No doubt the phrase “bring home the bacon” will outlive our civilization and future historians will confidently assert to one another that we were all paid in rashers of bacon.
Because of the dampness, there's no turf to speak of
and now we have nothing to burn.
This sounds a bit less serious to modern American ears than it should. We think of winter as being annoying, not dangerous.
In China, where a common word for wages is 薪资 -- "fuel and resources" -- people are more likely to intuit that going without fuel is best not attempted, even though they've never experienced it either. It makes for an odd example of poetry coming across better in translation than it does in the original language.
Maybe there's a good reason for the bacon thing, or maybe some guy just tended to buy bacon on payday. /shrug
"It sounds cool and kids' parents hate it" goes back to at least the 50s. It's an arms race of kids/teens trying to invent their own slang that their parents won't understand and then that language being picked up in popular culture and becoming more widely used and then kids try to come up with new terms.
(We had a lot of fun with "yeet," "hype," "been knew," and a few others with my kids a few years ago.)
Most on-line sources claim the phrase originated in 1104 in a small town in Essex, England.
In the third paragraph the author states he prefers the boxer story.
Personally, I think the usage of that idiom is older than 117 years.