December 23, 2021 • 51 mins
Josh and Chuck’s holiday mojo has returned and they’re back in the saddle to rustle up some holiday cheer. So put on your comfiest sweater, ugly or otherwise, grab a mug of whatever makes you happy, gather round with your favorite people, and listen in.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the Holiday Cast. I'm Josh,
(00:25):
and there's Chuck and Jerry's with us in spirit, and
everything is merry and bright, and the tidings are glad
in the halls are decked, and uh, Santa's on his way.
That's right. Are Christmas episode that we look forward to
every year. This, along with the Halloween episodes or episodes,
(00:46):
are two of our favorites. And they are both ad
free because we insist upon it, because Christmas has been
commercialized enough for doing our bit to reverse that trend
just ever so slightly. And I think it's it's been
having a measurable effe, don't you, Chuck? I think so.
People's fingers are spared that fast forward button for the
next forty five minutes, and let's do this. So what
(01:20):
are we going to do first? Maybe the mystery behind
the world's most famous Christmas poem? Yeah, did you dig
this one up? Or no? I believe this was a
listener suggestion. It was so. This is based on an
article by Stacy Conrad in Mental Floss, but it was
suggested to us by one of our listeners named Adam Stevenson,
and thank you very much to Adam for sending this
(01:41):
idea in And the whole thing, Chuck, that we're talking
about is probably the world's most famous Christmas poem. It's
called a Visit from St. Nicholas, and we've read it before,
but it's actually, in most people's mind called Toys the
Night before Christmas. That's what I was confused a couple
of times I read through this. So that poem has
(02:02):
the authorship of it is disputed and has been disputed
for some time now. And it's not one of those
questions where somebody says, no, no, it was my great
great great great great grandfather who wrote it. Instead, there's
actually like evidence that kind of backs this up. So
right now here in one and maybe for the rest
of all time, we're not a certain who wrote a
(02:26):
Visit from St. Nick also known as Towards the Night
before Christmas. That's right. We know. It first popped up
in Troy, New York's Troy Sentinel on December appropriately three,
with no authorship attributed, and then thirteen years after that,
a professor and a poet named Clement Clark Moore was
(02:49):
named as the author. Because of the story that his housekeeper,
without him knowing it, sent the piece in. It was
a poem he wrote for his kids, supposedly, and sent
into the newspaper. And then in eighteen forty four, which
is twenty one years later, right, it was officially included
in one of his poet poetry anthologies. That's right, So
(03:13):
it officially became credited to Clement Clark Moore. And then
at some point, in a not entirely certain win, another family, um,
the family of Henry Livingston Jr. And again by family
we mean um, five generations grandchildren step forward and said, hey, um,
I don't think this is quite right, because it turns
(03:35):
out that great great great great great grandfather Henry had
been reading this poem to our to his kids, my
great great great great grandmother for like fifteen years before
it was first published in the Troy, New York Sentinel. Right,
So if that was three, they're claiming it goes back
(03:56):
to eighteen seven. Yeah, that's what I saw, all right.
So let's duke this out on the livingstone side. And
we're not taking sides because neither one of us know
or care, but uh, on the livings, they certainly do.
On the Livings in side. They say, you know what,
we have Dutch heritage in our family and ancestry. Um
(04:16):
great great great great great great grand Peppie Henry's mom
was Dutch and there's a lot of Dutch references in
the poem, so it's his. Yeah, apparently this is where
we get the names for Santa's eight Reindeer, And originally
Donner and Blitzen's names were Dunder and blicks them. If
you read that, I know it's great. What makes it
(04:38):
like a cheap T shirt you would buy or something?
What a dunder brand T shirt? Well just know, like
you know, you're off brand toys. That seems like the
Christmas shirt. Yeah, so don't but it Dunder and blicks
them mean thunder and lightning and Dutch, so hence the
Dutch references. And the thing is that Clement Clark Moore
wasn't Dutch and he didn't have Dutch heritage, so it
(04:59):
does make it a little more sensible that Livingston, who
did have Dutch heritage, would have used those Dutch names initially.
That's right. And for all of you thinking I'd just
stepped by a Dunder and Mifflin joke, I just want
to acknowledge it, so you know that I did think
of it and I chose not to same here, all right,
it's a Christmas miracle for growing up. Yeah, we really are.
(05:21):
Uh So blix Um changed to blix in first, I
think to rhyme with vixen, and I believe in the
etour More stepped up because you know, he was like, hey,
this is my poem after all, right, uh and changed
it to the Germanic Blitzen, and then Dunder eventually became Donder,
and then in the early twentieth century it was went
(05:42):
to Donner because it's also Germanic. Yeah, so there's the
whole thing. Originally Dunder and blicks Him were two of
the names, and those are clearly Dutch words, which has
nothing to do with Clement Clark Moore. Um. There's another
thing to remember. We said that Henry's children said, and
apparently a neighbor at times said that they remember him
reading this to them back in eighteen oh seven, uh sixteen,
(06:05):
years before it was published, and they there's also family
legend among the Livingston's that there used to be a
handwritten draft copy that had markouts and scratches and revisions
to it. That would Yeah, I would basically suggest this
is the original version of the poem, and the case
would be closed had that not burned up in a
house fire at some point in family history. I don't see.
(06:26):
I was when I was reading this stuff, I was like,
all right, here we go, it's over, case reopened. Yeah,
the mysterious house fire. Now I'm like, I don't know
about you. Livingstone's right, okay, very fishy. Well, then the
literary professors got involved, and then things got really taken
off the rails, right, Yeah, they've there have been plenty
of well know about plenty, but at least a few
(06:48):
literary professors who have gotten in the archives and the
anthologies and said, you know what, this more guy never
wrote anything like this thing. Uh, it's in this anapestic
scheme where you have the two syllables followed by a
more stressed third syllable, and you never wrote anything like that, buddy,
So I think you're a fraud. Yeah. And I had
(07:10):
no idea about that scheme until I kind of spelled
it out myself and got it wrong. Though. Did you
notice that? No? I didn't. You got the first half right,
but then you lose it at you lost it after
and all through the house, Oh I did. Yeah, that
was pretty much like oh yeah, I see now okay,
can read it like yeah, please do, please do. Itwas
the night before Christmas and all through the house not
(07:33):
a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Oh man,
this is like my math. You got tripped up. Yeah
that's all right, good stuff, But that's anapestic scheme. They said,
you didn't write anything like that, buddy, But Livingston wrote
plenty of stuff like that. Yeah, so again case closed. Right,
(07:53):
if you want to put a nail in that coffin.
Another professor from New Zealand, a guy named McDonald Jackson,
stepped up and said, get this, everybody, I could. I've
devised a statistical analysis machine, and I said it loose
on Clement Clark Moore's manuscript notebook and it says all
of those poems are Clement Clark Moore's. But when I
feed that same machine towys the night before Christmas, you know,
(08:15):
a visit from St. Nicholas, everybody goes, oh yeah that
one he goes. It just starts coughing and smoking and sputtering,
and it broke. Yeah. Basically, uh, if you talk to
them more as they're like, yeah, but you know what
you're you're just constructing us in a way that makes
it look like you never anything like this, because I
know for sure he wrote the Pig and the Rooster
(08:35):
and that's antipestic. He wrote one like this, and that's
that I should I should spell out some of the
Pig and the Rooster and antipestic scheme and see what happens.
So on the more side this, I mean, I sort
of get this, but more was buddies with Rip van Winkle,
who was very much into the Dutch culture up there
(08:57):
in New York State. And I guess the argument is,
but because he was good friends with Irving that, uh,
it just he picked up on that Dutch stuff. Is
that the argument? That's the argument. But the argument that
I saw that basically is like, no, that's it's Clement
Clark Moore. Is that Clement Clark Moore, who has otherwise
(09:17):
never been accused of doing anything nefarious in his life,
um stepped up and claimed credit and an authorship of this,
and that just doesn't seem to be something that he
would have done had he not done that. And the
Livingston's Henry specifically, who was alive after the thing was
published for five more years, never stepped forward to take
(09:38):
credit for it, and that to a lot of people,
they are like, well that, I mean, that's that, Like, yes,
you can create statistical analysis machines to say whatever. But
as it stands out, if you go on to the
Poetry Websites Foundation, they say that there's a lot of
scholars that credit Henry Livingston with authorship, but they still
if you search Clement Clark Moore, the poem that they
(09:59):
have on their website for him is a visit from St. Nicholas. Still,
so everybody's like, who knows, but ultimately who cares? Just
read the poem. It's so great it doesn't matter who
wrote it anymore. I agree. So I think, Chuck, that
we've done our first little segment, which means it's time
for some of Jerry's delicious Christmas interstitial music. Huh all right,
let's hear it. Oh boy, that didn't that so much
(10:30):
better than an ad? Yeah? That is so nice. Jerry
really knows what she's doing. She's gotten really good at
this stuff. All right, where are we headed next? Oh jeez,
I'm driving? Huh Okay, I guess he said you want
to skip around, So yeah, let's do one of yours.
How about red and green? It's Christmas colors. Yeah, we
need to thank u Wanderopolis Reader's digests and our old
(10:52):
buddy Robert Paulson, Mr RP funding himself, longtime listener, he said, us,
I think he's done this past few years since it's
a bunch of Christmas ideas because you know, it gets
hard you guys to think of new things and to
find new stories, and Paulson's always sent this good stuff.
So this was inspired by Robert. And this is the
(11:13):
idea that where did green and red come from? For Christmas?
And there's quite a few theories and no one knows
for sure. No um, which is fun because that means
you get to toss out a lot of theories that
might be right or wrong, who knows. But um, if
you go talk to a Christian, say hey, that whole
red and green thing for Christmas? You're a Christian, where
did it come from? And they'll say, well, sit down, friend,
(11:35):
I'll tell you. It turns out that the green represents
an evergreen tree, which in turn represents Jesus. And you say,
I didn't see Jesus coming in this But here we go. Yeah,
it's only Christmas. And the reason that the evergreen represents
Jesus is because Jesus has eternal life or offers eternal life,
and the evergreen was representative of eternal life and living
(11:57):
through the winter time even the bleakest part of the winter,
and evergreen is still green. Hence the green part. And
you say, well, what about the the red. Don't say blood,
don't say blood. What do they say blood? Yeah, blood
of Christ. It's always the blood of Christ. So supposedly
that's where the red and green came from, as far
as Christian scholars are concerned. That's right. Other people say, well,
(12:20):
i'll tell you what. In the churches would put on
these miracle plays, is what they were called, And on
Christmas they would perform one called the Paradise Play, which
retells the story in Genesis of the creation of Adam
and even the garden of Eden when Adam was instructed
not to eat from the tree of good and evil
did so. Anyway, they were banished from Paradise. And when
(12:41):
they put on these miracle plays, apple trees weren't in season,
so they couldn't drag a dead apple tree in there,
so they would bring in a nice, lovely green evergreen
pine and then fastened apples to them, and that is
where the green and the red comes from. And every
single year there was always one townsfolk, one annoying towns folk.
