December 26, 2025 • 23 mins
Holly talks about the ways Joseph Medill could be both problematic and surprising. Tracy shares her additional thoughts on the book about caroling she used during research that wasn't always about caroling.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Joseph Medill this week.
We did. Throughout my research, I just kept muttering to myself,
(00:22):
Joseph Medill is a pill because he was very bossy,
not someone you could really reason with if you had
made up his mind. Yeah, but also super interesting and
like one of those people we don't really talk about
in terms of like the people pulling the levers of
power in the United States. But he sure did have
(00:43):
a lot of influence. Yeah, he was not a name
that rung a bell to me at all. There is
a great story, apparently, when about his friendship with Abe Lincoln,
Uh huh, when Lincoln would come to the offices and visit,
and apparently Lincoln had gotten to the Tribune offices when
Medill was not in his office he was doing something,
(01:04):
and when he came back to his office, he found
mister Lincoln sitting reading the paper with his feet up
on the desk, his long legs extended, and according to
many staffers, they heard him yell, get your damn feet
off my desk, Gabe, which I just love somebody yelling
that at Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I also really,
(01:26):
I mean, we don't know if it's true. We only
have Medill's account, but I really liked his account of
like Abe Lincoln being like, I'm doing what you wanted,
so maybe don't be a sucker and do what has
to be done here. Right. It sounds somewhat unlike Abe Lincoln. Yeah,
but also I love it, and it was enough that
it cowed Medill and he wanted to admit as much.
(01:51):
So I find that fascinating fascinating. He also didn't. I
didn't get into it because eventually I had to cut
some stuff for time. But like the Douglas Lincoln debates,
Oh yeah, Madill followed that whole thing like he literally
was the one newspaper man that was printing it every
(02:11):
day that there was any news about it, like following
the whole thing around, just like followed it like the
grateful dead and reported every second of everything that was
going on, which is another way that he supported Lincoln
in the paper. Yeah, so this outline characterized him in
(02:32):
his newspaper journalism career. As having a bias, and I
was curious about whether whether like it was a bias
or whether it was more like an informed perspective. I
think he did have an informed perspective, however, because he
(02:52):
was using his paper contacts to communicate back and forth
with Abraham Lincoln about hone should be presented and maybe
you want to know about this before it hits this
other newspaper. Like, to me, that's the bias part, Right.
I am helping you every way I can. Yeah, there
is a journalistic integrity line that that crosses for sure. Yeah.
(03:17):
And to be fair, all of the rules of journalistic
integrity that we think about today weren't all necessarily in
place yet at this point, right, But there's a reason
they got put in place, and some of it is
stuff like that. Yeah. Well, and today, like we have
been living through an approach to journalism that is purportedly
(03:42):
unbiased and taking a neutral stance on topics, but sometimes
there's not an actual a neutral stance on that issue, right,
And so having like just become deeply exasperated with reporting
that makes it seem like there are two equivalent sides
(04:05):
to issues that don't have equivalent sides In that way.
I'm like, right, I kind of would prefer, like, you know,
if the paper's position is slavery is bad and should
be abolished, that like the reporting points to that. Yeah, yeah,
(04:25):
say straightforwardly and you know, says it directly, because yeah, boy,
I have various frustrations with the worlds of journalism and reporting.
Oh point of I mean that was that was part
of why I found this interesting. The other thing too,
is that if you read his editorials, they are not
like I am conveying information to you. It is like,
(04:49):
here's the action you need to take. Okay, you know
what I mean? Yeah, yeah, definitely not like reporting so
much as shaping the way people perceive things. Yeah yeah,
I mean granted, like I'm on board with his anti
slavery agenda, less so with his anti union stuff. Lead
in the game, right, So that made me laugh a
(05:13):
little bit because he reminds me of my grandfather who
was a union type setter and eventually got promoted into management,
and he had been a union man. He raised my
dad and my aunt we like, the union is why
(05:35):
we have what we have. And then when he moved
into management and actually had to deal with the union
from the other side, he got a little a little
more frustrated on that score, and so this reminded me
of that in terms of like how he had gone
from being a type setter and from having like a
pretty progressive perspective leading into the Civil War to being
(05:58):
a more anti union person having managed an entire city
and a whole city, yeah, being the mayor. Yeah, yeah,
his time as mayor is so fascinating. One of the
things that started happening even before he was elected was
that because he was writing these really like hopeful editorials
(06:20):
in the paper of like, hey, everybody, cheer up, keep
your heads up, We're all going to work together to rebuild.
