December 23, 2025 • 50 mins
Deck your tidings and get your halls nice and gladded because it’s time for maybe the best episode of the year, where SYSK loosens our ties, puts on our smoking jackets and Santa hats and create holiday nostalgia in real time. Happy holidays, everybody!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Do Do Do Do Do, Do Do Do, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's
here too. Somewhere in spirit. She may be haunting somebody
right now as a ghost of Christmas past. I'm not sure. Yeah,
And this is our annual Stuff you Should Know Holiday
special Hunt Chalk.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
That's right, I tell you what. It's one of, if
not our favorite episodes of the year. M h. I
will say it's getting harder and harder to come up
with stuff. We're delving further out into the world and
further back in time.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah. Yeah, this is our Anglo American edition, I guess.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, that's right. European listeners are going to be pretty stoked.
And also we like to point out this this is
one of two episodes at the year where we draw
a line in the sand and say, sales take the
day off. No ads for this one.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, because Christmas is commercial enough? Am I right?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah? Man? Am I going to sell these? No?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
These belong to you guys, the people there are gifts.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That's right. And by the way, if you hear the
tinkle tinkle of ice. It's because Josh talked me into
making the drink that we're gonna You know, sometimes we
have a little Christmas drink that we put out as
a part of this episode, and we're doing that again
this year, and so I'm having what we call here
in the South a nooner.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I didn't have to try very hard. What do you
want to start with, Chuck? And also hats off to
Jerry for doing all of the wonderful sound design that
makes this Christmas episode so special every year.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
That's right, as usually we're flying by the seat of
our pants. What do you say we start with one
of your picks on the Morabians, who we've talked about
before on a Christmas episode. I believe I don't remember
that we definitely did.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It makes sense because they are definitely sod with Christmas
in the United States, and I would guess the Czech
Republic too. At the time the Moravians made the move
over to North America in the eighteenth century, the Czech
Republic was still called Bohemia, and the Moravians first settled
in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, and they where a
(02:17):
very devout group still are and that's why Pennsylvania has
towns named Nazareth in Bethlehem, for example.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, never knew that until yesterday.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
So they brought a lot of Christmas traditions with them.
The Moravian cookies Mevini gingery, molasses heavy flat, yeah, crispy delicious.
Oh yeah, yeah, those cookies came from these people. They
also brought the seeds of miniature Christmas villages that people
put up around the holidays too.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
That's right. If you look back in the Middle Ages
in Europe, well, there's a bunch of awful things going on.
But one of the fun things was a trend of
creating Nativity scenes. They were called, I guess cretches. And
you know what a Nativity scene is. They're a little
dioramas of the of the scene of the birth of
Jesus in a manger. And yeah, the Moravians saw those
(03:07):
and they were like, hold my molasses cookie, because we're
gonna kick this up a notch. And they kicked it
up such a notch that the Germans created a term
basically for that notch of these crutches, these Moravian crutches,
called a puts. It means to put out or decorate
and putzing was the act of doing this nothing to
(03:27):
do with the Yiddish term you're a putts or putsing about?
Speaker 2 (03:32):
No, oh really, I thought putsing probably came from that
because you're going from house to house, as we'll find out.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
No, because the putts is sort of a fool and
puttsing about is kind of doing foolish things.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I see, I heard a putts was something else entirely
that we would well be able to mention on the episode.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Is that not true, that's the original, that's the og meeting. Yes,
you are correct.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Okay, So Moravians, like you said, they kind of took
this medieval tradition to like a whole new level. The
putts is that they created just started getting bigger and bigger.
They started out with those Nativity scenes, the crush, but
they started adding new figures like the shepherd's dog. Well,
shepherd's dog, from what I understand, doesn't appear in any
(04:16):
biblical description of the Nativity scene, which was the birth
of Jesus.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Right, Yeah, but you still.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Want to include the shepherd's dog because you're starting to
make a better and better diorama. Eventually, there were too
many characters to fit in the manger. So they started
hanging out outside the manger.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, They're like, where am I going to put the
manger repair guy? They had no spot. So they created
they just expanded the natural scene around the I guess
the barn. They created fields. Of course, all of a
sudden you had lakes, you had cliffs, you had rivers,
you had buildings, you had more buildings, and before you
(04:53):
know it, a putts or a putz rather it's probably puts.
It could take up an entire room, like they would
clear up room and dedicate it to their puts.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Right, And so there's a tradition that kind of grew
up around this where that room would usually be closed
off to the kids of the family got to do that,
and the adults would go in there and puts around
o their poots. Then on Christmas Eve they would unveil
the poots, the family poots, to the kids. And I'm
sure it was just a great a great time for everybody.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That's right. And now I digress very briefly to tell
you of a little natural diorama I made at my
camp on a stump, on a big old tree stump
that I brought up there from a neighbor's front yard.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I brought your own stump.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
I brought my own stump, which was a whole story
in itself, which I won't get into. But the stump
is now located near the fire and I created a
whole scene there where we display the rocks that we
paint when we go up there. And then I brought
it a step forward and I made a whole nature
scene featuring little plastic animals of all the animals that
I've caught in the camp cam nice And I mentioned
this only because while I was doing it, it was
(06:02):
a weekend with a lot of the kids there. A
bunch of neighbors and friends went up and families.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Were they invited?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
They were not. Every time they came over there to
try and arrange things, very gently said this is mister
Chuck's project.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, So that wasn't so much fun. But it reminded
me of the Moravians saying, kids get out of here.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Right. Did you unveil it to the children's delight though
on Christmas Eve?
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No. I unveiled it later that evening and they said,
buzz off turkey. I wasn't a part of it.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
So there were people who got so good at it
that they became known for their puttses or poots's. One.
Probably the most famous Moravian puts artist I guess yeah
would be, was named Jenny Train. She was working in
I guess about the mid twentieth century, and her puttses
were so great that some of the museums in the
Lehigh Valley hold them in their collections and display them
(06:55):
at certain times.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Of the year. That's right. And the non Marie got
into it at a certain point, so much so that
they were like, we don't even need this Nativity scene
any longer. Let's just create a Christmas village. Sure, you
can buy these things if you want, but it's a
lot more fun if you sort of collect things piece
by piece and set up your own. Obviously, electricity came
along and you could have, you know, Christmas lights. You
(07:18):
could have little ski lifts that take people up tiny mountains.
They do that so cute.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, for sure. Apparently lit Max is probably from what
I could tell the leader in Miniature Christmas Village Manufactory. Yeah, oh,
you want me to tell you some more about them, please,
So they have different themes. Like you said, you can
buy these whole kits like wholesale, but they also I think,
sell each piece individually because if you know so there's
(07:44):
the Christmas tip. If you know somebody who sets up
Christmas villages around Christmas, yeah, that is a guaranteed home
run gift to get them another piece for their collection.