It would stand up in point and say, that's not
(13:01):
an apple tree, that's right, Cleidas a slack gelgyokel. But
then now we get into probably the true origins of it,
because we're going back beyond the origin of Christianity and
starting to get into pagan and Roman culture. And as
we've seen time and time and time again with a
lot of the holidays that we celebrate these days, they're
(13:24):
ultimately based on Pagan and Roman rituals and this is
no no different. Um. They think that Saturnalia actually used
to claim as it's holiday colors red and green again
because of evergreens and the berries they bear. And and
then we talked about Saturnalia before in a Christmas episode, right,
we had to have. Surely at some point that's the
(13:45):
only way I would know about it. Uh. The Celtic people, also,
the ancient Celts, they loved their holly plants because they
were evergreen, and holly is very much associated with Christmas,
and they were saying, well, that's where the red and
green comes from. Then a little bit later on they were, uh,
these religious screens called rudes medieval churches were dyed red
(14:07):
and green. But other people say, well, that's because those
were the pigments that were available at the time. So
no one really knows for sure, no, but it does
like present like a connection between Christianity and red and green.
Those medieval church screens definitely do. So. The Victorians came
along and they had a bunch of different color schemes.
Blue and white, blue and red, red and green all
(14:29):
were pretty much equally associated with Christmas with the Victorians.
And uh, it wasn't until one when Coca Cola commissioned
Um had in Sunbloom to do his famous illustration of
Santa Claus, where Santa Claus became fat and fully clothed
in red for the first time and for the rest
of all time before that he was naked as a
(14:51):
j bird. That's right. It was a gross Christmas tradition,
all right, Jerry, how about some more of that music?
Take it away, Jerr. Okay, Chuck, So now I think
(15:24):
it's your turn to pick which one we're gonna do next.
It's a it's like opening Christmas presents. We're gonna just
switch off. You know where I'm headed. I'm headed to, Uh,
I'm headed to the nineteen eighties. I'm headed to December seven,
and I'm watching the TV show ALF, and I'm shocked
at what I'm seeing on my screen. It's right, mainly
because I never saw an episode of ALF. Oh you know, yeah,
(15:47):
you were a little old for it. I definitely did.
It was a cute show eighty six, so I was fifteen,
maybe just on the cusp, but yeah, I didn't see
way too old for what was ALF. Like an eightyear
old exactly the right age to hate ALF more than
any other age group on the planet, I think. Yeah,
I was like I started listening to Pink Floyd when
(16:09):
I was fifteen, So right, okay, yeah, you wouldn't have
like alfin people who have never seen ALF, like you. Um,
I was thinking our younger viewers, but I guess anybody
who has never seen ALF. It's a eighties sitcom about
an alien who crashed lands on Earth takes up a
residence with a family, who he in short order starts
to drive crazy with his wise cracking, his troublemaking. He's
(16:29):
good hearted, but he's just a lot. He's a handful.
And then on top of that, they have to keep
him a secret from nosy neighbors, from the government. Um.
And it's a it's a cute little show that that
like a six year old can follow the plotline of.
Uh you want to hear something more shocking. Yes, I
didn't know until yesterday that Alf was an alien. What
(16:50):
do you think he was? I don't know. I never
thought about it. I just I knew it was a puppet.
It looked like a little fuzzy beast of some kind.
I never really thought about I had no idea what
Alf was. But now that you know, I see this,
and I see the year clearly capitalizing on a post
et kind of thing. Let's do a sitcom. I'm sure
(17:11):
that was brought up in the room, you know. Yeah. Yeah,
and Alf actually stood for alien life for him. It
was the name that the dad Willie gave to him.
His real name was Gordon schum Way, and he was
from the planet mill Mack. Was it really Gordon Shumway? Yeah,
it's Have you ever seen that movie Permanent Midnight? Uh? Yeah, Oh, sure. Yeah, Yeah,
that guy that was based on the Ben Stiller place.
(17:33):
He was a writer for Alfred. Yeah, that's that's all
I knew of alf was that movie. Okay, gotcha? That
was one of my favorite lines from any movie is
when Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller have lost their percocets.
Owen Wilson and his voice goes, if I were a percoset,
where would I be? That? I can totally envision that. Wow.
(17:55):
That was a dead on Owen Wilson. By the way,
Wow there was again. So with alf Um, what you
see was what you got. It was very straightforward as
far as episodes were concerned. Sure, it was kind of jarring,
like you were saying when you tuned in on December, Oh,
I don't remember, but in and you found out that
there was a not just a one part as a standard,
(18:17):
but a two part episode shot on film of alf
And it was a very special Christmas special of alf Yeah.
It was, uh, to say the least, not very funny there.
You know, I watched some of it today. They didn't
forego the jokes entirely. They used them, tried to use
them effectively to sort of you know, punch up some
(18:39):
moments here and there, but it was definitely different. It
was Alf gets outside the house, get hitches a ride
with Cleveland Little from Blazing Saddle's fame as Santa Claus,
and they go to a hospital where Alf is mistaken
for a Christmas toy and given to a little girl
who is dying. Yes, which is basically the main plot
(19:04):
line of this episode. Alf hanging out with this dying
girl in her hospital room. And this is not like
the kind of thing where the dying girl doesn't know
she's dying. She actually talks openly and frequently about dying
and how she's being scared of it. Yeah, it's being
scared to die. Yeah. Not exactly like the typical Christmas
themes you would you would expect. There's also a part
(19:25):
in the second part where Alf talks um uh talks
Cleveland Little's character out of taking his life by jumping
off a bridge, not another I Actually I was about
to say that's not like a very Christmasy thing, but
thanks to a wonderful life, jumping off of a bridge
actually is kind of Christmas now that I think about it. Yeah,
But you know, being Alf and being a TV sit
(19:47):
come from the eighties, you would think at the end,
of course, the doctors come in and they say we're
going to save this girl, or or Alf, your heart
was big enough to heal this girl. But no, it
ends with Alf leaving and waving from the back seat
of the car, and she waves from her hospital window,
and the assumption is that she dies. Yeah. I mean,
(20:08):
there's a part early on in part one where Alf
over here is a doctor talking to Cleveland Little and
saying like, yeah, she's she's a goner, like there's nothing
we can do from her. This is going to be
her last Christmas. And the show makes no efforts to
change that whatsoever. And so like today, if you um
read about it on the internet, people like to tee
off on it um and in some pretty annoying like
(20:30):
think pieces. It's an easy target if you look at
it from a really cynical point of view, but if
you actually stop and watch it, it's an extremely touching episode.
Apparently viewers in seven were very touched by it, and
Alf went on to become a big hit in part
because of this kind of daring limb that they went
out on. But there's a guy who writes for Yahoo
News named Ethan Atler, and he noticed that at the
(20:52):
end of part two there's a little title card that
said that that episode was a memory of another girl
named Tiffany. So he was like, well, what is this.
That's the name of the dying girl in the episode.
Who's this Tiffany? And he started to dig into it
and he found out there actually was a real life
Tiffany who was dying who was a fan of Alf.
That's right, uh, And apparently this was something that happened
(21:13):
a lot, is that kids who were, you know, battling
cancer or something terrible like that, would get involved in
either with Make a Wish or just had a wish
to see Alf and to meet Alf because kids loved Alf.
And that's what happened. Tiffany went through Make a Wish
wanted to meet Alf, so they set up a video
conference in seven no small feat between Alf and the
(21:37):
puppeteer Paul Fusco obviously, and then Tiffany was in her
hospital room and the mom says, you know what, if
it hadn't been for this, like this gave Tiffany an
extra month of life. It like picked her spirits up
so much. Brandon Tartakov, who was running NBC at the
time heard about this and of course, you know, you
can imagine what happens from there. That's how this story
(21:59):
was born. He was like, this is gold, Christmas gold, everybody,
that's right. So they actually did make this two part
episode again, shot on film, um and they dedicated it
at the end title card to Tiffany Lee Smith in
her memory, which is pretty sweet. Um. But I mean
that that that video conference, that meeting between those two
was significant enough that like they did they did that,
(22:22):
you know, and if you go back and watch it.
I've only seen part one because I accidentally stumbled onto
an internet mystery Chuck. Part two is not on the internet.
Part one you can get anywhere and you watch it
and you want to see part two, and you can't
see part two anymore interesting there there. I watched this.
Uh you probably saw this too. There's like a ten
(22:44):
minute video where this guy kind of breaks it down
and goes over the story and shows clips from it.
Apparently out delivers a baby at some point too. That's
where some of the laughs come from. Uh. But yeah,
it's interesting. And the guy in the video too said
that um alf fan sites it can be rated the
worst or the best episode of ALF, depending on which
(23:05):
one you go to. Yeah, I read like a little
article on MeTV and they were saying, the ALF Christmas
Special is the ALF movie we always wanted. But anyway,
it was nice. It was very pleasant to watch, at
least the first part of it. I recommend anybody who
can go check it out. It's good and it maybe
want to watch more ALF again. Yeah. I looked up
the girl. I was like, I wonder where she is today.
(23:26):
She's born in seventy five, so she's a year older
than you, And um, I didn't she had She didn't
do a lot of stuff after her childhood. But she
was on that TV show as a cast regular. Uh
not Full House, Our House. Yeah yeah, with Wilford Brimley. Yeah,
I never saw that. Shannon Doherty and Wilford Brimley. She
(23:48):
was one of the little girls in that too. So
you know, now she's she's locked into Christmas history. That's right,
trapped forever with ALF. All right, Jerry, this is your
chance to shine. Tune up that violin and let's hear it, man.
(24:23):
We're just careening from Christmas Spirit to Christmas Spirit, aren't
I know? Uh? So that was yours. Why don't we
go with well, no, you pick from mine? Oh is
it my turn? Yeah, that's what we're doing. Okay, because
I I we got a big finish if you ask me.
Let's do Christmas songs, which is interesting, but you know
the one I'm excited about. Okay, all right, fair enough, okay,
(24:45):
uh yeah, Christmas songs. This got me thinking about I
saw the movie About a Boy recently, again movie that
I really love, and in that movie, Hugh Grant's character
is still living the good life as a fat cat
because of a Christmas song that his father wrote. I
can't remember the name of the song, but it's sort
of the idea. And it's correct that if you are
(25:08):
a pop star or even not, if you write, and
especially if you write and record and have those all
those rights to a popular Christmas song, then you are
living on easy street. My friend. Yeah, you can pretty
much just retire, and it's possible your kids and their
kids might be able to retire to and such as
the case Chuck with Jim Lee, who figures prominently in
(25:29):
this article you found about Christmas music in the music industry.