And those got reprinted all over the world. People from
all over the world, like royal houses in Europe and
other places, started sending money directly to him. Oh wow.
And what he would do whenever he got it was
(06:41):
he would give the money to his wife, Kitty, and
she got to kind of manage the way that money
was distributed, so she would basically like handle the philanthropic
part of disbursement and be like, Hey, I've looked at
these four hospitals, this one is suffering the most. I'm
going to give them the biggest chunk. He kind of
did all of that, But there's not a lot of
(07:02):
documentation in how she did it, at least that I
could find easily, But I would be curious how she
made those decisions. Yeah, it's kind of interesting that he
just became well before he was mayor, like when he
was literally just writing his stuff in those that like
month in between the fire and the thing, people were
already just sending chunks of money to him, like thousands
(07:24):
at a time, and he would be like, Okay, so fascinating.
He also, I didn't get into it, but because I
feel like we talk about it so much, people will
think it is my special project. He was really instrumental
in getting the World's Columbian Exposition to Chicago in eighteen
(07:44):
ninety three, one of the things he worked on in
his later life, which is just an interesting, interesting thing
and it makes sense. He was very proud of what
he had accomplished in terms of rebuilding the city, even
if people started getting frustrated with the way he was
filling positions. Yeah, yeah, and they did. They did pass
a law about not using pine for new structures, Yeah,
(08:07):
which probably saved them a lot of trouble down the road. Yeah,
I mean certainly it did. The place that I used
to live has been having like an internal city dispute
involving people being upset that they felt like a business
was being unfairly penalized by the city over building codes.
And then when like the whole, the whole, like the
(08:32):
documentation of it was released and it was like, no, really,
they were building a bunch of stuff out of wood
in the densely constructed downtown without permits when wood cannot
be used for those structures downtown because of the flammability
and yea like this kind of reminded me about of
that with like how much of Chicago was made out
(08:55):
of wood at the time and how much that contributed
to the fire. Yeah, there was early on, I think
even before he was elected, as people were discussing these
problems in Chicago, like, hey, this is a problem though,
because that's the most economical thing I can possibly get
a hold of. And the hart fastest a lot of
(09:16):
the time. Yeah, And we read a lot of his
inauguration speech, but we didn't read half of it. I mean,
it was so long. But one of the things he
does is he does this breakdown because he clearly did
his research on it or talked to experts, because he
was like, here's how fast pine rots, and how often
you will have to replace parts of pine even if
(09:36):
it doesn't catch on fire. We are stupid to use this,
and it's actually more expensive if you amortize out the
replacements you have to make over a twenty year period
than if you just invest in a better building material
right out of the gate. And I was like, man,
he has very strong feelings about this, which were correct
(09:58):
and great, and I do like that. He basically was like, okay, people,
here's the real real. Here's how much money we owe people,
here's how much we have gotten. Here's the gap. Here's
how I'm gonna fill that gap. And he was really
quite direct. There was no hemming and hawing of like
I mean when I say he line item to that thing.
He literally was like, this is how much it costs
(10:20):
to run these four government offices. This is how like
just anybody that was a numbers nerd was probably losing
their minds with glee during this reach because it was
like a spreadsheet being read aloud. So yeah, problematic in
a number of ways. Like I said, some of his
very early writing about teaching. I immediately ran across some
(10:43):
very slurry, not cool language, and I was like, well,
we're not going to quote this. I'll just say he
didn't love teaching, but also incredibly powerful and quite smart. Yeah,
if he didn't always use his smarts in the way
we might have liked. Sure. Also, don't adopt raccoons. Don't
(11:05):
try to adopt raccoons. That was a good listener mail.
It made me wonder for a moment. I was like,
I wonder if this person is talking about the shelter
that I adopted my cats from, because they got a
brand new, beautiful facility not that long ago. And then
I was like, m no, you got to be buzzed in.