They will not be mad about.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
It, yeah for sure. But if you choose to buy
whole kit, you can get you know, themes, you can
get like a Norman Rockwell thing or like a Victorian
age thing. That'd be kind of a fun one.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I think that seems to be that in like Swiss
village seems to be like a pretty common theme. But
there's also I've seen one for the fifties. Somebody's really
heavy in the do op. I guess that would be
their kind. So there was also Santo's Wonderland, you know,
like where it's at Sanna's actual village. That seems pretty
good thematically speaking.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, that's right. And we want to thank listener Robert Paulson,
who's been listening forever. Yeah, because he always sends in
Christmas ideas and I believe he sent this one in
under the guise of trains around the tree and that
led to this because it seems that the origin of
the trains around the tree came from this tradition of
creating these villages. They eventually added trains, and once Lionel
(08:48):
came along with their electric train sets, sometimes the village
went away and it just became a train around the tree.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Yeah. And then people who had those trains around their
trees grew up, they got nostalgic for them, they started
setting them up for their kids, and it became a
Christmas tradition thanks to our Moravian friends.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That's right, and that is the story of the Moravian
tiny villages And scene, what do you want to do next?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Do you want to tell everybody about your drink so
they can possibly press paws and make one and then
come back for the rest of it?
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah? Why not? Okay? This year, the drink that we're
going to talk about is Chuck's special Pumpkin Spice Old Fashion.
I've been drinking these lately because when fall rolls around
here in Georgia, that's when the whiskey and the bourbon
kind of becomes a little more to my taste, definitely,
And this year I heard about a pumpkin spice Old Fashion,
(09:49):
and I thought you know what, I've never made my
own syrups and stuff, so I'm going to make my
own pumpkin spice syrup from scratch. And I did, and
it's great.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I have some questions about your recipe. I may have
some suggestions. I'm not surprised, and you tell me, you
tell me if you think that they would be incorporaable.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Uh okay, I mean you can. You can do it,
what however you want to?
Speaker 2 (10:10):
So all right, well listen, so you start with five
cups of water, right?
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Uh yeah. I mean I'm not an exact guy when
it comes to recipes, so I had a really hard
time coming with measurements because I'm just I fly by
the seat of my pants when it comes to cooking
and things.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Okay, well, so you got that. You've got one and
a half cups like brown sugar, another half a cup turbinato,
which is like the granular minimally processed sugar.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, but it's sort of like the pre brown sugars.
It's got that same molasses flavor.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Okay, and then do you like your syrup very sweet?
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Uh? Yeah, I mean in this case, you know, you know,
I actually don't think I measured the water. What I
think I did was I got an old bourbon bottle
and clean that out really good and filled that up
because I wanted it to fill that bottle. So I
guess it's what is that bottle like? Like, is that
a lead seven fifty? Yeah? I got a seven to
fifty so whatever that equates two cup.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Wise, although I guess it could be a leader.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
No, no, no, no, the leader is the big guy, right, yeah, No,
this is the seven to fifty. So, however much water
that is, so you.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Can depending on how sweet you want your syrup to be,
you can make it a two to one ratio two
cups of water to one cup of sugar, or a
one to one ratio if you really like a sweet
one cup of sugar to one cup of water, and
then you expand it from there, depending on how much
you've got in your whisky bottle.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Right, yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
And then you've got to make your spice mix though yourself.
Chuck here is showing off everybody, and his recipe says
it's best if you grind and powder your own.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Sure, what do you have, well, classic pumpkin spice. It
can vary depending on who you are, but I did
about a tablespoon of cinnamon, about a half a tablespoon
of nutmeg, and then you've got to go a little
bit lighter, maybe a teaspoon or two of ginger, about
a teaspoon of allspice, and about a half a teaspoon
of clove, because clove is you know, pretty it can overpaw. Yeah,
(12:01):
but again it depends on how you like your pumpkin spice.
But you know, you mix those all up, you throw
it all, you know, you boil that water and then
throw in the sugar in that pumpkin spice mix, and
you just stir it until you get to the consistency
that you like, which, you know, the longer you boil,
the kind of thicker it's going to get.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, and the clearer it'll get the more you boil,
I think, right, it'll eventually just go whoop and turn clear.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
No, no, no, this is a very dark brown syrup.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Right, so sorry, not clear, I mean translucent, but still
dark brown.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I don't even know what translucent means.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Then it means like it goes from cloudy to where
you could see through it even though you're seeing through
like brown.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
I don't know if you could see through the stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, well then this is some thick syrup.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, I mean it looks sort of like a coke
and a bottle.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Okay, great, So I do have one one thing to add, okay,
if you so, if you take cinnamon, it does not
like water. It's hydro haiti. I can't remember which which
what it's called, but it does not like to mix.
Do you ever have trouble mixing it in with the
boiling water?
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Nope, mixed up, just fine.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Okay. Well, I've found that if you mix something like
cinnamon and I would guess all of the spices with
sugar ahead of time, it binds to the sugar and
it allows it to dissolve more easily.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Oh okay, good tip.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
That was my only other tip.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I love it. That sounds pretty good. The other thing
I did was Emily dehydrates of fruits as bar garnishes.
So she had a big mess of orange peel that
she had dehydrated. So I kind of chopped those up
and threw that in the bottle as well, because you know,
an old fashion has those orange notes.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
And if you want to make the old fashion, and
I have to say, you can put this in your coffee.
You can drizzle it on a cheesecake. It's just a
pumpkin spice sweet syrup, so you can. Really it doesn't
have to be an alcoholic drink, but you're gonna make
the old fashion. I do two ounces of bourbon. You
can use rye if you want a little shake of
that angle store bitters. I do a little shake of
(13:58):
orange bitters on top. Then I love this elguappo chickory
pecan or pecan bitters.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
They're local, right, I don't know if.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
They are not, but you know, if you can find
a chickory pecan or any kind of like walnut or
pecan bitters, I think it really adds a nice touch.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
It does sound very nice. And then of course the
coup de gras, the death blow, which is the pumpkin
spice syrup.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yeah, I mean it spends on how sweet you like
these things. You can just put just a little bit
if you don't like it too sweet, and you're still
going to get that flavor. And you know, all of
this stuff. You can make it less boozy if you
want the one I made for today, since it's a noon,
or I just made a little happy so I just
did one ounce of bourbon.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Very smart. So you take that, you make sure everything
is at room temperature. You put it in a glass,
and you drink it and sayoh.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
No, no, no, no, no, what I do? I mean
you can just put it straight over ice and mix
it with a spoon or something. But if you really
want to do it right, put that stuff in a cocktail,
shake with ice, shake it really really good, and then
get a nice heavyweight cocktail glass out of at a
cocktail cherry to the bottom of that thing. Pour it
over a giant square ice cube or a giant round
ice cube if you want to really be fancy. And
(15:08):
then here's the key. As you know, Josh, you got
to get that orange peel right.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Oh yeah, you want a nice wide swath of orange peel,
no pith, no white on the bottom, or as minimal
as possible.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yeah, And you twist it.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
You twist it over the top of the drink, and
if you look closely, you can see a spray come out.