He was the bass player for Slade, who until today
I didn't realize was the originators of Quiet Riots Come
On Field of Noise. It's actually Slades Come On Field
of Noise. And I went back and listened to both
of them and I was like, this Slave Boy is
(25:50):
so much better. I mean, I love the Quiet Riot song,
and then I heard the slave version. I was like,
oh wow, this is this is amazing. Yeah Slade and
by the way, this is from Rob Pachetta cnn um,
but yeah Slade. I love Slade. When I was a kid,
they had that great video MTV video hit Run Run Away,
and that's how I got introduced. But previous to that,
in the early eighties, they were a big glam rock
(26:12):
band in England and Jim was the bassist and he was,
you know, he was talking about the pressure of of
writing that next big hit all the time, and he
was in he was sort of dry of ideas, and apparently,
as the story goes, in seventy three, in a hotel
bathroom kind of wondering what to do and remembered that
(26:33):
his manager and his mom had both said, why Christmas tune,
you can bloody retire. He's saying that inspired him. My room,
I mean a hotel bathroom so that inspired him and
he uh he he came up with the outline of
(26:53):
a verse and then a bridge apparently, and then all
of a sudden had a Christmas hit by Slade, which
isn't as big here in the States. I definitely heard
it quite a few times, but it's really big in
the UK. Yeah, I've never heard it before in my
entire life until yesterday. I think, Yeah, it's called Mary
Xmuss everybody, and um, yeah, I think it's enormous in
(27:15):
Britain because Against Slave was British, but I mean, it's
so big in Britain. I'm very surprised. I've never heard
it before. But it's a it's a cute, fun little
song about how not so Christmas is. But it was
a huge, huge hit for him, and it's kind of
one of those things where um Slade, the guy, the
bass player, Jim Lee, when he came up with this
(27:35):
idea like to do a Christmas song. It wasn't like
the band had been had been thinking of doing a
Christmas song. He really had to go sell it to
talk this awesome hard rocking glam rock band into doing
a Christmas song. And they didn't release it as like
a single or special. They released it on one of
their regular albums. Yeah, you're gonna say the name of
their lead singer, oh um, uh, it's great. Hold on,
(27:57):
what is his name? Naughty Holder? That's it's a great name.
And he actually looks a lot like a Naughty Holder does.
But Lee talks about the fact that it's like having
a pension basically here, you know, as he's aging, and
he said, you know, my grandkids just like we were
talking to He said, they're gonna be getting money for
this thing because Christmas tunes don't go away. If you
(28:20):
if you managed to wed yourself in there with a
popular tune, at least in your home country, uh, you're
gonna make a lot of money. And that's why Freddie
Mercury came to jim Ley at one point and said, Hey,
I'm kind of thinking about doing a Christmas song. Is like,
is that okay? Like I'm not gonna be stepping on
your toast or anything, am I? Yeah? Well, I mean
that was part of it. I think also, like Slade
(28:41):
was the ones who made it okay for people who
weren't being Crosby and Gene Autry record Christmas music because
after them Bowie recorded that Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby.
Queen came along and recorded There's and it just kept
going from there. I have the distinct impression that Slade
where the origin eights of that trend. I think, I think,
(29:03):
I think you might be right. It seems to be
what this uh, what this article is indicating. Uh And
you know now it's I think they said that, uh
and this was No one knows for sure, because no
one really wants to share these numbers, I think partially
because it goes against what you want to think about
it Christmas. But like that Mariah Carey song Ineen, they
(29:26):
estimated had earned her about sixty million bucks. It's it's
a great song. I'm not even a Mariah Carey fan,
but I love that song. It is a really good one.
Apparently she has more uppersly that have been coming out
lately to Christmas album. I think, yeah, I think she
just released another one. But that I mean that is
like it is a definitive recent Christmas hit, But it
(29:47):
also points out how hard it is to make one
of those, like because she's definitely not the only artist
who's working still today who's released a Christmas song every Christmas.
Tons and tons of artists like they're audited Christmas song
and one of the reasons why they take their song
was because they will basically be able to stop working
whenever they want if it's a hit. It's just so
(30:09):
rarely a hit. And there's this guy who has interviewed
in them in the article who basically said, um, he's uh.
He works for PRS for Music, which manages royalty payments.
He said, basically, you can count on your fingers the
number of artists in the last twenty five years we've
had like a bona fide Christmas hit. And it's true,
like there's plenty of Christmas songs, but Christmas hits are
(30:31):
few and far between. Yeah. I do think it's funny though,
how everyone, even bands you don't think you're doing it,
they try to get some of that Christmas juice because
if you will bring up like a modern Christmas rock playlist,
it is just littered with bands that I haven't even
heard of that are throwing their name in the hat. Basically,
(30:54):
I mean, I love a lot. I love Elton John's song,
I love Queen song, Thank God It's Christmas. I think
my favorite might be Tom pet ease uh and the
Heartbreakers Christmas all over again. I don't know that one. Oh,
it's great. It's great because at the end, I think
I talked about this some movie Crush a couple of
years ago. At the end, it's kind of fading out
with some jingle bells and Tom Petty and that sort
(31:14):
of Florida Southern draw says Santa this Christmas, I want
a thender Twin Reverb Chuck Berry song. Yeah. Yeah, And
he's just like listing things out. Is that it even
fades out on his voice. It's real. Hey, I remember
that song. That is a cute one. What's your favorite?
I think we poked about this before. My favorite Christmas
song of all the time, A recent Christmas hit, favorite
(31:36):
just pop rock of any era. Christmas song. Man, Somebody's
going to find me on the street and strangle me.
But I gotta say Last Christmas by wayamb Oh, it's great?
Are you kidding me? Yeah? A lot of people really
hate that song. But it's not because it's a bad song.
It's just because it's really overplayed. That's one of the
other problems with the fact that so few Christmas songs
(31:58):
are Christmas hits because that means that is a small pool.
It gets played over and over and over again. Such
good stuff. What a big mistake to get a Christmas
Heart and the very next day give it away. That's
it is a big, big mistake. There's one other person
I want to give a shout out to, though, is
Carly Kylie Minogue. She had some good Christmas songs and
there's actually um did she did a duet with James
(32:22):
Cordon called like every Day Is Christmas? I think, very
very cute. It's not it's not a hit in the
United States, but I would bet a lot of marmalite
that it was. It's a big hit in Australia. Uh.
I know people are sick of hearing it, but I
still love Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time and I love
John Lennon. So this is Christmas good stuff. Yeah, it
(32:44):
is good stuff. And then I also, um My, the
thing I've been playing Chuck and this will come probably
is a little surprised to you, Bias wanting to shout
it out to. Um. I found a YouTube video that's
an hour long called Kmart Store Intercom Christmas Music nineteen four.
Whoa knock your socks off? Is this a playlist? It's
apparently an hour that they took from the kmart store
(33:05):
intercom because at one point they call for security in
section three. Um. But it's like just small, like instrumental,
smallty Christmas music that will make you pucker. It's so sweet. Uh.
Emily has been She usually likes her her rock and
roll Christmas mixes, but she's a big Christmas music person.
From Thanksgiving to Christmas. It's always on in the house. Yeah,
(33:28):
but this year she's just so crazy with work and
really stressed. She's listened to nothing. But I mean, we're
calling it jazzy Christmas. I don't know what it is,
but it's the these it's sort of like dentist office
Christmas piano stuff. Oh yeah, nice, very relaxing. But I
do miss step into Christmas and Christmas all over the world,
and so we're gonna have to rock it out soon, okay.
(33:51):
Um oh. Another one that we um we should mention
is that Donnie Hathaway song. Um This Christmas I think
is what it's called Christmas. You've heard it a million times,
you know, listen to Dolly. I think I put this
before I left social media. Last year, a full of
Dolly Parton's Christmas songs are about having sex. What go
(34:15):
listen to? Go listen to Dolly Parton's Christmas songs about them.
At some point she's talking about like screwing Santa, or
like the guy in neighbor, or like what, it's really funny.
I'm telling you just do it. And you know it's
in the Dolly Parton way, like yeah, yeah, of course,
it's not like we had a few drinks and canoe
told or something. Really, I had no idea. It's really funny.
(34:38):
But that she she deserves another shout out just for
candy Christmas alone. Well, but I think that one talks
about it. Yeah, I think she talks about going to
the bar and picking up somebody maybe at once. I
know what you're talking about. I hadn't really thought about
it because it's just Dolly, you know. All Right, I'm
gonna look at the lyrics for that. Well, we need
to move on or else we're just gonna spend the
(35:00):
next forty five minutes talking about Christmas songs that we
we thought of. All right, Jerry, that's your cue? All right?
(35:24):
Is it my turn? It's your turn? Buddy. All right, well,
I guess there's nowhere else to go for you than
Advent calendars. That's true. I don't know how that happened,
did I Did you choose first or something? I must
have huh, all right, I'm not sure. It's it's kind
of like the antipestic rhyme scheme all over the place.
(35:47):
But we're talking to Advent calendars, and I realized that, um,
I didn't set out what an Advent calendar was. Maybe
not everybody understands that because I was raised Catholic, so
I had an Advent calendar every year, did you No.
I got into them when took German in high school
and we sold them for German Club. Okay, alright, so
they're a super German thing. But also if you're Catholic
in the United States, they're a pretty Catholic thing too,
(36:08):
but I think they're also a lot of Protestants usom.
But it's just basically a little calendar, but it's a
calendar plus because for each day from December one, that's
the extent of an Advent calendar. Each day it has
like a little door on it each day, and you
open up the door and there's like a swede inside
or something like that. And the whole point of an
(36:29):
Advent calendar is to get kids jazz about the coming
of Christmas, as if they needed any extra jazzing whatsoever.
But that seems to be the whole point of Advent calendars. Yeah,
we I don't know why I didn't get one this year,
because we've been getting them, and I've seen with my
own eyeballs how delighted my daughter is because you know,
it becomes the ritual every day. He used to open
(36:50):
that door and get that little piece of chocolate. Uh, jeez,
I didn't get one this year. If you look at dope,
it's not too late. You can just pick up the
pace and just started like you know, December twelve. Oh yeah,
I guess that we're recording this in December nine, So
you're right. I need to find a local German club,
high school German club. That all right? So these things?
(37:11):
There isn't one on the twenty, does it end. I've
seen both ways, and I don't remember. I haven't had
one for years either, but I feel like there was
there the last one you opened on Christmas, I thought,
But maybe it is Christmas Eve that you opened the
last one and you wake up and it's Christmas and
you burn it. Then you set it up fire uh
Latin uh in Latin, coming or arrival is what Advent means.
(37:34):
So obviously the arrival of Christmas and the first Advent
calendar that uh, you know, we kind of recognize. This
one was introduced later than I thought, in nineteen o
eight in uh Munich or as we would say in
German club Munichian Germany, by Gerard Long. Gerard, No, I
(37:55):
think it would be Gerhardt line. That's what I thought.