So if somebody was just standing in the lobby, they couldn't.
That couldn't be the same, right, right. Talked about Christmas
(11:39):
carols this week, We sure did talked about William Sands.
When we finally got to William Sands, we talked about
the introduction to his book of Christmas Carols that was
like forty percent of the length of the book, and
then within that introduction there was a sixty page gap
in which carols were not mentioned something that cracked me up.
(12:03):
A couple of things cracked me up about that. One
is that that introduction ends with him saying, quote, but
it is time to close this introduction, which has imperceptibly
almost extended to a link that the subject will not sanction.
And I was like, yes, William Sands, the subject will
not sanction it because a lot of this introduction is
(12:26):
not actually about the subject. You're like, perceptible in point
of fact, Yeah, well, and I mean some of the
things that he was writing about are things that are
part of the context, that are tangentially related or you know,
they're part of the historical precursor of the Christmas caroling.
But some of it just felt like wandering digression around Christmas,
(12:47):
and I was like, I need to get back to
the part that's relevant. I'm not going to be able
to really put my attention to all of this that's
not And so when I found the little margin note
that some lack some past person had made where they
put a little star and with the word Carrol's, I
thought that was very funny. And then pretty consistently for
(13:09):
a lot of the rest of the book, the things
that I found useful and noteworthy and wanting to mention
in the episode were also things that this past person
with their pencil had written in the book. Maybe it's
a future person, maybe you time traveled, and you were like,
(13:30):
I'm really gonna need this help because this is a
really sucking wow. And that at the one day we
finally invent that time machine that we talk about on
the show from time to time. I feel like the
time machine that we one day build is going to
be like the JWST or the very large array where
(13:51):
we'll have to submit our proposals for usage just to
get on, like the wait list. Yeah yeah, well, and
a lot of the things that we've talked about using
a time machine for on the show have been not
the best use of the time machine. And I remember
many years ago somebody pointing it out, either in an
(14:11):
email or social media, I don't remember, but we had
talked about wanting to go back in time to prevent
people from trampling all over the crime scene. Uh huh,
And somebody was like, did you think about maybe go
back going back in time to prevent the murder from happening? No? No,
it's like, well, yeah, now that you mention it, I
(14:32):
suppose that would be better than just stopping the crime
scene destruction. But no, that was not really what I
had been thinking about. I just want to go back
and tell the Lumier brothers I will hang onto this
forever who thought that film was not ever going to
be a money making thing. I literally still want to
go back and go Rogue one made a billion dollars
(14:54):
and then just vanish into thin air with a bee,
so many dollars. By total coincidence. While I was working
on this, an algorithm fed me a video. I did
not know the name of whose video this was. Maybe
I should go look it up, but they had. It
was an a cappella performance of a song about the
(15:17):
song God Rest you Mary Gentleman, and where in that
phrase the comma should go? And I found it so funny.
I'm just I'm gonna have to look at my phone
because I feel that, you know, people, people would appreciate this.
Ramsey's the Pigeon is the name of the account, and
(15:39):
I have no idea of anything about this account other
than that there is a song that's God Rest You
Marry Gentleman. That is a song about where in the
song title the comma should go and how the position
of that comma changes the titles meaning. And I found
(15:59):
it so funny, which is always great when a random
thing on the Internet is so funny. Yes, yes, I
would like more of that on the Internet. I remember
when it felt like most of the Internet was random
things that were so funny. Those were the days instead
of AI slop and hate speech. Those were the days.
(16:20):
My favorite recent one, since we're on this brief tangent
is a post from Happy Camper Tattoos on Instagram, Okay,
and it says girl dinner and it's a praying mantis
holding her mate's head, and it's very cute and it's
done in like the old school kind of slightly cartoony
tetes style, and I thought it was the most brilliant
thing I'd ever seen, and it made me laugh literally
(16:42):
so hard. I was crying, and I sent it to
everybody I knew. Christmas, Carol. Yeah, as is often the
case with anything we talk about, do you know what
this episode made me think of? Sorrow Wars, bobs Burgers.