And then all of a sudden there's a little oil
slick on top of the drink, and you, friend, have
just expressed the essential oils from that orange into your
old fashion.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
That's right, And just a quick psa for all the
bartenders out there. When you make a martini or anything
with like a lemon or orange, make it a big
wide you know, they have those the little peelers that
you know, like a cocktail peeler. You can get the
kind that does the little tiny pigtail curly cue. Those
are annoying. They curl them up, they hang it on
(15:59):
the outside the glass. But the whole point of that
peel is to get that essential oil, and you can't
do that with those little little skinny things. So bartenders,
for the love of Pete, give the customer a big
wide peel so they can express that thing themselves.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Our listeners named Pete just said, yeah, that's right. What's
the last little bit? If you really want to show
off though, chuck.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Oh, if you want to, if you have a zester
like little Greater, get a cinnamon stick and just just
grate a little fresh cinnamon.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
On top, just a little bit, just a touch. That's right,
and people will be like, this is the best Christmas
I've ever had.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, Or you can stick that cinnamon stick right in
the drink if you really want to get crazy.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
One other thing that we should probably say though off
the bat is when you make the syrup, you want
to make it ahead because it needs to cool and
go in the fridge.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Right, yeah, yeah, keep that thing in the fridge. And
like I said, I use an old liquor bottle because
it has a cork on top, or if you have
those fancy bottles with the little clasp on top with
the cork, like, that's great. When I went to my
brother's Thanksgiving this year, I got one of Emily's little tiny, like,
you know, four or five ounce bottles and poured some
in there and brought it along. It's a nice, nice
(17:13):
thing to give us a gift.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
That is classy, buddy, thank you. Okay, well, I guess
we should probably let everybody pause, go make the pumpkin
spice syrup, wait a couple of days, and then come
back and we'll start the next segment. How about that.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
What do you want to do next? Chuck?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Well, I mean let's go back to one of yours.
Should we do the Frozen Fair?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Yeah, we're gonna go back in time, way back.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Frozen Fair, the Fryar's Fair, the frost Fairs. I didn't
get it once, did I?
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Featuring the Fryars.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
So we're talking about a series of basically impromptu winter
festivals that happened to London over the course of a
few hundred years and had tipped to the BBC London Museum,
History Jar, Honest History and the podcast Tales of History
and Imagination. And what we're talking about is they're called
(18:19):
the Frost Fairs. And we should give you a little
background first because the bridge that's now London Bridge was
built in the sixties. The bridge before that was built
in eighteen thirty one, and that eighteen thirty one bridge
was disassembled and reassembled in Lake Havasoo, Arizona, which is
where it stands today. And that little gift from London
(18:40):
to Lake Havasou gave rise to a really great nineteen
eighty five TV movie starring David Hasselhoff, Glate Terror at
London Bridge. Definitely worth watching. But the problem is the
eighteen thirty one bridge and the nineteen sixties bridge put
an end to this impromptu winter tradition in London forever.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
That's right. That new London Bridge has five arches. The
one previous to that from eighteen thirty one had nineteen arches,
but they were closer together, they were pretty narrow and
water didn't float through those things very well. And it
was also a time when the Thames was shallower. And
was it narrower or wider?
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Wider?
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Wider and shallower, Yeah, wider and shallower. So all of
this sort of added up to because of a strange
weather phenomenon that Josh is going to describe, a time
when the Thames would actually freeze over.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, the Little Ice Age was going on too, from
the mid thirteen hundreds to the mid eighteen hundreds. This
period about five hundred years, there was some really weird
extra cold weather. Global temperatures dropped, and that means, ultimately
for our purposes with this story, that winters in London
were way colder during that five hundred year period than
(19:58):
they are today. So you put that toge the design
of the bridge with way more narrow arches, the Little
ice Age and the wider, shallower Thames. That meant that
the Thames could freeze over sometimes like it can't today.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
That's right, And that happened in fifteen sixty four when
it froze over and people in London were like, hey,
that's pretty cool. Let's go out and get drunk and
walk around and play on that thing.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah, apparently even Queen Elizabeth I was like, that looked fun,
let's go.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
She packed up for Corgi's and slipped around on the
ice for a little while. It froze again in sixteen
oh seven eight, and this time they were like, hey,
BlimE me, this thing's frozen again. Let's get drunk and
sell some things. That was Australian. Oh man.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
The thing is is like a lot of people bade
their money by shipping and moving stuff up and down
the Thames. They suddenly couldn't so some of those people
just set up stalls to try to make up whatever
they could. That was the first time anyone used the
term frost fair for these things.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Or frozen fryar or whatever the heck, righty.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
A frozen fryar frost fair. It wasn't until though, I
think sixteen eighty three eighty four, that it really became
like a full blown thing.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Though. Yeah, I mean that was a couple of months
of frozen Thames, and this time it was like a
real like a Christmas market. Basically everybody is selling their wares.
Like you said, people that normally sold stuff on the
side of the river were all set up down there.
They had so many rows of booths that they formed
a literal avenue down the middle of the Thames. And
(21:34):
you could do everything. You could have a sit down
restaurant meal under a huge tint made of boat sails
that are propped up by rowing oars.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, and it was apparently quite a party because there
was a writer of the time, John Evelyn. He wrote
that that Frost Fair was a bacchanalien triumph, a carnival
on the water. Yeah, that's saying quite a bit. This
is again, this is like people aren't like, Okay, the
sixteen eighty three f Frost Fairs coming up, we better
start planning. These were all generally impropt too. That was
(22:05):
pretty cool that sixteen eighty three one lasted two months.
And Tales of History and Imagination, the podcast I thanked earlier,
they turned up a fact that some guy bet some
other guy that he could build a three story house,
spend a night in it, and take it down before
the Thames thawed. And it's a great story even despite
(22:28):
the fact that neither we nor Tales of History and
Imagination could find out the outcome.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Of the bet. That sounds like a good show.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah it is. There's a lot of great episodes that
I saw when I was looking for that. I'm not
sure how I stumbled across it. I guess I just
came across some of their Christmas content.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I love it. I'm gonna check it out so big
thanks to them. There were a couple of more frost Fairs,
not Friars, in seventeen sixteen and again in seventeen thirty nine,
so there. I mean, I don't know if anyone's doing
the math. There are large, large gaps between all this stuff, right.