He really threw me off. They were in Saxony or something,
so Long actually said. It was my dear sweet mother
who introduced me to the Advent calendar. She used to
make them for me by hand herself, put little pastries
in there so that every day, um, I would get
to eat a little sweet and that was my treat
(38:17):
for Advent. And he loved it so much and loved
his dear sweet mother so much that he grew up
as an adult and in nineteen o eight he released
the first Advent calendar. But it was the suckiest Advent
calendar you could possibly get, because it was just a
flat piece of paper. There were no treats involved. There
are no doors to open. You just crossed off the day.
(38:37):
And I think gerhart Lang's mother haunted him by his
bedside for years until he finally in nine added doors
to his Advent calendars and put sweets inside. And then
everybody said okay, and his dear sweet mother could rest
in peace from that point on and went off to heaven.
That's nice German heaven. Uh. This went throughout Germany of first,
(39:00):
and they were they were selling and printing these things
like crazy up until World War One and in World
War Two when they stopped doing it because of the
paper rations. But you'll be glad to know. Then in
World War Two, the Nazis still printed their own Advent
calendars with Nazi propaganda stuff behind the little doors. Yeah,
they took all the churchy stuff out. Yeah, but in
(39:22):
the little pagan symbols. Uh. And then after World War
Two they kind of cranked up the operation again. Yeah,
they got back to normal. Everybody's like, thank God. And
apparently they just stayed basically in Germany. It was a
German tradition among Lutherans and other German Protestants. And then
in the fifties h Dwight Eisenhower, dear old Ike was
(39:43):
photographed with his grandchildren around Christmas time opening an Advent calendar,
and everybody said, I like Ike. So they went out
and bought event calendars, and they suddenly became a lot
more widespread in the United States, and today they are widespread,
to say the least, and they really bear little rese
went to that original Sucky Night Advent calendar that Gary
(40:03):
hart Lion came up with. Yeah, you know, when I
bought them, they do resemble it. It's still sort of
the traditional Advent calendar with just the simple little chocolate
in there, but they can get quite fancy. Now. Apparently
you can get large calendars with beer or wine or
whiskey in them, which I think is kind of cool.
(40:24):
What else, Um, if you're a little kid and you're like,
I really want to be exposed to branding all month
long to really get me primed to ask for certain
certain presents, then they've got Advent calendars for you. They
have roadblocks, they have Lego hot Wheels minecraft. Some of
them managed to be doubly branded. There's Harry Potter Lego
(40:46):
Advent calendars, Pokemon Funco Advent calendars, it's an advertising bananza
all about the arrival of the baby Jesus. I bet
Amazon sales one that's just a tiny little QR code
for five percent off something that's right, and like you
open each jour in the messages you love Amazon, I
(41:07):
love Amazon. You cannot do without Amazon. Uh. And then
there is one that uh I meant to look this
up and see a picture of it, but apparently if
you have way too much money and you're a uh no,
I'm not gonna say what kind of person might do?
Is okay because it's our kids are listening. But you
can get one from Tiffany and Company, which has it's
(41:29):
a big crate with you know, legit jewelry inside each
day to give your special someone twenty four individually wrapped
Tiffany gifts. I think in this crate man the spirit
of giving. That's what they call that. I guess so.
And by the way, everybody advent calendars was the suggestion
of another little helper named Alexandra Stock who sent in
(41:51):
that one and a whole list of others. So thanks
for that, and Chuck, I think it's Jerry's time to
shine again right now? All right, we're back and Uh,
(42:18):
we need to shout out Time magazine and and this
is going to be a dead giveaway Festivus web dot
com for this next bit. Yes, so we're talking about Festivus, Chuck, Festivus,
the festival for the rest of us or the festivals
for the rest of us, depending on who you talk to.
(42:39):
That's right. Uh, if you don't know what we're talking about,
then you probably are not a Seinfeld fan. But Festivus
was in the of an episode of The Strike in
the ninth season when Frank Costanza the great great Jerry Stiller,
Uh has he left us or is he around? Don't
know when? And Mara died? Don't know? All right, should
(43:02):
we get our our our person to check on this? Hey,
check on that? Will you on it? I think people
think we do have like a dedicated researcher at our
side at all times, and they're not very good. So
Jerry still er, Uh, this is great. He staged a
war on Christmas and created Festivus. With one of the
(43:25):
great lines in Seinfeld history, he said, many Christmases ago,
I went to buy a doll for my son. I
reached for the last one they had, but so did
another man and here's the line. As I rained blows
upon him, I realized there had to be another way
that Christmas twice today? You you watched it twice today.
Oh my gosh. It is flawless. Man. It has it all.
(43:49):
Cramers on a bagel strikes like giving her fake number
out and trying to get a free sub, Kruger's in it,
George's Human Fund, like fake charity, Cherry's two faced girlfriend,
like everything is in that one. It's just an amazing
flaw this episode. I love it. Uh So this is
(44:10):
on the show. It's celebrated on December twenty three because
he wanted to get a leg up on Christmas. Uh
and he he practiced festivals with the Festivus pole, which
was a bare aluminum pole in the living room or
the backyard with no decoration. And they have, of course
the airing of the family grievances and then engage in
(44:31):
the feats of strength. That's right. So everybody knows that
Seinfeld and Seinfeld writers just created this out of whole cloth,
and Festivus was born. And I mean almost immediately people
just started taking up festivals and celebrating festivals as well,
and still do today. Very much. But it turns out,
and I had no idea about this, but one of
(44:52):
the writers on Seinfeld, Dan O'Keeffe, his father, Daniel O'Keeffe Sr.
Actually created festivals back in the six these and little
Dan O'Keefe, as a kid in the seventies and eighties,
celebrated it with his family every single year. So Festivus
was a real thing. The other writers of Seinfeld forced
Dan O'Keefe to basically include in an episode. Yeah. I
(45:15):
think I may have heard that at some point, but
didn't really have it ingrained in my mind until this
popped up. And it just makes it all the better
the fact that this was a real thing. As the
family story goes in nineteen sixty six, on the eve
of the first date that Daniel Sr. Had with his
UH fiance to be Deborah Uh, they commemorate Festivus and
(45:40):
they became an annual tradition. Some differences is they did
not have a Festivus pole. I was creative for the show, uh,
and it was not on a set date. Apparently in
the O'Keefe family, happened at any time in the year
and never actually happened at Christmas. Yeah, I reade an
interview with Dan O'Keefe, and he said he never knew
when they were going to celebrate festivals until he got
(46:02):
off the bus after school and his dad like had
the decorations on, was playing weird sixties French music and
I guess I love that so much better than it
being a Christmas thing. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, there's no
no idea when. But they actually did air grievances. That
was part of it, and it seems to be part
of like the actual theme or reason four festivals. As
(46:25):
Daniel O'Keeffe senior conceived of it, that it was partially
just kind of like blow off steam, get out what
was bothering you about the rest of the family, and
then you drew off. You know, it's a healthy thing
to do. They didn't call it the airing of the grievances.
They just you know, basically spoke about their beefs uh.
They um apparently were inspired or the senior Daniels inspired
(46:49):
by a Samuel Beckett play called Crap's Last Tape where
the protagonist in the movie or I'm starting to play
Um tapes himself speaking at different points in his life.
And so the O'Keefe family used a tape recorder to
record their festivus and these some of these tapes still
exist apparently from little Dan's life, which is great. Yeah,
(47:09):
and there's actually in that episode Frank Costanza brings into
old tape recorder and plays an audio tape of one
of the festivals. Is where they just saw the whole
family descends into screaming and George's crying and it's it's
pretty good. Seriously, you need to watch the episode again.
So good. I'm like, man, this show was good, and
(47:31):
that was a really great episode. I'm gonna do that
right after this. Actually, this was exactly what I'm gonna do. Um.
One of the traditions that they did that that was
not on the show was this is really funny. It
was called a clock into bag or a clock in
a bag. And the thing here is that apparently even
the kids still don't know what that was all about.
(47:53):
This is something the dad did and they would ask him,
like Dad, what is the clock in the bag all about?
And he would say, that's not for you to know.
So they just had to go along with it and
honor the clock in the bank. And apparently one of
the other famous things about Festivists. The Festivals for the
rest of Us is what a lot of people say.
(48:13):
It's the slogan that's on that episode. That actually was
a slogan for Festivus with the Keith family, they called
it the Festival for the rest of Us, And initially
um was kind of a bit of dark humor reference
to Daniel O'Keeffe Senior's mom dying, and so it was
a festival for the rest of them left over after
his mom died. But it was part of the point
(48:35):
was to um move on each year, to like, you know,
are your grievances and kind of bid a dude to
whatever problems you had and just move on rather than
dwelling in the past and your problems and that that
seems to be tied in with that. So it was
I as if Festivus could have gotten any better, It
just did for me. I love it. So we should
(48:55):
do that now, Josh, I've been meaning to say, you're
not so great at mass, and oh, yeah, that's all
I have to say. Uh, your your putdowns are actually
not that bad. How about that? That's my big problem?
All right, we've gotten it. We've gotten that out of
the way. I feel so much better. I do too.
I love it. I think it's great that it was
(49:17):
a real thing and the writers had to kind of
put him up to it. Apparently Dan was a little
reticent about sharing this, but his since I think he
went on to write a book about it even Yeah,
I think so too. He fully embraced it. Yeah, I
mean with a set of cash. He right, and he
definitely likes set loose, a huge cultural juggernaut on the
on the world, which is cool. I love it. And
(49:37):
this makes me think of Aaron Cooper, So we want
to shout out Aaron, because I know Aaron loves Festivus
for sure. Happy Festivus, Cooper, and happy Festivus to all
the rest of us. Yeah, and thanks thanks for another
great year everybody, and you and Jerry and Dave and
UH and Max who helps uh helps us with the
ads and and the ad sales team and everyone at
(49:58):
I Heeart who helps us put this thing out. It's uh,
we gotta think Dave Ruse, we gotta thank our newest
member Libya, and we gotta thank Grabowski and uh, Julia, Yeah,
that's right, Julia Layton. And also thank you to our
special elf helpers Um, Adam Stevenson, Robert Paulson, of course
Alexandra stock Um for coming up with these great suggestions
(50:22):
for us. Were appreciate that big time. And like Chuck said,
happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanuka, happy Kwanza,
as they say in that episode of The Simpsons, have
a tip top ted. And we appreciate you guys joining
us every year for this thing because we really look
forward to it. And Chuck, I have to say, after
(50:43):
a wonky ish episode, which I think was very appropriate
for I feel like we got our our Christmas spirit
back in this one. I think so. And of course,
if this is a tough time of year for you,
which it often is for some people we're thinking about you,
hang in there, get through these holidays and uh and
look forward to hopefully a better next year. So in
(51:03):
the meantime, everybody, happy holidays from all of us. It's
Stuff you Should Know. Stuff You Should Know is a
(51:36):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the Holiday Cast. I'm Josh,
(00:25):
and there's Chuck and Jerry's with us in spirit, and
everything is merry and bright, and the tidings are glad
in the halls are decked, and uh, Santa's on his way.