(17:04):
You're close, Okay, there's a great They always have great
Christmas episodes, some of which make me cry and cry,
but one is very funny, where the b plot is
Linda and the kids and their handyman Teddy, walking around
this very rich neighborhood Christmas caroling in the hopes that
someone will give them hot coco. And there's one house
(17:26):
that's known as the Murder House, and then it turns
out that really the guy that lives there is just
bad at decorating, and he comes out and sings in
a beautiful voice Adeste Fidelis, and then they're all friends.
But it's so lovely, and that's all I can think
of the whole time. This episode made me think about
being raised as a kid and being raised Methodist as
(17:47):
a kid, and I don't know how the Methodist Church, well,
the Methodist Church had a schism, so I super don't
know what's going on with Methodist Church leadership now except
the general sides of the schism. But when I was
a kid, we were United Methodists. We went to United
Methodist Church, and at that time, the United Methodist Church
(18:09):
moved the preachers around every few years, so you would
get a new preacher periodically, and the types of services
that would happen for Christmas could change a lot when
there was a different preacher. Like a different preacher could
come to the church and sort of have a different
idea of what would be good to do for Christmas.
(18:29):
And so there were years that we had either on
Christmas Eve or sometime during Advent, we would have like
a service of lessons and carols. And there were a
lot of Christmas carols that were sung as part of
church services during Advent. And sometimes there would be like
(18:53):
a Christmas Eve specific service that might or might not
specifically be lessons in carols, but there would often be
Christmas carols sung. And I don't know, it just sort
of made me think about the many different iterations of
Christmas observances that there were at church when I was
a kid. Yeah, and how also sometimes the youth group
(19:18):
would go caroling. I don't think, I don't remember if
I actually did that very much, but that was like
a group activity that would happen, would be going caroling
house to house, which we did not like. That was
not something that happened near where I lived, because we
lived out in the country on a busy highway. But
(19:39):
you know, the church was located in a town, and
say there would be caroling through the neighborhoods around the
church often a neighborhoods that a lot of members of
the church lived in. Yeah, I don't know that I've
ever gone caroling. If I did, it was probably part
of like some theater program saying oh sure, sure, yeah,
(20:02):
I don't recall ever caroling just for funsies. Yeah, I
think I remember one time going caroling at a nursing home.
Oh yeah, like room to room at the nursing home. Somehow,
what you just said reminded me of the year that
the summer theater that I did in the summers when
I was a kid, that we did Scrooge, which was
(20:26):
funny because it was July in the summer. Yeah, it was,
And we did restage that one at Christmas time, if
I recall correctly. And then my high school tried to
do Scrooge and it went not great. The theater program
was kind of floundering at my high school by the
(20:47):
time I got there. And the thing that I remember
from the high school production of Scrooge was that one
of the early scenes, like the early crowd scenes around
the town, the town being London, there was a bottle
that either someone dropped or it got put down on
(21:10):
the stage. A bottle was on the stage that was
not supposed to be there. That was like a prop,
And rather than anyone having the presence of mind to
create a reason to strike this prop from the stage,
everyone just danced around it through the production numbers. I
(21:32):
find this now hilarious. But boy was our theater teacher
not pleased with us for doing that. Well, anyway, I
have good news theater teacher. Now it's only thought of
with love. Well, she is no longer among the living,
so hopefully she did not carry any resentments about our
(21:57):
poor performance of Scrooge in the year in nineteen ninety
three to the beyond with her anyway. So the Carol's
episode came out on Christmas Eve. Now it is Boxing Day,
the day that's behind the scenes is coming out. Whatever
is going on with this season of the year, whatever
(22:17):
it is that you are celebrating or not celebrating, I
hope that it is just all going as well as possible.
It has been a rough year, yeah, and I know
a lot of folks need a break, And so if
you need a break, I hope you're able to get
one before the new year turns over. It will be
(22:41):
a whole new year by the time our next behind
the scenes comes out. So happy New Year, a little
in advance to everyone. Yeah, I hope everybody has the
means and the ability to eat something delicious feast and
remember to take care of other people that need the meats. Yeah,
(23:04):
and figures across for twenty twenty six. Is that the
year that's coming? It sure is. I almost said twenty
twenty seven. I almost blipped us right by that. Biz,
that'd be funny. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow.