It's not like, you know, they went on the internet
and were like, hey, the last time they did all this,
so people are you know, I guess word gets passed down,
(23:08):
you know, like, hey, here's this is a thing to
do when the times freezes. But sadly, the last Frost
Fair was in eighteen fourteen.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, and you know that somebody at the seventeen sixteen
Frost Fair was like, this Frost Fair sucks. Yesterre to
eighty four sold out eighty four rocked Man.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
So yeah. The last one was eighteen fourteen, and the
BBC talked about it in one of their articles, and
they interviewed a food history named Ivan Day, and he
said that the eighteen fourteen Frost Fair was basically food
and drink and people getting wasted. He said that there
was this one drink called a pearl it was it
(23:48):
was wormwood wine. It's kind of like vermouth gin together,
so it was hot. It was like a hot, super
potent martini. Then he said, quote, you'd get absolutely wrecked
on it. There was a spiky beer that has a
lot of spices in it called mum, which is what
you'd probably call it a winter ale today. Yeah, I
love that, And then of course this regular gin. There
(24:09):
was also other stuff too. There's tea, coffee, hot chocolate,
and there was plenty of food to eat, particularly the
roast ox. Right.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Oh man, Yeah, I don't even like saying those words together.
But this Iban Day, this food historian, he replicates cooking
techniques from back then, and for this roast ox, he
said it would take basically a day over twenty four
hours to roast this thing in front of a fire.
And Buddy, I don't know if these numbers are right,
(24:37):
but he said that that ox could feed eight hundred people.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, yeah, and he's a food historian, so he would
probably know.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
I mean, I guess you're just getting like an ox
a moose boushe. It's not a plate full of ox
for eight hundred, There's no way.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
I don't know. I mean maybe their oxes were way
bigger during the little ice Age.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
I think it's oxen, my friend.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, thank you for correcting me on that one.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
What else would they serve mutton?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah? Sure, which is kind of like it's almost like
a sheep like meat.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
I think it is sheep. Isn't it like a grown sheep?
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
And you don't want that. Nobody wants mutton.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Really, I don't want mutton. So Jerry Seinfeld certainly doesn't
want mutton.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
So what does that one me?
Speaker 1 (25:22):
That was from Seinfeld? Remember he had a girlfriend that
he was spitting out food and putting it in his jacket,
and she was serving mutton vaguely. He would wrap it
in his napkin and stuff in his pocket, and eventually
Elaine borrowed his coat and got it backed by a dog.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Man. That was a great show, sure was. So. The
reason why the eighteen fourteen one was the last one
is because, like you said, the newer better. I guess
versions of the London Bridge have wider spans, so the
water camp back up behind the little narrow arches and freeze.
It just isn't gonna happen, everybody. Frost Fair was eighteen fourteen,
(26:01):
but parts of the Thames can freeze from time to time,
and the BBC turned up one from nineteen sixty two.
The winner in that year was called the Big Freeze
in London, and someone spotted a man riding a bicycle
on the Thames probably thinking to himself, you know what,
the Frozen Friar Fair would be great right now?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah? I hope it was a penny farthing. Yeah, for sure,
that'd be fantastic, very nice. All right, So that's the
Frozen frost Fire Fair. Where are we going next? My friend?
As we as we load up the sleigh and prepare
to take off.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
I don't know. I feel like I don't know. What
do you want to do? You pick one?
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Let's do our tribute to Vince GERALDI okay, I came
up with this one, I know. In one episodisode we
certainly talked about the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and kind
(27:05):
of dabbled in this, but I wanted to just sort
of do a little tribute to the man himself, because boy,
oh boy, for my money, there's no better Christmas music
than the Charlie Brown Christmas Special vince Garaldi Jazz Trio.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
I'm protective of that. I keep it at bay because
I don't ever want to get sick of it.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Okay, I don't get sick of it, but I do
appreciate that because we both certainly cherish it.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Like I can't even listen to Journey anymore because I've
heard their songs too many times. I don't want the
Charlie Brown Christmas to become the new Journey.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, who wants that?
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Right? So let's talk about vince Garaldi, though, because if
you know of him from the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack,
you essentially are familiar with the vast majority of vince
Garaldi's work.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, and big thanks to The New Yorker, specifically an
article from Ethan Iverson I think from twenty Seventeenish Piano
with Johnny dot com that's jo nn why and Unconservatory
dot org, who all had little bits and pieces about
the great vince Garaldi, who was born Vincent Anthony Dalaglio
(28:14):
in nineteen twenty eight and San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, his mom Carmela Divarce's biological father, Vincenzo Delaggio, and
married a guy named Tony Garaldi. Tony Garaldi adopted him,
and as a head tip and a thank you to Tony,
Vince said, let's change my last name, shall we? Guys?
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Yeah, I mean, is there ever a more Italian name
than Vincenzo de Laggio.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
No, there really isn't.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Yeah, maybe Tony soprano.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So he he ended up. He actually wasn't very musically inclined.
I think he took some piano lessons, but it never
really got under his skin. When he was a kid,
his uncle's introduced him to jazz, and he was like eh,
And he didn't really start playing until he went to
San Francisco State University for.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
A little while.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
And then there was an interlude between that and them
really getting going playing the Korean War, where he served
as a cook in the army.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
That's right, he went to the war. He came back and,
like you said, sort of started playing around a little jazz.
Clearly a talented guy, and he started going to these
jazz clubs in San Francisco, started playing wherever he could
little sort of I guess, not open mic, but open
key nights or whatever you would call those, and eventually
he got his first real gig, playing the intermissions during
(29:28):
Art Tatum shows at a club called the Blackhawk.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah. Art Tatum, he was actually from Toledo. He was
a self taught piano virtuo so who was nearly blind.
He's great, and he was so his talent was so
intimidating that vince Garaldi later said working with him was
more than scary. I came close to giving up the instrument,
and I wouldn't have been the first after working around Tatum.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, pretty intimidating.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, so he did not give up the instrument. Fortunately,
he went on to play with the likes of Cal Jader,
who who he was a vibraphone player who was into
Latin inflected jazz.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah, he's awesome, by the way, if you're into that
sort of Latin jazz thing. He's probably the most famous
non Latin Latin jazz guy. And the vibraphone is just
it's it's well, it's a vibe, it really is.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I love a good vibraphone. Jazz trio.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, same.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
He formed his own trio I think in nineteen fifty
five with a couple of friends, Eddie Durant and Dean Riley.
Now was that the all time vince Garaldi trio.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
I don't know, because they're not the guys who played
on the Charlie Brown. So then I think there were
iterations of the vince Garaldi trio over the years.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Gotcha, So as he's starting to kind of pick up
steam in the fifties, he played the Hungry Eye in
San Francisco, He played with the big band leader Woody Herman,
got back together with Carl Jader for a little while,
and he was basically the leader of several different jazz groups.