That's right. Are Christmas episode that we look forward to
every year. This, along with the Halloween episodes or episodes,
(00:46):
are two of our favorites. And they are both ad
free because we insist upon it, because Christmas has been
commercialized enough for doing our bit to reverse that trend
just ever so slightly. And I think it's it's been
having a measurable effe, don't you, Chuck? I think so.
People's fingers are spared that fast forward button for the
next forty five minutes, and let's do this. So what
(01:20):
are we going to do first? Maybe the mystery behind
the world's most famous Christmas poem? Yeah, did you dig
this one up? Or no? I believe this was a
listener suggestion. It was so. This is based on an
article by Stacy Conrad in Mental Floss, but it was
suggested to us by one of our listeners named Adam Stevenson,
and thank you very much to Adam for sending this
(01:41):
idea in And the whole thing, Chuck, that we're talking
about is probably the world's most famous Christmas poem. It's
called a Visit from St. Nicholas, and we've read it before,
but it's actually, in most people's mind called Toys the
Night before Christmas. That's what I was confused a couple
of times I read through this. So that poem has
(02:02):
the authorship of it is disputed and has been disputed
for some time now. And it's not one of those
questions where somebody says, no, no, it was my great
great great great great grandfather who wrote it. Instead, there's
actually like evidence that kind of backs this up. So
right now here in one and maybe for the rest
of all time, we're not a certain who wrote a
(02:26):
Visit from St. Nick also known as Towards the Night
before Christmas. That's right. We know. It first popped up
in Troy, New York's Troy Sentinel on December appropriately three,
with no authorship attributed, and then thirteen years after that,
a professor and a poet named Clement Clark Moore was
(02:49):
named as the author. Because of the story that his housekeeper,
without him knowing it, sent the piece in. It was
a poem he wrote for his kids, supposedly, and sent
into the newspaper. And then in eighteen forty four, which
is twenty one years later, right, it was officially included
in one of his poet poetry anthologies. That's right, So
(03:13):
it officially became credited to Clement Clark Moore. And then
at some point, in a not entirely certain win, another family, um,
the family of Henry Livingston Jr. And again by family
we mean um, five generations grandchildren step forward and said, hey, um,
I don't think this is quite right, because it turns
(03:35):
out that great great great great great grandfather Henry had
been reading this poem to our to his kids, my
great great great great grandmother for like fifteen years before
it was first published in the Troy, New York Sentinel. Right,
So if that was three, they're claiming it goes back
(03:56):
to eighteen seven. Yeah, that's what I saw, all right.
So let's duke this out on the livingstone side. And
we're not taking sides because neither one of us know
or care, but uh, on the livings, they certainly do.
On the Livings in side. They say, you know what,
we have Dutch heritage in our family and ancestry. Um
(04:16):
great great great great great great grand Peppie Henry's mom
was Dutch and there's a lot of Dutch references in
the poem, so it's his. Yeah, apparently this is where
we get the names for Santa's eight Reindeer, And originally
Donner and Blitzen's names were Dunder and blicks them. If
you read that, I know it's great. What makes it
(04:38):
like a cheap T shirt you would buy or something?
What a dunder brand T shirt? Well just know, like
you know, you're off brand toys. That seems like the
Christmas shirt. Yeah, so don't but it Dunder and blicks
them mean thunder and lightning and Dutch, so hence the
Dutch references. And the thing is that Clement Clark Moore
wasn't Dutch and he didn't have Dutch heritage, so it
(04:59):
does make it a little more sensible that Livingston, who
did have Dutch heritage, would have used those Dutch names initially.
That's right. And for all of you thinking I'd just
stepped by a Dunder and Mifflin joke, I just want
to acknowledge it, so you know that I did think
of it and I chose not to same here, all right,
it's a Christmas miracle for growing up. Yeah, we really are.
(05:21):
Uh So blix Um changed to blix in first, I
think to rhyme with vixen, and I believe in the
etour More stepped up because you know, he was like, hey,
this is my poem after all, right, uh and changed
it to the Germanic Blitzen, and then Dunder eventually became Donder,
and then in the early twentieth century it was went
(05:42):
to Donner because it's also Germanic. Yeah, so there's the
whole thing. Originally Dunder and blicks Him were two of
the names, and those are clearly Dutch words, which has
nothing to do with Clement Clark Moore. Um. There's another
thing to remember. We said that Henry's children said, and
apparently a neighbor at times said that they remember him
reading this to them back in eighteen oh seven, uh sixteen,
(06:05):
years before it was published, and they there's also family
legend among the Livingston's that there used to be a
handwritten draft copy that had markouts and scratches and revisions
to it. That would Yeah, I would basically suggest this
is the original version of the poem, and the case
would be closed had that not burned up in a
house fire at some point in family history. I don't see.
(06:26):
I was when I was reading this stuff, I was like,
all right, here we go, it's over, case reopened. Yeah,
the mysterious house fire. Now I'm like, I don't know
about you. Livingstone's right, okay, very fishy. Well, then the
literary professors got involved, and then things got really taken
off the rails, right, Yeah, they've there have been plenty
of well know about plenty, but at least a few
(06:48):
literary professors who have gotten in the archives and the
anthologies and said, you know what, this more guy never
wrote anything like this thing. Uh, it's in this anapestic
scheme where you have the two syllables followed by a
more stressed third syllable, and you never wrote anything like that, buddy,
So I think you're a fraud. Yeah. And I had
(07:10):
no idea about that scheme until I kind of spelled
it out myself and got it wrong. Though. Did you
notice that? No? I didn't. You got the first half right,
but then you lose it at you lost it after
and all through the house, Oh I did. Yeah, that
was pretty much like oh yeah, I see now okay,
can read it like yeah, please do, please do. Itwas
the night before Christmas and all through the house not
(07:33):
a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Oh man,
this is like my math. You got tripped up. Yeah
that's all right, good stuff, But that's anapestic scheme. They said,
you didn't write anything like that, buddy, But Livingston wrote
plenty of stuff like that. Yeah, so again case closed. Right,
(07:53):
if you want to put a nail in that coffin.
Another professor from New Zealand, a guy named McDonald Jackson,
stepped up and said, get this, everybody, I could. I've
devised a statistical analysis machine, and I said it loose
on Clement Clark Moore's manuscript notebook and it says all
of those poems are Clement Clark Moore's. But when I
feed that same machine towys the night before Christmas, you know,
(08:15):
a visit from St. Nicholas, everybody goes, oh yeah that
one he goes. It just starts coughing and smoking and sputtering,
and it broke. Yeah. Basically, uh, if you talk to
them more as they're like, yeah, but you know what
you're you're just constructing us in a way that makes
it look like you never anything like this, because I
know for sure he wrote the Pig and the Rooster
(08:35):
and that's antipestic. He wrote one like this, and that's
that I should I should spell out some of the
Pig and the Rooster and antipestic scheme and see what happens.
So on the more side this, I mean, I sort
of get this, but more was buddies with Rip van Winkle,
who was very much into the Dutch culture up there
(08:57):
in New York State. And I guess the argument is,
but because he was good friends with Irving that, uh,
it just he picked up on that Dutch stuff. Is
that the argument? That's the argument. But the argument that
I saw that basically is like, no, that's it's Clement
Clark Moore. Is that Clement Clark Moore, who has otherwise
(09:17):
never been accused of doing anything nefarious in his life,
um stepped up and claimed credit and an authorship of this,
and that just doesn't seem to be something that he
would have done had he not done that. And the
Livingston's Henry specifically, who was alive after the thing was
published for five more years, never stepped forward to take
(09:38):
credit for it, and that to a lot of people,
they are like, well that, I mean, that's that, Like, yes,
you can create statistical analysis machines to say whatever. But
as it stands out, if you go on to the
Poetry Websites Foundation, they say that there's a lot of
scholars that credit Henry Livingston with authorship, but they still
if you search Clement Clark Moore, the poem that they
(09:59):
have on their website for him is a visit from St. Nicholas. Still,
so everybody's like, who knows, but ultimately who cares? Just
read the poem. It's so great it doesn't matter who
wrote it anymore. I agree. So I think, Chuck, that
we've done our first little segment, which means it's time
for some of Jerry's delicious Christmas interstitial music. Huh all right,
let's hear it. Oh boy, that didn't that so much
(10:30):
better than an ad? Yeah? That is so nice. Jerry
really knows what she's doing. She's gotten really good at
this stuff. All right, where are we headed next? Oh jeez,
I'm driving? Huh Okay, I guess he said you want
to skip around, So yeah, let's do one of yours.
How about red and green? It's Christmas colors. Yeah, we
need to thank u Wanderopolis Reader's digests and our old
(10:52):
buddy Robert Paulson, Mr RP funding himself, longtime listener, he said, us,
I think he's done this past few years since it's
a bunch of Christmas ideas because you know, it gets
hard you guys to think of new things and to
find new stories, and Paulson's always sent this good stuff.
So this was inspired by Robert. And this is the
(11:13):
idea that where did green and red come from? For Christmas?
And there's quite a few theories and no one knows
for sure. No um, which is fun because that means
you get to toss out a lot of theories that
might be right or wrong, who knows. But um, if
you go talk to a Christian, say hey, that whole
red and green thing for Christmas? You're a Christian, where
did it come from? And they'll say, well, sit down, friend,
(11:35):
I'll tell you. It turns out that the green represents
an evergreen tree, which in turn represents Jesus. And you say,
I didn't see Jesus coming in this But here we go. Yeah,
it's only Christmas. And the reason that the evergreen represents
Jesus is because Jesus has eternal life or offers eternal life,
and the evergreen was representative of eternal life and living
(11:57):
through the winter time even the bleakest part of the winter,
and evergreen is still green. Hence the green part. And
you say, well, what about the the red. Don't say blood,
don't say blood. What do they say blood? Yeah, blood
of Christ. It's always the blood of Christ. So supposedly
that's where the red and green came from, as far
as Christian scholars are concerned. That's right. Other people say, well,
(12:20):
i'll tell you what. In the churches would put on
these miracle plays, is what they were called, And on
Christmas they would perform one called the Paradise Play, which
retells the story in Genesis of the creation of Adam
and even the garden of Eden when Adam was instructed
not to eat from the tree of good and evil
did so. Anyway, they were banished from Paradise. And when
(12:41):
they put on these miracle plays, apple trees weren't in season,
so they couldn't drag a dead apple tree in there,
so they would bring in a nice, lovely green evergreen
pine and then fastened apples to them, and that is
where the green and the red comes from. And every
single year there was always one townsfolk, one annoying towns folk.