We will have something brand new on Monday. Stuff you
(23:28):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Joseph Medill this week.
We did. Throughout my research, I just kept muttering to myself,
(00:22):
Joseph Medill is a pill because he was very bossy,
not someone you could really reason with if you had
made up his mind. Yeah, but also super interesting and
like one of those people we don't really talk about
in terms of like the people pulling the levers of
power in the United States. But he sure did have
(00:43):
a lot of influence. Yeah, he was not a name
that rung a bell to me at all. There is
a great story, apparently, when about his friendship with Abe Lincoln,
Uh huh, when Lincoln would come to the offices and visit,
and apparently Lincoln had gotten to the Tribune offices when
Medill was not in his office he was doing something,
(01:04):
and when he came back to his office, he found
mister Lincoln sitting reading the paper with his feet up
on the desk, his long legs extended, and according to
many staffers, they heard him yell, get your damn feet
off my desk, Gabe, which I just love somebody yelling
that at Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I also really,
(01:26):
I mean, we don't know if it's true. We only
have Medill's account, but I really liked his account of
like Abe Lincoln being like, I'm doing what you wanted,
so maybe don't be a sucker and do what has
to be done here. Right. It sounds somewhat unlike Abe Lincoln. Yeah,
but also I love it, and it was enough that
it cowed Medill and he wanted to admit as much.
(01:51):
So I find that fascinating fascinating. He also didn't. I
didn't get into it because eventually I had to cut
some stuff for time. But like the Douglas Lincoln debates,
Oh yeah, Madill followed that whole thing like he literally
was the one newspaper man that was printing it every
(02:11):
day that there was any news about it, like following
the whole thing around, just like followed it like the
grateful dead and reported every second of everything that was
going on, which is another way that he supported Lincoln
in the paper. Yeah, so this outline characterized him in
(02:32):
his newspaper journalism career. As having a bias, and I
was curious about whether whether like it was a bias
or whether it was more like an informed perspective. I
think he did have an informed perspective, however, because he
(02:52):
was using his paper contacts to communicate back and forth
with Abraham Lincoln about hone should be presented and maybe
you want to know about this before it hits this
other newspaper. Like, to me, that's the bias part, Right.
I am helping you every way I can. Yeah, there
is a journalistic integrity line that that crosses for sure. Yeah.
(03:17):
And to be fair, all of the rules of journalistic
integrity that we think about today weren't all necessarily in
place yet at this point, right, But there's a reason
they got put in place, and some of it is
stuff like that. Yeah. Well, and today, like we have
been living through an approach to journalism that is purportedly
(03:42):
unbiased and taking a neutral stance on topics, but sometimes
there's not an actual a neutral stance on that issue, right,
And so having like just become deeply exasperated with reporting
that makes it seem like there are two equivalent sides
(04:05):
to issues that don't have equivalent sides In that way.
I'm like, right, I kind of would prefer, like, you know,
if the paper's position is slavery is bad and should
be abolished, that like the reporting points to that. Yeah, yeah,
(04:25):
say straightforwardly and you know, says it directly, because yeah, boy,
I have various frustrations with the worlds of journalism and reporting.
Oh point of I mean that was that was part
of why I found this interesting. The other thing too,
is that if you read his editorials, they are not
like I am conveying information to you. It is like,
(04:49):
here's the action you need to take. Okay, you know
what I mean? Yeah, yeah, definitely not like reporting so
much as shaping the way people perceive things. Yeah yeah,
I mean granted, like I'm on board with his anti
slavery agenda, less so with his anti union stuff. Lead
in the game, right, So that made me laugh a
(05:13):
little bit because he reminds me of my grandfather who
was a union type setter and eventually got promoted into management,
and he had been a union man. He raised my
dad and my aunt we like, the union is why
(05:35):
we have what we have. And then when he moved
into management and actually had to deal with the union
from the other side, he got a little a little
more frustrated on that score, and so this reminded me
of that in terms of like how he had gone
from being a type setter and from having like a
pretty progressive perspective leading into the Civil War to being
(05:58):
a more anti union person having managed an entire city
and a whole city, yeah, being the mayor. Yeah, yeah,
his time as mayor is so fascinating. One of the
things that started happening even before he was elected was
that because he was writing these really like hopeful editorials
(06:20):
in the paper of like, hey, everybody, cheer up, keep
your heads up, We're all going to work together to rebuild.