The thing is, he would probably be in name among
(31:00):
jazz cats and hepcats in San Francisco still today, but
it would probably be about the extent of his career
had he not created this one particular song called cast
Your Fate to the Wind. It's the other song that
he's known for, just a little threeish minute jazz song
from nineteen sixty two that he buried at the end
(31:21):
of a very odd album that he came up with.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, there was a movie in nineteen fifty nine a
French film called Black Orpheus, and what he did was
offer some sort of jazz arrangements of Brazilian music from
that movie, and it was called Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus.
And like you said, he stuck cast your Fate to
the Wind here at the end it is I'm sure
you know the song right. It is an amazing jazz
(31:45):
tune and the bones of everything you know about that
Charlie Brown Christmas Special music is in cast your Fate
to the Wind. It's just this. I mean, I think
who was it that called it a breadth of fresh air?
I think that was the ultimate producer of the Charlie
Brown Christmas Special, Lee Mendelssohn.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, so this is where fate really steps in because
there was a San Francisco jazz show hosted by al
Jasbo collins Man, what a great nickname. And on this
show on KSFO, he would play vince Garaldi's stuff because
by this time, the early sixties, vince Garaldi was pretty
well known around San Francisco. And Lee Mendelssohn, who was
(32:25):
starting a documentary project on Charles Schultz that would ultimately
be called a boy named Charlie Brown, and he was
looking for somebody to compose the music for it, and
he heard cast Your Fate to the Wind and was like,
I think this.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Might be it. Yeah, that was it. He said, hey man,
you want to compose some music for this documentary? He said,
because they were both Bay Area guys, and he said, sure,
I'll do it. And he created an entire original piece
called Lenis and Lucy. That was the theme. And that
is the you know, the very famous sort of Charlie
Brown theme song that we all know and love.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
You do a little measure or two of it.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
D oh wait, I gotta do my hand.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I'm dancing like in my arms in the air and
then down and then up. Then now you're supposed to
come in. That's very nice.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I can't keep doing that. People are about to tune out.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
I think that was a great one. I'm sure everyone
who's ever heard that song is like, oh, yeah, that one.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
A lot of people probably don't know it is Linus
and Lucy. I don't think of it. I just think
of it as like the Peanuts theme.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah, So he made Linus and Lucy. The documentary went
over and then Coca Cola came around and they said,
we want to do this Christmas special Charlie Brown Christmas
in spring sixty five, and so Giraldi was an obvious
choice to come back and record music. So he recycled
Linus and Lucy and also wrote Skating and Christmas Time
Is Here iconic.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Skating is one of the most beautiful songs of all time. Agreed, Yeah,
and like you said, when you when you hear cast
your fate to the wind, if you aren't familiar with that,
you would immediately be like that sounds a lot like
the Peanuts guy. He had a style that was all
his own, that was instantly recognizable, and Charles Schultze even said, like, hey,
he's his music is really to be credited in a
(34:14):
large part for the success of the Charlie Brown Christmas specials.
If you've heard Christmas Time Is Here too, there's an
instrumental version that's all Giraldi, and then there's a well
another Garali version, but it has lyrics of the little
kids singing, and I guess Lee Mendelssohn basically did what
a producer does when he couldn't find a lyricist. He
just took the reins and did it himself.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, apparently he was having trouble and he said he
wrote it in about fifteen minutes on the back of
an envelope. Pretty simple lyrics. But Vincecaraldy never went on
to be known for a lot after this. His output
after that wasn't super famous. But you know, I think
it was Ethan Irison from that New Yorker article made
it a great point. He was like, you know, he
(34:56):
shouldn't be cast aside in the history of jazz. He
should very much be remembered because his really his effective
and efficient techniques on the piano. He called Charlie Brown
Christmas like a gateway drug for people who were never
into jazz before, and I think that kind of says
it best.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, And he didn't have much time to grow as
a jazz musician after the Charlie Brown success because he
died ten years later in nineteen seventy six at age
forty seven.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, but his music lives on.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
The Charlie Brown Christmas album was voted into the Grammy
Hall of Fame in two thousand and seven. The only
travesty with that is that it took so long, and
it's part of the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry culturally,
historically or sthetically important American sound recordings.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
That's right. I wish we could play all of that
music today, but we can't because we don't want to
get sued.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, you're probably already going to get sued just by humming.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Oh I doubt it. They've said. The judge would say,
now that was not recognizable. Is the work at hand dismissed.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Let's have a little jingle interlude of our own making
that's in the public domain, and we will head on
over to the dark of night in Wales.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
How about that. Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Okay, Chuck, We're in Wales. It's dark, it's cold, it's
one of the twelve days of Christmas somewhere in there.
And we want to thank Alexandra Stock, who has sent
in plenty of ideas before she's sent this one in.
We also want to thank Museum Wales, Skynews and Wales
dot com for all the info about what's known as
the Mary Lloyd, which is not spelled like it sounds,
(36:47):
at least not the second part. It's Lwyd and that
is Welsh. It's Welsh's Welsh gits and it's a Christmas
tradition that clearly dates back to Celtic tradition. By the
purpose the point, all that stuff has been kind of
lost to history, but it's peculiar to Whales. You can't
(37:07):
find this anywhere else, and even in most parts of
Whales you're not going to find it these days. But
it still survives, and for good reason, because it's actually
a pretty cool little Christmas tradition for sure.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And here's how it goes down. On a certain night,
the Mauri Lloyd, which is a ghost horse, very pale
ghost horse, rides from house to house kind of looking
to be let in, looking for hospitality for people that
are in there enjoying their pumpkin spice, old fashions and
their apple ciders by the fireplace. But how it plays
out is it's a hobby horse. These men get together
(37:41):
it's a broomstick and they get covered in a white
sheet to form the body of the horse. They have
these colorful ribbons from the neck to form the neck
in the main, and then here's the most disturbing part
is I think sometimes it would be like paper machet
or wood or something like that, with like a hinge jaw,
(38:01):
so it looks like a horse's head, but in the
olden days, traditionally it was a real horse's skull.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Yeah, and it's frightening looking. If you see some old
timey mari Lloyd's that they're scary, And one of the
reasons why they're scary is they're supposed to represent like
death and spirits and being out in the cold in
the dark in winter. Right. But as scary as that sounds,
(38:28):
it's not like a crampus tradition where mari Lloyd's going
to come get you, like take you away and leave
you cold or something like that. It's in the tradition
of mummering, where caroling also came from going from house
to house, getting as drunk as you possibly can and
engaging in this kind of Christmas tradition, which is again
this is fairly peculiar. But the whole thing takes place
(38:50):
when the mari lloyd they're processing through the town essentially
a parade, and they go from house to house. When
they show up on the doorstep of a house, they
start seeinginging verse and they through the closed door and
on the other side of the door the family starts
singing verse back and essentially a verse battle goes back
(39:11):
and forth between the two.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, it's a rap battle. The weirdest thing about this
is the door is closed, right, But I guess the
whole point of this thing is they go back and forth.