It would stand up in point and say, that's not
(13:01):
an apple tree, that's right, Cleidas a slack gelgyokel. But
then now we get into probably the true origins of it,
because we're going back beyond the origin of Christianity and
starting to get into pagan and Roman culture. And as
we've seen time and time and time again with a
lot of the holidays that we celebrate these days, they're
(13:24):
ultimately based on Pagan and Roman rituals and this is
no no different. Um. They think that Saturnalia actually used
to claim as it's holiday colors red and green again
because of evergreens and the berries they bear. And and
then we talked about Saturnalia before in a Christmas episode, right,
we had to have. Surely at some point that's the
(13:45):
only way I would know about it. Uh. The Celtic people, also,
the ancient Celts, they loved their holly plants because they
were evergreen, and holly is very much associated with Christmas,
and they were saying, well, that's where the red and
green comes from. Then a little bit later on they were, uh,
these religious screens called rudes medieval churches were dyed red
(14:07):
and green. But other people say, well, that's because those
were the pigments that were available at the time. So
no one really knows for sure, no, but it does
like present like a connection between Christianity and red and green.
Those medieval church screens definitely do. So. The Victorians came
along and they had a bunch of different color schemes.
Blue and white, blue and red, red and green all
(14:29):
were pretty much equally associated with Christmas with the Victorians.
And uh, it wasn't until one when Coca Cola commissioned
Um had in Sunbloom to do his famous illustration of
Santa Claus, where Santa Claus became fat and fully clothed
in red for the first time and for the rest
of all time before that he was naked as a
(14:51):
j bird. That's right. It was a gross Christmas tradition,
all right, Jerry, how about some more of that music?
Take it away, Jerr. Okay, Chuck, So now I think
(15:24):
it's your turn to pick which one we're gonna do next.
It's a it's like opening Christmas presents. We're gonna just
switch off. You know where I'm headed. I'm headed to, Uh,
I'm headed to the nineteen eighties. I'm headed to December seven,
and I'm watching the TV show ALF, and I'm shocked
at what I'm seeing on my screen. It's right, mainly
because I never saw an episode of ALF. Oh you know, yeah,
(15:47):
you were a little old for it. I definitely did.
It was a cute show eighty six, so I was fifteen,
maybe just on the cusp, but yeah, I didn't see
way too old for what was ALF. Like an eightyear
old exactly the right age to hate ALF more than
any other age group on the planet, I think. Yeah,
I was like I started listening to Pink Floyd when
(16:09):
I was fifteen, So right, okay, yeah, you wouldn't have
like alfin people who have never seen ALF, like you. Um,
I was thinking our younger viewers, but I guess anybody
who has never seen ALF. It's a eighties sitcom about
an alien who crashed lands on Earth takes up a
residence with a family, who he in short order starts
to drive crazy with his wise cracking, his troublemaking. He's
(16:29):
good hearted, but he's just a lot. He's a handful.
And then on top of that, they have to keep
him a secret from nosy neighbors, from the government. Um.
And it's a it's a cute little show that that
like a six year old can follow the plotline of.
Uh you want to hear something more shocking. Yes, I
didn't know until yesterday that Alf was an alien. What
(16:50):
do you think he was? I don't know. I never
thought about it. I just I knew it was a puppet.
It looked like a little fuzzy beast of some kind.
I never really thought about I had no idea what
Alf was. But now that you know, I see this,
and I see the year clearly capitalizing on a post
et kind of thing. Let's do a sitcom. I'm sure
(17:11):
that was brought up in the room, you know. Yeah. Yeah,
and Alf actually stood for alien life for him. It
was the name that the dad Willie gave to him.
His real name was Gordon schum Way, and he was
from the planet mill Mack. Was it really Gordon Shumway? Yeah,
it's Have you ever seen that movie Permanent Midnight? Uh? Yeah, Oh, sure. Yeah, Yeah,
that guy that was based on the Ben Stiller place.
(17:33):
He was a writer for Alfred. Yeah, that's that's all
I knew of alf was that movie. Okay, gotcha? That
was one of my favorite lines from any movie is
when Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller have lost their percocets.
Owen Wilson and his voice goes, if I were a percoset,
where would I be? That? I can totally envision that. Wow.
(17:55):
That was a dead on Owen Wilson. By the way,
Wow there was again. So with alf Um, what you
see was what you got. It was very straightforward as
far as episodes were concerned. Sure, it was kind of jarring,
like you were saying when you tuned in on December, Oh,
I don't remember, but in and you found out that
there was a not just a one part as a standard,
(18:17):
but a two part episode shot on film of alf
And it was a very special Christmas special of alf Yeah.
It was, uh, to say the least, not very funny there.
You know, I watched some of it today. They didn't
forego the jokes entirely. They used them, tried to use
them effectively to sort of you know, punch up some
(18:39):
moments here and there, but it was definitely different. It
was Alf gets outside the house, get hitches a ride
with Cleveland Little from Blazing Saddle's fame as Santa Claus,
and they go to a hospital where Alf is mistaken
for a Christmas toy and given to a little girl
who is dying. Yes, which is basically the main plot
(19:04):
line of this episode. Alf hanging out with this dying
girl in her hospital room. And this is not like
the kind of thing where the dying girl doesn't know
she's dying. She actually talks openly and frequently about dying
and how she's being scared of it. Yeah, it's being
scared to die. Yeah. Not exactly like the typical Christmas
themes you would you would expect. There's also a part
(19:25):
in the second part where Alf talks um uh talks
Cleveland Little's character out of taking his life by jumping
off a bridge, not another I Actually I was about
to say that's not like a very Christmasy thing, but
thanks to a wonderful life, jumping off of a bridge
actually is kind of Christmas now that I think about it. Yeah,
But you know, being Alf and being a TV sit
(19:47):
come from the eighties, you would think at the end,
of course, the doctors come in and they say we're
going to save this girl, or or Alf, your heart
was big enough to heal this girl. But no, it
ends with Alf leaving and waving from the back seat
of the car, and she waves from her hospital window,
and the assumption is that she dies. Yeah. I mean,
(20:08):
there's a part early on in part one where Alf
over here is a doctor talking to Cleveland Little and
saying like, yeah, she's she's a goner, like there's nothing
we can do from her. This is going to be
her last Christmas. And the show makes no efforts to
change that whatsoever. And so like today, if you um
read about it on the internet, people like to tee
off on it um and in some pretty annoying like
(20:30):
think pieces. It's an easy target if you look at
it from a really cynical point of view, but if
you actually stop and watch it, it's an extremely touching episode.
Apparently viewers in seven were very touched by it, and
Alf went on to become a big hit in part
because of this kind of daring limb that they went
out on. But there's a guy who writes for Yahoo
News named Ethan Atler, and he noticed that at the
(20:52):
end of part two there's a little title card that
said that that episode was a memory of another girl
named Tiffany. So he was like, well, what is this.
That's the name of the dying girl in the episode.
Who's this Tiffany? And he started to dig into it
and he found out there actually was a real life
Tiffany who was dying who was a fan of Alf.
That's right, uh, And apparently this was something that happened
(21:13):
a lot, is that kids who were, you know, battling
cancer or something terrible like that, would get involved in
either with Make a Wish or just had a wish
to see Alf and to meet Alf because kids loved Alf.
And that's what happened. Tiffany went through Make a Wish
wanted to meet Alf, so they set up a video
conference in seven no small feat between Alf and the
(21:37):
puppeteer Paul Fusco obviously, and then Tiffany was in her
hospital room and the mom says, you know what, if
it hadn't been for this, like this gave Tiffany an
extra month of life. It like picked her spirits up
so much. Brandon Tartakov, who was running NBC at the
time heard about this and of course, you know, you
can imagine what happens from there. That's how this story
(21:59):
was born. He was like, this is gold, Christmas gold, everybody,
that's right. So they actually did make this two part
episode again, shot on film, um and they dedicated it
at the end title card to Tiffany Lee Smith in
her memory, which is pretty sweet. Um. But I mean
that that that video conference, that meeting between those two
was significant enough that like they did they did that,
(22:22):
you know, and if you go back and watch it.
I've only seen part one because I accidentally stumbled onto
an internet mystery Chuck. Part two is not on the internet.
Part one you can get anywhere and you watch it
and you want to see part two, and you can't
see part two anymore interesting there there. I watched this.
Uh you probably saw this too. There's like a ten
(22:44):
minute video where this guy kind of breaks it down
and goes over the story and shows clips from it.
Apparently out delivers a baby at some point too. That's
where some of the laughs come from. Uh. But yeah,
it's interesting. And the guy in the video too said
that um alf fan sites it can be rated the
worst or the best episode of ALF, depending on which
(23:05):
one you go to. Yeah, I read like a little
article on MeTV and they were saying, the ALF Christmas
Special is the ALF movie we always wanted. But anyway,
it was nice. It was very pleasant to watch, at
least the first part of it. I recommend anybody who
can go check it out. It's good and it maybe
want to watch more ALF again. Yeah. I looked up
the girl. I was like, I wonder where she is today.
(23:26):
She's born in seventy five, so she's a year older
than you, And um, I didn't she had She didn't
do a lot of stuff after her childhood. But she
was on that TV show as a cast regular. Uh
not Full House, Our House. Yeah yeah, with Wilford Brimley. Yeah,
I never saw that. Shannon Doherty and Wilford Brimley. She
(23:48):
was one of the little girls in that too. So
you know, now she's she's locked into Christmas history. That's right,
trapped forever with ALF. All right, Jerry, this is your
chance to shine. Tune up that violin and let's hear it, man.
(24:23):
We're just careening from Christmas Spirit to Christmas Spirit, aren't
I know? Uh? So that was yours. Why don't we
go with well, no, you pick from mine? Oh is
it my turn? Yeah, that's what we're doing. Okay, because
I I we got a big finish if you ask me.
Let's do Christmas songs, which is interesting, but you know
the one I'm excited about. Okay, all right, fair enough, okay,
(24:45):
uh yeah, Christmas songs. This got me thinking about I
saw the movie About a Boy recently, again movie that
I really love, and in that movie, Hugh Grant's character
is still living the good life as a fat cat
because of a Christmas song that his father wrote. I
can't remember the name of the song, but it's sort
of the idea. And it's correct that if you are
(25:08):
a pop star or even not, if you write, and
especially if you write and record and have those all
those rights to a popular Christmas song, then you are
living on easy street. My friend. Yeah, you can pretty
much just retire, and it's possible your kids and their
kids might be able to retire to and such as
the case Chuck with Jim Lee, who figures prominently in
(25:29):
this article you found about Christmas music in the music industry.