And those got reprinted all over the world. People from
all over the world, like royal houses in Europe and
other places, started sending money directly to him. Oh wow.
And what he would do whenever he got it was
(06:41):
he would give the money to his wife, Kitty, and
she got to kind of manage the way that money
was distributed, so she would basically like handle the philanthropic
part of disbursement and be like, Hey, I've looked at
these four hospitals, this one is suffering the most. I'm
going to give them the biggest chunk. He kind of
did all of that, But there's not a lot of
(07:02):
documentation in how she did it, at least that I
could find easily, But I would be curious how she
made those decisions. Yeah, it's kind of interesting that he
just became well before he was mayor, like when he
was literally just writing his stuff in those that like
month in between the fire and the thing, people were
already just sending chunks of money to him, like thousands
(07:24):
at a time, and he would be like, Okay, so fascinating.
He also, I didn't get into it, but because I
feel like we talk about it so much, people will
think it is my special project. He was really instrumental
in getting the World's Columbian Exposition to Chicago in eighteen
(07:44):
ninety three, one of the things he worked on in
his later life, which is just an interesting, interesting thing
and it makes sense. He was very proud of what
he had accomplished in terms of rebuilding the city, even
if people started getting frustrated with the way he was
filling positions. Yeah, yeah, and they did. They did pass
a law about not using pine for new structures, Yeah,
(08:07):
which probably saved them a lot of trouble down the road. Yeah,
I mean certainly it did. The place that I used
to live has been having like an internal city dispute
involving people being upset that they felt like a business
was being unfairly penalized by the city over building codes.
And then when like the whole, the whole, like the
(08:32):
documentation of it was released and it was like, no, really,
they were building a bunch of stuff out of wood
in the densely constructed downtown without permits when wood cannot
be used for those structures downtown because of the flammability
and yea like this kind of reminded me about of
that with like how much of Chicago was made out
(08:55):
of wood at the time and how much that contributed
to the fire. Yeah, there was early on, I think
even before he was elected, as people were discussing these
problems in Chicago, like, hey, this is a problem though,
because that's the most economical thing I can possibly get
a hold of. And the hart fastest a lot of
(09:16):
the time. Yeah, And we read a lot of his
inauguration speech, but we didn't read half of it. I mean,
it was so long. But one of the things he
does is he does this breakdown because he clearly did
his research on it or talked to experts, because he
was like, here's how fast pine rots, and how often
you will have to replace parts of pine even if
(09:36):
it doesn't catch on fire. We are stupid to use this,
and it's actually more expensive if you amortize out the
replacements you have to make over a twenty year period
than if you just invest in a better building material
right out of the gate. And I was like, man,
he has very strong feelings about this, which were correct
(09:58):
and great, and I do like that. He basically was like, okay, people,
here's the real real. Here's how much money we owe people,
here's how much we have gotten. Here's the gap. Here's
how I'm gonna fill that gap. And he was really
quite direct. There was no hemming and hawing of like
I mean when I say he line item to that thing.
He literally was like, this is how much it costs
(10:20):
to run these four government offices. This is how like
just anybody that was a numbers nerd was probably losing
their minds with glee during this reach because it was
like a spreadsheet being read aloud. So yeah, problematic in
a number of ways. Like I said, some of his
very early writing about teaching. I immediately ran across some
(10:43):
very slurry, not cool language, and I was like, well,
we're not going to quote this. I'll just say he
didn't love teaching, but also incredibly powerful and quite smart. Yeah,
if he didn't always use his smarts in the way
we might have liked. Sure. Also, don't adopt raccoons. Don't
(11:05):
try to adopt raccoons. That was a good listener mail.
It made me wonder for a moment. I was like,
I wonder if this person is talking about the shelter
that I adopted my cats from, because they got a
brand new, beautiful facility not that long ago. And then
I was like, m no, you got to be buzzed in.
So if somebody was just standing in the lobby, they couldn't.