Sometimes it could take like an hour until one side
finally gives up. I guess they can. You know, they
can't come up with a new next line, or they're
(39:33):
too drunk to and they say, all right, you guys win.
So the reason the door is closed is because if
there is a victory by the mary Lloyd crew, and
they usually won, the whole point was to be invited
in after that. So that's why the door is shut.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Right. But again, the mary Lloyd is scary. It's death
that kind of thing. That's why the family's trying to
keep them out. But when they come in, they're like,
here's some wastle, here's some rich crackers with the olive
on it. You know, they welcome them in, and the
mary Lloyd a role at that point is to run
around and like nip at the children and scare them
and maybe knock some stuff over. They might put the
(40:08):
fire out in the family's house. Just general mischief and revelry. Right,
there's a BBC like five to six minute documentary showing
mary Lloyd. Well, it's called a Ponka pwnco That verse
battle take place, and it's the most stayed presentation you
(40:30):
can ever find. Like, if you just saw that, you'd
be like mary Lloyd seems like a very serious thing,
it's not. It was again drunken revelry going from house
to house basically spreading the Christmas spirit and in return
for letting the mary Lloyd in you your house would
be blessed with good luck for the new year.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
That's right, we're the mary Lloyd's and we came to say,
we came to bring you luck in the usual way.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
I love fruity pebbles in a major way.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah. So in the end it turns out to be
a good party. I guess your home might get slightly wrecked,
but you got good luck. There are a couple of
theories about what that name actually means. One translation is
gray Mary, and it's a legend linking mary Lloyd to
the Nativity story and that it was a pregnant horse
that was in the stables where Mary is said to
(41:21):
have had Jesus. So they're like, we need some room
in here to have this very special baby. So I
know you're pregnant as well, horse, but hit the road. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
The horse is like I was here first.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yeah, and I'm also pregnant by the way.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And apparently the horse spent days trying to find a
place to have her full It's a very sad story. Yeah,
but it's Christian in origin, and a lot of people
are like, this is not a Christian tradition. This is
pagan as it gets. And there's the other translation of it,
the gray Mayor, And in Celtic and British mythology, the
(41:57):
gray Mayor or pale horse was of generated I guess
animal that could kind of cross over from this world
to the underworld fairly easily, which really kind of gets
across the whole horse skull and explains all that kind
of stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah. Well, you know what they say about the gray Mayor.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
She's not what she used to be.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
No, she ain't.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
So this is a very old tradition probably, but it
saw its hating in the nineteenth century and in the
most delicious way, right.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Yeah, But ironically, in trying to decry this thing that
was a Christian scholar saying like, you know, we can't
do this it, you know, like all things like the stress.
In effect, it brought more attention. They didn't call it
that then, but it brought more attention to it, and
all of a sudden, like how to manuals sprung up right.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
And so finally, though that heyday in the nineteenth century
kind of died off. By the nineteen sixties, it was
totally gone. They think, like they don't think anyone was
celebrating it anymore. But some groups of merrymakers found out
about it or revived it, and it still goes on
today in a few different places. And apparently it's when
they do it. It's pretty big and pretty fun and
(43:05):
pretty rowdy and just colorful and not really scary at all.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
I love it me too. Hats off whales, Hats off whales,
Hats off Tom Jones.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Mm see Welsh?
Speaker 1 (43:20):
Yeah, well that is name the singer with the Elvis hips.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah he was Welsh.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Huh he's Welsh, baby, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
All right, Chuck, we've arrived at the last piece, which
I love you found it and I think it's very
helpful and I love how it adds some like good
advice to this episode.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
That's right, because everyone loves putting up If you celebrate
Christmas and you celebrate with a Christmas tree, you love
putting up those Christmas tree lights. But storing those things
and then unveiling them the next year can be a
real pain in.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
The rump, a real drag, right.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
That's right. So we're gonna tell you at least some
Internet source tips on how to properly store those Christmas
tree lights.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
The first one, I like this one. It's complicated, but
it's cool. So you take a wrapping tube of Christmas
paper wrapping tube first, unroll the paper on end, throw
it away, and just take the tube and you make
a little notch in the end, one end of it
about an inch long, and you run the end of
the Christmas lights through and you stick your jam like
(44:31):
the plug and into that notch so it can't come out.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Okay, yeah, well, I mean the plug goes into the
tube hole, right, and then you just pull the electrical
cord through that slit.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Okay, that's another way to do it, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But then you take the lights and you start twisting them, twist, twist,
twist around the tube. Well, you twist the tube and
the lights kind of diagonally go around the tube, and
then you get to the end, cut another slit, put
the other plug end in, and there you go. You've
(45:05):
got one way to store Christmas lights. That seems pretty
great to me.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Yeah, you know, depending on the length of your tube,
you might have to go back over the other way.
But the point is it's not getting wrapped and wrapped
and wrapped around each other. Maybe just like one overlap.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Okay, that's one way. What about another way?
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Well, this is I mean these are all fairly similar.
In this case, though, You're going to cut a rectangular
piece of cardboard from a box. You know, depending on
how big you want it, maybe eighteen inches by nine
inches okay, And this time you cut little square notches
about an inch from each end on both sides, and
those notches are going to do the same thing that
that slit did. They're going to secure that plug and
(45:45):
then you just wrap it around that section of cardboard box.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Yeah. Like, if you've ever done any plumbing work or something,
sometimes whatever piece you're replacing, it'll come with a little
thing of teflon tape. It's the exact same thing in
miniature that we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah, exactly, I like that one.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
That's probably the one I would try of all these. Okay,
this one sounds really not super helpful. You use one
of those coffee caddies with the four little depressions for coffee,
and you stick the plug in through one of the
You know that each little hole or depression has some
slits in it. Yeah, you stick the plug in through that,
(46:27):
and you just start wrapping that guy over and over
and over again, rap, rap, rap, and then when you
reach the other plug in, you stick that through a
hole too.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yeah, not too bad. This way is maybe a little
likelier to get tangled because you're wrapping it over itself
through the center of that thing, over and over.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
Right, But what about what do you do? Chuck? I
think that's what the people want to hear.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Well, the Chuck method is very low fi. I found
that it works for me, may not work for you.
I take the lights off the tree and then I
lay them sort of out, one at a time on
the cow, which because the whole point of all of
this is you don't want those tangles, you know, that's
the biggest hassle of these things. Sure, they're kind of unwieldy.
And then I take that one of those little plastic
grocery bags that I'm about to go recycle, and instead
(47:12):
I just sort of bunch up that individual cord and
stick it in the bag. Each one gets its own bag.
As I said in this piece that I sent to you,
it sounds super yanky, but I found that it doesn't
really tangle when you take them back out, and they
pack really nice, you know, much nicer than these big
long tubes because you can just sort of flat pack
(47:33):
them in a bin and as long as they're each one.