He was the bass player for Slade, who until today
I didn't realize was the originators of Quiet Riots Come
On Field of Noise. It's actually Slades Come On Field
of Noise. And I went back and listened to both
of them and I was like, this Slave Boy is
(25:50):
so much better. I mean, I love the Quiet Riot song,
and then I heard the slave version. I was like,
oh wow, this is this is amazing. Yeah Slade and
by the way, this is from Rob Pachetta cnn um,
but yeah Slade. I love Slade. When I was a kid,
they had that great video MTV video hit Run Run Away,
and that's how I got introduced. But previous to that,
in the early eighties, they were a big glam rock
(26:12):
band in England and Jim was the bassist and he was,
you know, he was talking about the pressure of of
writing that next big hit all the time, and he
was in he was sort of dry of ideas, and apparently,
as the story goes, in seventy three, in a hotel
bathroom kind of wondering what to do and remembered that
(26:33):
his manager and his mom had both said, why Christmas tune,
you can bloody retire. He's saying that inspired him. My room,
I mean a hotel bathroom so that inspired him and
he uh he he came up with the outline of
(26:53):
a verse and then a bridge apparently, and then all
of a sudden had a Christmas hit by Slade, which
isn't as big here in the States. I definitely heard
it quite a few times, but it's really big in
the UK. Yeah, I've never heard it before in my
entire life until yesterday. I think, Yeah, it's called Mary
Xmuss everybody, and um, yeah, I think it's enormous in
(27:15):
Britain because Against Slave was British, but I mean, it's
so big in Britain. I'm very surprised. I've never heard
it before. But it's a it's a cute, fun little
song about how not so Christmas is. But it was
a huge, huge hit for him, and it's kind of
one of those things where um Slade, the guy, the
bass player, Jim Lee, when he came up with this
(27:35):
idea like to do a Christmas song. It wasn't like
the band had been had been thinking of doing a
Christmas song. He really had to go sell it to
talk this awesome hard rocking glam rock band into doing
a Christmas song. And they didn't release it as like
a single or special. They released it on one of
their regular albums. Yeah, you're gonna say the name of
their lead singer, oh um, uh, it's great. Hold on,
(27:57):
what is his name? Naughty Holder? That's it's a great name.
And he actually looks a lot like a Naughty Holder does.
But Lee talks about the fact that it's like having
a pension basically here, you know, as he's aging, and
he said, you know, my grandkids just like we were
talking to He said, they're gonna be getting money for
this thing because Christmas tunes don't go away. If you
(28:20):
if you managed to wed yourself in there with a
popular tune, at least in your home country, uh, you're
gonna make a lot of money. And that's why Freddie
Mercury came to jim Ley at one point and said, Hey,
I'm kind of thinking about doing a Christmas song. Is like,
is that okay? Like I'm not gonna be stepping on
your toast or anything, am I? Yeah? Well, I mean
that was part of it. I think also, like Slade
(28:41):
was the ones who made it okay for people who
weren't being Crosby and Gene Autry record Christmas music because
after them Bowie recorded that Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby.
Queen came along and recorded There's and it just kept
going from there. I have the distinct impression that Slade
where the origin eights of that trend. I think, I think,
(29:03):
I think you might be right. It seems to be
what this uh, what this article is indicating. Uh And
you know now it's I think they said that, uh
and this was No one knows for sure, because no
one really wants to share these numbers, I think partially
because it goes against what you want to think about
it Christmas. But like that Mariah Carey song Ineen, they
(29:26):
estimated had earned her about sixty million bucks. It's it's
a great song. I'm not even a Mariah Carey fan,
but I love that song. It is a really good one.
Apparently she has more uppersly that have been coming out
lately to Christmas album. I think, yeah, I think she
just released another one. But that I mean that is
like it is a definitive recent Christmas hit, But it
(29:47):
also points out how hard it is to make one
of those, like because she's definitely not the only artist
who's working still today who's released a Christmas song every Christmas.
Tons and tons of artists like they're audited Christmas song
and one of the reasons why they take their song
was because they will basically be able to stop working
whenever they want if it's a hit. It's just so
(30:09):
rarely a hit. And there's this guy who has interviewed
in them in the article who basically said, um, he's uh.
He works for PRS for Music, which manages royalty payments.
He said, basically, you can count on your fingers the
number of artists in the last twenty five years we've
had like a bona fide Christmas hit. And it's true,
like there's plenty of Christmas songs, but Christmas hits are
(30:31):
few and far between. Yeah. I do think it's funny though,
how everyone, even bands you don't think you're doing it,
they try to get some of that Christmas juice because
if you will bring up like a modern Christmas rock playlist,
it is just littered with bands that I haven't even
heard of that are throwing their name in the hat. Basically,
(30:54):
I mean, I love a lot. I love Elton John's song,
I love Queen song, Thank God It's Christmas. I think
my favorite might be Tom pet ease uh and the
Heartbreakers Christmas all over again. I don't know that one. Oh,
it's great. It's great because at the end, I think
I talked about this some movie Crush a couple of
years ago. At the end, it's kind of fading out
with some jingle bells and Tom Petty and that sort
(31:14):
of Florida Southern draw says Santa this Christmas, I want
a thender Twin Reverb Chuck Berry song. Yeah. Yeah, And
he's just like listing things out. Is that it even
fades out on his voice. It's real. Hey, I remember
that song. That is a cute one. What's your favorite?
I think we poked about this before. My favorite Christmas
song of all the time, A recent Christmas hit, favorite
(31:36):
just pop rock of any era. Christmas song. Man, Somebody's
going to find me on the street and strangle me.
But I gotta say Last Christmas by wayamb Oh, it's great?
Are you kidding me? Yeah? A lot of people really
hate that song. But it's not because it's a bad song.
It's just because it's really overplayed. That's one of the
other problems with the fact that so few Christmas songs
(31:58):
are Christmas hits because that means that is a small pool.
It gets played over and over and over again. Such
good stuff. What a big mistake to get a Christmas
Heart and the very next day give it away. That's
it is a big, big mistake. There's one other person
I want to give a shout out to, though, is
Carly Kylie Minogue. She had some good Christmas songs and
there's actually um did she did a duet with James
(32:22):
Cordon called like every Day Is Christmas? I think, very
very cute. It's not it's not a hit in the
United States, but I would bet a lot of marmalite
that it was. It's a big hit in Australia. Uh.
I know people are sick of hearing it, but I
still love Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time and I love
John Lennon. So this is Christmas good stuff. Yeah, it
(32:44):
is good stuff. And then I also, um My, the
thing I've been playing Chuck and this will come probably
is a little surprised to you, Bias wanting to shout
it out to. Um. I found a YouTube video that's
an hour long called Kmart Store Intercom Christmas Music nineteen four.
Whoa knock your socks off? Is this a playlist? It's
apparently an hour that they took from the kmart store
(33:05):
intercom because at one point they call for security in
section three. Um. But it's like just small, like instrumental,
smallty Christmas music that will make you pucker. It's so sweet. Uh.
Emily has been She usually likes her her rock and
roll Christmas mixes, but she's a big Christmas music person.
From Thanksgiving to Christmas. It's always on in the house. Yeah,
(33:28):
but this year she's just so crazy with work and
really stressed. She's listened to nothing. But I mean, we're
calling it jazzy Christmas. I don't know what it is,
but it's the these it's sort of like dentist office
Christmas piano stuff. Oh yeah, nice, very relaxing. But I
do miss step into Christmas and Christmas all over the world,
and so we're gonna have to rock it out soon, okay.
(33:51):
Um oh. Another one that we um we should mention
is that Donnie Hathaway song. Um This Christmas I think
is what it's called Christmas. You've heard it a million times,
you know, listen to Dolly. I think I put this
before I left social media. Last year, a full of
Dolly Parton's Christmas songs are about having sex. What go
(34:15):
listen to? Go listen to Dolly Parton's Christmas songs about them.
At some point she's talking about like screwing Santa, or
like the guy in neighbor, or like what, it's really funny.
I'm telling you just do it. And you know it's
in the Dolly Parton way, like yeah, yeah, of course,
it's not like we had a few drinks and canoe
told or something. Really, I had no idea. It's really funny.
(34:38):
But that she she deserves another shout out just for
candy Christmas alone. Well, but I think that one talks
about it. Yeah, I think she talks about going to
the bar and picking up somebody maybe at once. I
know what you're talking about. I hadn't really thought about
it because it's just Dolly, you know. All Right, I'm
gonna look at the lyrics for that. Well, we need
to move on or else we're just gonna spend the
(35:00):
next forty five minutes talking about Christmas songs that we
we thought of. All right, Jerry, that's your cue? All right?
(35:24):
Is it my turn? It's your turn? Buddy. All right, well,
I guess there's nowhere else to go for you than
Advent calendars. That's true. I don't know how that happened,
did I Did you choose first or something? I must
have huh, all right, I'm not sure. It's it's kind
of like the antipestic rhyme scheme all over the place.
(35:47):
But we're talking to Advent calendars, and I realized that, um,
I didn't set out what an Advent calendar was. Maybe
not everybody understands that because I was raised Catholic, so
I had an Advent calendar every year, did you No.
I got into them when took German in high school
and we sold them for German Club. Okay, alright, so
they're a super German thing. But also if you're Catholic
in the United States, they're a pretty Catholic thing too,
(36:08):
but I think they're also a lot of Protestants usom.
But it's just basically a little calendar, but it's a
calendar plus because for each day from December one, that's
the extent of an Advent calendar. Each day it has
like a little door on it each day, and you
open up the door and there's like a swede inside
or something like that. And the whole point of an
(36:29):
Advent calendar is to get kids jazz about the coming
of Christmas, as if they needed any extra jazzing whatsoever.
But that seems to be the whole point of Advent calendars. Yeah,
we I don't know why I didn't get one this year,
because we've been getting them, and I've seen with my
own eyeballs how delighted my daughter is because you know,
it becomes the ritual every day. He used to open
(36:50):
that door and get that little piece of chocolate. Uh, jeez,
I didn't get one this year. If you look at dope,
it's not too late. You can just pick up the
pace and just started like you know, December twelve. Oh yeah,
I guess that we're recording this in December nine, So
you're right. I need to find a local German club,
high school German club. That all right? So these things?
(37:11):
There isn't one on the twenty, does it end. I've
seen both ways, and I don't remember. I haven't had
one for years either, but I feel like there was
there the last one you opened on Christmas, I thought,
But maybe it is Christmas Eve that you opened the
last one and you wake up and it's Christmas and
you burn it. Then you set it up fire uh
Latin uh in Latin, coming or arrival is what Advent means.
(37:34):
So obviously the arrival of Christmas and the first Advent
calendar that uh, you know, we kind of recognize. This
one was introduced later than I thought, in nineteen o
eight in uh Munich or as we would say in
German club Munichian Germany, by Gerard Long. Gerard, No, I
(37:55):
think it would be Gerhardt line. That's what I thought.