That couldn't be the same, right, right. Talked about Christmas
(11:39):
carols this week, We sure did talked about William Sands.
When we finally got to William Sands, we talked about
the introduction to his book of Christmas Carols that was
like forty percent of the length of the book, and
then within that introduction there was a sixty page gap
in which carols were not mentioned something that cracked me up.
(12:03):
A couple of things cracked me up about that. One
is that that introduction ends with him saying, quote, but
it is time to close this introduction, which has imperceptibly
almost extended to a link that the subject will not sanction.
And I was like, yes, William Sands, the subject will
not sanction it because a lot of this introduction is
(12:26):
not actually about the subject. You're like, perceptible in point
of fact, Yeah, well, and I mean some of the
things that he was writing about are things that are
part of the context, that are tangentially related or you know,
they're part of the historical precursor of the Christmas caroling.
But some of it just felt like wandering digression around Christmas,
(12:47):
and I was like, I need to get back to
the part that's relevant. I'm not going to be able
to really put my attention to all of this that's
not And so when I found the little margin note
that some lack some past person had made where they
put a little star and with the word Carrol's, I
thought that was very funny. And then pretty consistently for
(13:09):
a lot of the rest of the book, the things
that I found useful and noteworthy and wanting to mention
in the episode were also things that this past person
with their pencil had written in the book. Maybe it's
a future person, maybe you time traveled, and you were like,
(13:30):
I'm really gonna need this help because this is a
really sucking wow. And that at the one day we
finally invent that time machine that we talk about on
the show from time to time. I feel like the
time machine that we one day build is going to
be like the JWST or the very large array where
(13:51):
we'll have to submit our proposals for usage just to
get on, like the wait list. Yeah yeah, well, and
a lot of the things that we've talked about using
a time machine for on the show have been not
the best use of the time machine. And I remember
many years ago somebody pointing it out, either in an
(14:11):
email or social media, I don't remember, but we had
talked about wanting to go back in time to prevent
people from trampling all over the crime scene. Uh huh,
And somebody was like, did you think about maybe go
back going back in time to prevent the murder from happening? No? No,
it's like, well, yeah, now that you mention it, I
(14:32):
suppose that would be better than just stopping the crime
scene destruction. But no, that was not really what I
had been thinking about. I just want to go back
and tell the Lumier brothers I will hang onto this
forever who thought that film was not ever going to
be a money making thing. I literally still want to
go back and go Rogue one made a billion dollars
(14:54):
and then just vanish into thin air with a bee,
so many dollars. By total coincidence. While I was working
on this, an algorithm fed me a video. I did
not know the name of whose video this was. Maybe
I should go look it up, but they had. It
was an a cappella performance of a song about the
(15:17):
song God Rest you Mary Gentleman, and where in that
phrase the comma should go? And I found it so funny.
I'm just I'm gonna have to look at my phone
because I feel that, you know, people, people would appreciate this.
Ramsey's the Pigeon is the name of the account, and
(15:39):
I have no idea of anything about this account other
than that there is a song that's God Rest You
Marry Gentleman. That is a song about where in the
song title the comma should go and how the position
of that comma changes the titles meaning. And I found
(15:59):
it so funny, which is always great when a random
thing on the Internet is so funny. Yes, yes, I
would like more of that on the Internet. I remember
when it felt like most of the Internet was random
things that were so funny. Those were the days instead
of AI slop and hate speech. Those were the days.
(16:20):
My favorite recent one, since we're on this brief tangent
is a post from Happy Camper Tattoos on Instagram, Okay,
and it says girl dinner and it's a praying mantis
holding her mate's head, and it's very cute and it's
done in like the old school kind of slightly cartoony
tetes style, and I thought it was the most brilliant
thing I'd ever seen, and it made me laugh literally
(16:42):
so hard. I was crying, and I sent it to
everybody I knew. Christmas, Carol. Yeah, as is often the
case with anything we talk about, do you know what
this episode made me think of? Sorrow Wars, bobs Burgers.