The whole point is just to do one per bag
and to keep them separate. And when I unveil them,
they don't really get that tangly.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
That's amazing. There's got to be some sort of fluid
dynamics or something at play that somebody could explain. But
I don't get how that works. But that's cool.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
What's your method?
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Well, first of all, I want to say, you didn't
say super yanky in the piece. It says JANKI af.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
That's right, because I'm a hip kid.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
My method is I follow two different methods. One, you
can just leave the lights up throughout the year and
just don't turn them on.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Until Christmas on the tree. Okay.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
The second what I actually really do is I just
do that method where you have your you stick your
arm up at the elbow at a ninety degree angle.
You just kind of wrap from between your thumb and
forefinger across the palm through your elbow palm elbow, palm, elbow,
and you have to say that out loud while you're
doing it over and over again. It helps if people
are watching you while you say that too. And then
(48:32):
before you get to the end, maybe about six inches left,
you wrap that around the middle of that.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Com okay, and then like a like an extension cord style.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Precisely, as a matter of fact, that's probably the best
thing to call it. Extension cord style is what I do.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
All right. I bet that works pretty good, huh, it does.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
But I want to try yours.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
It sounds fun, yeah, I mean, like I said, it's
pretty yanky. You can also, you know, we should point
out that they obviously sell all sorts of contrap and
storage devices for these now, but I don't know, just
be a little more fun. Come up with your own method.
Don't buy some other dumb thing.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
No, as anyone who's ever done the holidays really knows
that's cheating. That's right, and that's it, everybody. That's the
twenty twenty five Stuff you Should Know holiday extravaganza special
of all time.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
That's right. And as we say every year, you know,
whatever however you choose to celebrate your holiday this year,
we hope you're doing it right. We hope you're surrounded
by friends and loved ones. And it sounds trite to
say that if you're lonely this holiday season that we're
thinking about you, but we truly truly are, because this
can be a rough time of the year for some folks,
(49:44):
and so you know, we really think a lot about
those those situations this time of year.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
That was very sweet, Chuck, Yeah, and everybody out there,
we hope you guys have a happy holidays, that it's safe.
That it's Mary Bright and all that jazz and from
us and Jerry and the whole stuff you should Know.
Crewe where you wish you a merry Christmas and a
happy New.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Do Do Do Do Do, Do Do Do, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's
here too. Somewhere in spirit. She may be haunting somebody
right now as a ghost of Christmas past. I'm not sure. Yeah,
And this is our annual Stuff you Should Know Holiday
special Hunt Chalk.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
That's right, I tell you what. It's one of, if
not our favorite episodes of the year. M h. I
will say it's getting harder and harder to come up
with stuff. We're delving further out into the world and
further back in time.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Yeah. Yeah, this is our Anglo American edition, I guess.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, that's right. European listeners are going to be pretty stoked.
And also we like to point out this this is
one of two episodes at the year where we draw
a line in the sand and say, sales take the
day off. No ads for this one.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, because Christmas is commercial enough? Am I right?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah? Man? Am I going to sell these? No?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
These belong to you guys, the people there are gifts.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That's right. And by the way, if you hear the
tinkle tinkle of ice. It's because Josh talked me into
making the drink that we're gonna You know, sometimes we
have a little Christmas drink that we put out as
a part of this episode, and we're doing that again
this year, and so I'm having what we call here
in the South a nooner.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I didn't have to try very hard. What do you
want to start with, Chuck? And also hats off to
Jerry for doing all of the wonderful sound design that
makes this Christmas episode so special every year.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
That's right, as usually we're flying by the seat of
our pants. What do you say we start with one
of your picks on the Morabians, who we've talked about
before on a Christmas episode. I believe I don't remember
that we definitely did.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
It makes sense because they are definitely sod with Christmas
in the United States, and I would guess the Czech
Republic too. At the time the Moravians made the move
over to North America in the eighteenth century, the Czech
Republic was still called Bohemia, and the Moravians first settled
in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, and they where a
(02:17):
very devout group still are and that's why Pennsylvania has
towns named Nazareth in Bethlehem, for example.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, never knew that until yesterday.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
So they brought a lot of Christmas traditions with them.
The Moravian cookies Mevini gingery, molasses heavy flat, yeah, crispy delicious.
Oh yeah, yeah, those cookies came from these people. They
also brought the seeds of miniature Christmas villages that people
put up around the holidays too.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
That's right. If you look back in the Middle Ages
in Europe, well, there's a bunch of awful things going on.
But one of the fun things was a trend of
creating Nativity scenes. They were called, I guess cretches. And
you know what a Nativity scene is. They're a little
dioramas of the of the scene of the birth of
Jesus in a manger. And yeah, the Moravians saw those
(03:07):
and they were like, hold my molasses cookie, because we're
gonna kick this up a notch. And they kicked it
up such a notch that the Germans created a term
basically for that notch of these crutches, these Moravian crutches,
called a puts. It means to put out or decorate
and putzing was the act of doing this nothing to
(03:27):
do with the Yiddish term you're a putts or putsing about?
Speaker 2 (03:32):
No, oh really, I thought putsing probably came from that
because you're going from house to house, as we'll find out.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
No, because the putts is sort of a fool and
puttsing about is kind of doing foolish things.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
I see, I heard a putts was something else entirely
that we would well be able to mention on the episode.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Is that not true, that's the original, that's the og meeting. Yes,
you are correct.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Okay, So Moravians, like you said, they kind of took
this medieval tradition to like a whole new level. The
putts is that they created just started getting bigger and bigger.
They started out with those Nativity scenes, the crush, but
they started adding new figures like the shepherd's dog. Well,
shepherd's dog, from what I understand, doesn't appear in any
(04:16):
biblical description of the Nativity scene, which was the birth
of Jesus.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Right, Yeah, but you still.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Want to include the shepherd's dog because you're starting to
make a better and better diorama. Eventually, there were too
many characters to fit in the manger. So they started
hanging out outside the manger.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, They're like, where am I going to put the
manger repair guy? They had no spot. So they created
they just expanded the natural scene around the I guess
the barn. They created fields. Of course, all of a
sudden you had lakes, you had cliffs, you had rivers,
you had buildings, you had more buildings, and before you
(04:53):
know it, a putts or a putz rather it's probably puts.
It could take up an entire room, like they would
clear up room and dedicate it to their puts.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Right, And so there's a tradition that kind of grew
up around this where that room would usually be closed
off to the kids of the family got to do that,
and the adults would go in there and puts around
o their poots. Then on Christmas Eve they would unveil
the poots, the family poots, to the kids. And I'm
sure it was just a great a great time for everybody.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
That's right. And now I digress very briefly to tell
you of a little natural diorama I made at my
camp on a stump, on a big old tree stump
that I brought up there from a neighbor's front yard.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I brought your own stump.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
I brought my own stump, which was a whole story
in itself, which I won't get into. But the stump
is now located near the fire and I created a
whole scene there where we display the rocks that we
paint when we go up there. And then I brought
it a step forward and I made a whole nature
scene featuring little plastic animals of all the animals that
I've caught in the camp cam nice And I mentioned
this only because while I was doing it, it was
(06:02):
a weekend with a lot of the kids there. A
bunch of neighbors and friends went up and families.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Were they invited?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
They were not. Every time they came over there to
try and arrange things, very gently said this is mister
Chuck's project.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, So that wasn't so much fun. But it reminded
me of the Moravians saying, kids get out of here.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Right. Did you unveil it to the children's delight though
on Christmas Eve?