He really threw me off. They were in Saxony or something,
so Long actually said. It was my dear sweet mother
who introduced me to the Advent calendar. She used to
make them for me by hand herself, put little pastries
in there so that every day, um, I would get
to eat a little sweet and that was my treat
(38:17):
for Advent. And he loved it so much and loved
his dear sweet mother so much that he grew up
as an adult and in nineteen o eight he released
the first Advent calendar. But it was the suckiest Advent
calendar you could possibly get, because it was just a
flat piece of paper. There were no treats involved. There
are no doors to open. You just crossed off the day.
(38:37):
And I think gerhart Lang's mother haunted him by his
bedside for years until he finally in nine added doors
to his Advent calendars and put sweets inside. And then
everybody said okay, and his dear sweet mother could rest
in peace from that point on and went off to heaven.
That's nice German heaven. Uh. This went throughout Germany of first,
(39:00):
and they were they were selling and printing these things
like crazy up until World War One and in World
War Two when they stopped doing it because of the
paper rations. But you'll be glad to know. Then in
World War Two, the Nazis still printed their own Advent
calendars with Nazi propaganda stuff behind the little doors. Yeah,
they took all the churchy stuff out. Yeah, but in
(39:22):
the little pagan symbols. Uh. And then after World War
Two they kind of cranked up the operation again. Yeah,
they got back to normal. Everybody's like, thank God. And
apparently they just stayed basically in Germany. It was a
German tradition among Lutherans and other German Protestants. And then
in the fifties h Dwight Eisenhower, dear old Ike was
(39:43):
photographed with his grandchildren around Christmas time opening an Advent calendar,
and everybody said, I like Ike. So they went out
and bought event calendars, and they suddenly became a lot
more widespread in the United States, and today they are widespread,
to say the least, and they really bear little rese
went to that original Sucky Night Advent calendar that Gary
(40:03):
hart Lion came up with. Yeah, you know, when I
bought them, they do resemble it. It's still sort of
the traditional Advent calendar with just the simple little chocolate
in there, but they can get quite fancy. Now. Apparently
you can get large calendars with beer or wine or
whiskey in them, which I think is kind of cool.
(40:24):
What else, Um, if you're a little kid and you're like,
I really want to be exposed to branding all month
long to really get me primed to ask for certain
certain presents, then they've got Advent calendars for you. They
have roadblocks, they have Lego hot Wheels minecraft. Some of
them managed to be doubly branded. There's Harry Potter Lego
(40:46):
Advent calendars, Pokemon Funco Advent calendars, it's an advertising bananza
all about the arrival of the baby Jesus. I bet
Amazon sales one that's just a tiny little QR code
for five percent off something that's right, and like you
open each jour in the messages you love Amazon, I
(41:07):
love Amazon. You cannot do without Amazon. Uh. And then
there is one that uh I meant to look this
up and see a picture of it, but apparently if
you have way too much money and you're a uh no,
I'm not gonna say what kind of person might do?
Is okay because it's our kids are listening. But you
can get one from Tiffany and Company, which has it's
(41:29):
a big crate with you know, legit jewelry inside each
day to give your special someone twenty four individually wrapped
Tiffany gifts. I think in this crate man the spirit
of giving. That's what they call that. I guess so.
And by the way, everybody advent calendars was the suggestion
of another little helper named Alexandra Stock who sent in
(41:51):
that one and a whole list of others. So thanks
for that, and Chuck, I think it's Jerry's time to
shine again right now? All right, we're back and Uh,
(42:18):
we need to shout out Time magazine and and this
is going to be a dead giveaway Festivus web dot
com for this next bit. Yes, so we're talking about Festivus, Chuck, Festivus,
the festival for the rest of us or the festivals
for the rest of us, depending on who you talk to.
(42:39):
That's right. Uh, if you don't know what we're talking about,
then you probably are not a Seinfeld fan. But Festivus
was in the of an episode of The Strike in
the ninth season when Frank Costanza the great great Jerry Stiller,
Uh has he left us or is he around? Don't
know when? And Mara died? Don't know? All right, should
(43:02):
we get our our our person to check on this? Hey,
check on that? Will you on it? I think people
think we do have like a dedicated researcher at our
side at all times, and they're not very good. So
Jerry still er, Uh, this is great. He staged a
war on Christmas and created Festivus. With one of the
(43:25):
great lines in Seinfeld history, he said, many Christmases ago,
I went to buy a doll for my son. I
reached for the last one they had, but so did
another man and here's the line. As I rained blows
upon him, I realized there had to be another way
that Christmas twice today? You you watched it twice today.
Oh my gosh. It is flawless. Man. It has it all.
(43:49):
Cramers on a bagel strikes like giving her fake number
out and trying to get a free sub, Kruger's in it,
George's Human Fund, like fake charity, Cherry's two faced girlfriend,
like everything is in that one. It's just an amazing
flaw this episode. I love it. Uh So this is
(44:10):
on the show. It's celebrated on December twenty three because
he wanted to get a leg up on Christmas. Uh
and he he practiced festivals with the Festivus pole, which
was a bare aluminum pole in the living room or
the backyard with no decoration. And they have, of course
the airing of the family grievances and then engage in
(44:31):
the feats of strength. That's right. So everybody knows that
Seinfeld and Seinfeld writers just created this out of whole cloth,
and Festivus was born. And I mean almost immediately people
just started taking up festivals and celebrating festivals as well,
and still do today. Very much. But it turns out,
and I had no idea about this, but one of
(44:52):
the writers on Seinfeld, Dan O'Keeffe, his father, Daniel O'Keeffe Sr.
Actually created festivals back in the six these and little
Dan O'Keefe, as a kid in the seventies and eighties,
celebrated it with his family every single year. So Festivus
was a real thing. The other writers of Seinfeld forced
Dan O'Keefe to basically include in an episode. Yeah. I
(45:15):
think I may have heard that at some point, but
didn't really have it ingrained in my mind until this
popped up. And it just makes it all the better
the fact that this was a real thing. As the
family story goes in nineteen sixty six, on the eve
of the first date that Daniel Sr. Had with his
UH fiance to be Deborah Uh, they commemorate Festivus and
(45:40):
they became an annual tradition. Some differences is they did
not have a Festivus pole. I was creative for the show, uh,
and it was not on a set date. Apparently in
the O'Keefe family, happened at any time in the year
and never actually happened at Christmas. Yeah, I reade an
interview with Dan O'Keefe, and he said he never knew
when they were going to celebrate festivals until he got
(46:02):
off the bus after school and his dad like had
the decorations on, was playing weird sixties French music and
I guess I love that so much better than it
being a Christmas thing. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, there's no
no idea when. But they actually did air grievances. That
was part of it, and it seems to be part
of like the actual theme or reason four festivals. As
(46:25):
Daniel O'Keeffe senior conceived of it, that it was partially
just kind of like blow off steam, get out what
was bothering you about the rest of the family, and
then you drew off. You know, it's a healthy thing
to do. They didn't call it the airing of the grievances.
They just you know, basically spoke about their beefs uh.
They um apparently were inspired or the senior Daniels inspired
(46:49):
by a Samuel Beckett play called Crap's Last Tape where
the protagonist in the movie or I'm starting to play
Um tapes himself speaking at different points in his life.
And so the O'Keefe family used a tape recorder to
record their festivus and these some of these tapes still
exist apparently from little Dan's life, which is great. Yeah,
(47:09):
and there's actually in that episode Frank Costanza brings into
old tape recorder and plays an audio tape of one
of the festivals. Is where they just saw the whole
family descends into screaming and George's crying and it's it's
pretty good. Seriously, you need to watch the episode again.
So good. I'm like, man, this show was good, and
(47:31):
that was a really great episode. I'm gonna do that
right after this. Actually, this was exactly what I'm gonna do. Um.
One of the traditions that they did that that was
not on the show was this is really funny. It
was called a clock into bag or a clock in
a bag. And the thing here is that apparently even
the kids still don't know what that was all about.
(47:53):
This is something the dad did and they would ask him,
like Dad, what is the clock in the bag all about?
And he would say, that's not for you to know.
So they just had to go along with it and
honor the clock in the bank. And apparently one of
the other famous things about Festivists. The Festivals for the
rest of Us is what a lot of people say.
(48:13):
It's the slogan that's on that episode. That actually was
a slogan for Festivus with the Keith family, they called
it the Festival for the rest of Us, And initially
um was kind of a bit of dark humor reference
to Daniel O'Keeffe Senior's mom dying, and so it was
a festival for the rest of them left over after
his mom died. But it was part of the point
(48:35):
was to um move on each year, to like, you know,
are your grievances and kind of bid a dude to
whatever problems you had and just move on rather than
dwelling in the past and your problems and that that
seems to be tied in with that. So it was
I as if Festivus could have gotten any better, It
just did for me. I love it. So we should
(48:55):
do that now, Josh, I've been meaning to say, you're
not so great at mass, and oh, yeah, that's all
I have to say. Uh, your your putdowns are actually
not that bad. How about that? That's my big problem?
All right, we've gotten it. We've gotten that out of
the way. I feel so much better. I do too.
I love it. I think it's great that it was
(49:17):
a real thing and the writers had to kind of
put him up to it. Apparently Dan was a little
reticent about sharing this, but his since I think he
went on to write a book about it even Yeah,
I think so too. He fully embraced it. Yeah, I
mean with a set of cash. He right, and he
definitely likes set loose, a huge cultural juggernaut on the
on the world, which is cool. I love it. And
(49:37):
this makes me think of Aaron Cooper, So we want
to shout out Aaron, because I know Aaron loves Festivus
for sure. Happy Festivus, Cooper, and happy Festivus to all
the rest of us. Yeah, and thanks thanks for another
great year everybody, and you and Jerry and Dave and
UH and Max who helps uh helps us with the
ads and and the ad sales team and everyone at
(49:58):
I Heeart who helps us put this thing out. It's uh,
we gotta think Dave Ruse, we gotta thank our newest
member Libya, and we gotta thank Grabowski and uh, Julia, Yeah,
that's right, Julia Layton. And also thank you to our
special elf helpers Um, Adam Stevenson, Robert Paulson, of course
Alexandra stock Um for coming up with these great suggestions
(50:22):
for us. Were appreciate that big time. And like Chuck said,
happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanuka, happy Kwanza,
as they say in that episode of The Simpsons, have
a tip top ted. And we appreciate you guys joining
us every year for this thing because we really look
forward to it. And Chuck, I have to say, after
(50:43):
a wonky ish episode, which I think was very appropriate
for I feel like we got our our Christmas spirit
back in this one. I think so. And of course,
if this is a tough time of year for you,
which it often is for some people we're thinking about you,
hang in there, get through these holidays and uh and
look forward to hopefully a better next year. So in
(51:03):
the meantime, everybody, happy holidays from all of us. It's
Stuff you Should Know. Stuff You Should Know is a
(51:36):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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