though it’s also the fastest-growing state in the country due to the oil boom on the Bakken Formation in the northwestern part of the state.

TENNESSEE FIRESTORM

The ongoing drought in the southeastern United States is taking its toll on forested areas, with even the tiniest spark setting off raging infernos that can quickly spiral out of control. A massive fire burned through two popular resort towns in the eastern Tennessee mountains on November 30, killing several people and destroying hundreds of homes and businesses. Though the weather wasn’t directly responsible for the fires that tore through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, the same storm system that caused tornadoes in the south and near-blizzard conditions in the north also helped this fire spread out of control.

A tight pressure gradient caused by the strengthening low-pressure system over the Plains caused winds to rip out of the south across the southeast on the 28th. A fire burning on Chimney Tops Mountain grew exponentially as a result of the intense winds, rapidly spreading down into the valley near Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge.

The wildfire came into the towns so quickly that residents and visitors had to scramble to leave. Some didn’t make it out in time. Guests at Gatlinburg’s Park Vista hotel were trapped inside as flames lapped at the windows, their only escape route down the mountain cut off by fire. Firefighters were able to beat back the flames enough to evacuate the hotel’s guests, but not everyone in the area was so lucky. Authorities report that at least four people in Sevier County, Tennessee, died as a result of the flames, though that total could climb as rescue crews continue to search the remains of homes and businesses.

Fortunately, heavy rain followed just behind the rapid spread of the fires, moistening the dry vegetation and stopping the rapid spread of the flames, staving off potentially an even greater catastrophe.