(17:04):
You're close, Okay, there's a great They always have great
Christmas episodes, some of which make me cry and cry,
but one is very funny, where the b plot is
Linda and the kids and their handyman Teddy, walking around
this very rich neighborhood Christmas caroling in the hopes that
someone will give them hot coco. And there's one house
(17:26):
that's known as the Murder House, and then it turns
out that really the guy that lives there is just
bad at decorating, and he comes out and sings in
a beautiful voice Adeste Fidelis, and then they're all friends.
But it's so lovely, and that's all I can think
of the whole time. This episode made me think about
being raised as a kid and being raised Methodist as
(17:47):
a kid, and I don't know how the Methodist Church, well,
the Methodist Church had a schism, so I super don't
know what's going on with Methodist Church leadership now except
the general sides of the schism. But when I was
a kid, we were United Methodists. We went to United
Methodist Church, and at that time, the United Methodist Church
(18:09):
moved the preachers around every few years, so you would
get a new preacher periodically, and the types of services
that would happen for Christmas could change a lot when
there was a different preacher. Like a different preacher could
come to the church and sort of have a different
idea of what would be good to do for Christmas.
(18:29):
And so there were years that we had either on
Christmas Eve or sometime during Advent, we would have like
a service of lessons and carols. And there were a
lot of Christmas carols that were sung as part of
church services during Advent. And sometimes there would be like
(18:53):
a Christmas Eve specific service that might or might not
specifically be lessons in carols, but there would often be
Christmas carols sung. And I don't know, it just sort
of made me think about the many different iterations of
Christmas observances that there were at church when I was
a kid. Yeah, and how also sometimes the youth group
(19:18):
would go caroling. I don't think, I don't remember if
I actually did that very much, but that was like
a group activity that would happen, would be going caroling
house to house, which we did not like. That was
not something that happened near where I lived, because we
lived out in the country on a busy highway. But
(19:39):
you know, the church was located in a town, and
say there would be caroling through the neighborhoods around the
church often a neighborhoods that a lot of members of
the church lived in. Yeah, I don't know that I've
ever gone caroling. If I did, it was probably part
of like some theater program saying oh sure, sure, yeah,
(20:02):
I don't recall ever caroling just for funsies. Yeah, I
think I remember one time going caroling at a nursing home.
Oh yeah, like room to room at the nursing home. Somehow,
what you just said reminded me of the year that
the summer theater that I did in the summers when
I was a kid, that we did Scrooge, which was
(20:26):
funny because it was July in the summer. Yeah, it was,
And we did restage that one at Christmas time, if
I recall correctly. And then my high school tried to
do Scrooge and it went not great. The theater program
was kind of floundering at my high school by the
(20:47):
time I got there. And the thing that I remember
from the high school production of Scrooge was that one
of the early scenes, like the early crowd scenes around
the town, the town being London, there was a bottle
that either someone dropped or it got put down on
(21:10):
the stage. A bottle was on the stage that was
not supposed to be there. That was like a prop,
And rather than anyone having the presence of mind to
create a reason to strike this prop from the stage,
everyone just danced around it through the production numbers. I
(21:32):
find this now hilarious. But boy was our theater teacher
not pleased with us for doing that. Well, anyway, I
have good news theater teacher. Now it's only thought of
with love. Well, she is no longer among the living,
so hopefully she did not carry any resentments about our
(21:57):
poor performance of Scrooge in the year in nineteen ninety
three to the beyond with her anyway. So the Carol's
episode came out on Christmas Eve. Now it is Boxing Day,
the day that's behind the scenes is coming out. Whatever
is going on with this season of the year, whatever
(22:17):
it is that you are celebrating or not celebrating, I
hope that it is just all going as well as possible.
It has been a rough year, yeah, and I know
a lot of folks need a break, And so if
you need a break, I hope you're able to get
one before the new year turns over. It will be
(22:41):
a whole new year by the time our next behind
the scenes comes out. So happy New Year, a little
in advance to everyone. Yeah, I hope everybody has the
means and the ability to eat something delicious feast and
remember to take care of other people that need the meats. Yeah,
(23:04):
and figures across for twenty twenty six. Is that the
year that's coming? It sure is. I almost said twenty
twenty seven. I almost blipped us right by that. Biz,
that'd be funny. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow.
We will have something brand new on Monday. Stuff you
(23:28):
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