Speaker 1 (06:28):
No. I unveiled it later that evening and they said,
buzz off turkey. I wasn't a part of it.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
So there were people who got so good at it
that they became known for their puttses or poots's. One.
Probably the most famous Moravian puts artist I guess yeah
would be, was named Jenny Train. She was working in
I guess about the mid twentieth century, and her puttses
were so great that some of the museums in the
Lehigh Valley hold them in their collections and display them
(06:55):
at certain times.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Of the year. That's right. And the non Marie got
into it at a certain point, so much so that
they were like, we don't even need this Nativity scene
any longer. Let's just create a Christmas village. Sure, you
can buy these things if you want, but it's a
lot more fun if you sort of collect things piece
by piece and set up your own. Obviously, electricity came
along and you could have, you know, Christmas lights. You
(07:18):
could have little ski lifts that take people up tiny mountains.
They do that so cute.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, for sure. Apparently lit Max is probably from what
I could tell the leader in Miniature Christmas Village Manufactory. Yeah, oh,
you want me to tell you some more about them, please,
So they have different themes. Like you said, you can
buy these whole kits like wholesale, but they also I think,
sell each piece individually because if you know so there's
(07:44):
the Christmas tip. If you know somebody who sets up
Christmas villages around Christmas, yeah, that is a guaranteed home
run gift to get them another piece for their collection.
They will not be mad about.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
It, yeah for sure. But if you choose to buy
whole kit, you can get you know, themes, you can
get like a Norman Rockwell thing or like a Victorian
age thing. That'd be kind of a fun one.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I think that seems to be that in like Swiss
village seems to be like a pretty common theme. But
there's also I've seen one for the fifties. Somebody's really
heavy in the do op. I guess that would be
their kind. So there was also Santo's Wonderland, you know,
like where it's at Sanna's actual village. That seems pretty
good thematically speaking.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, that's right. And we want to thank listener Robert Paulson,
who's been listening forever. Yeah, because he always sends in
Christmas ideas and I believe he sent this one in
under the guise of trains around the tree and that
led to this because it seems that the origin of
the trains around the tree came from this tradition of
creating these villages. They eventually added trains, and once Lionel
(08:48):
came along with their electric train sets, sometimes the village
went away and it just became a train around the tree.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Yeah. And then people who had those trains around their
trees grew up, they got nostalgic for them, they started
setting them up for their kids, and it became a
Christmas tradition thanks to our Moravian friends.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That's right, and that is the story of the Moravian
tiny villages And scene, what do you want to do next?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Do you want to tell everybody about your drink so
they can possibly press paws and make one and then
come back for the rest of it?
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah? Why not? Okay? This year, the drink that we're
going to talk about is Chuck's special Pumpkin Spice Old Fashion.
I've been drinking these lately because when fall rolls around
here in Georgia, that's when the whiskey and the bourbon
kind of becomes a little more to my taste, definitely,
And this year I heard about a pumpkin spice Old Fashion,
(09:49):
and I thought you know what, I've never made my
own syrups and stuff, so I'm going to make my
own pumpkin spice syrup from scratch. And I did, and
it's great.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I have some questions about your recipe. I may have
some suggestions. I'm not surprised, and you tell me, you
tell me if you think that they would be incorporaable.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Uh okay, I mean you can. You can do it,
what however you want to?
Speaker 2 (10:10):
So all right, well listen, so you start with five
cups of water, right?
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Uh yeah. I mean I'm not an exact guy when
it comes to recipes, so I had a really hard
time coming with measurements because I'm just I fly by
the seat of my pants when it comes to cooking
and things.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Okay, well, so you got that. You've got one and
a half cups like brown sugar, another half a cup turbinato,
which is like the granular minimally processed sugar.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, but it's sort of like the pre brown sugars.
It's got that same molasses flavor.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Okay, and then do you like your syrup very sweet?
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Uh? Yeah, I mean in this case, you know, you know,
I actually don't think I measured the water. What I
think I did was I got an old bourbon bottle
and clean that out really good and filled that up
because I wanted it to fill that bottle. So I
guess it's what is that bottle like? Like, is that
a lead seven fifty? Yeah? I got a seven to
fifty so whatever that equates two cup.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Wise, although I guess it could be a leader.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
No, no, no, no, the leader is the big guy, right, yeah, No,
this is the seven to fifty. So, however much water
that is, so you.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Can depending on how sweet you want your syrup to be,
you can make it a two to one ratio two
cups of water to one cup of sugar, or a
one to one ratio if you really like a sweet
one cup of sugar to one cup of water, and
then you expand it from there, depending on how much
you've got in your whisky bottle.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Right, yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
And then you've got to make your spice mix though yourself.
Chuck here is showing off everybody, and his recipe says
it's best if you grind and powder your own.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Sure, what do you have, well, classic pumpkin spice. It
can vary depending on who you are, but I did
about a tablespoon of cinnamon, about a half a tablespoon
of nutmeg, and then you've got to go a little
bit lighter, maybe a teaspoon or two of ginger, about
a teaspoon of allspice, and about a half a teaspoon
of clove, because clove is you know, pretty it can overpaw. Yeah,
(12:01):
but again it depends on how you like your pumpkin spice.
But you know, you mix those all up, you throw
it all, you know, you boil that water and then
throw in the sugar in that pumpkin spice mix, and
you just stir it until you get to the consistency
that you like, which, you know, the longer you boil,
the kind of thicker it's going to get.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, and the clearer it'll get the more you boil,
I think, right, it'll eventually just go whoop and turn clear.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
No, no, no, this is a very dark brown syrup.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Right, so sorry, not clear, I mean translucent, but still
dark brown.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I don't even know what translucent means.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Then it means like it goes from cloudy to where
you could see through it even though you're seeing through
like brown.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
I don't know if you could see through the stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, well then this is some thick syrup.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, I mean it looks sort of like a coke
and a bottle.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Okay, great, So I do have one one thing to add, okay,
if you so, if you take cinnamon, it does not
like water. It's hydro haiti. I can't remember which which
what it's called, but it does not like to mix.
Do you ever have trouble mixing it in with the
boiling water?
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Nope, mixed up, just fine.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Okay. Well, I've found that if you mix something like
cinnamon and I would guess all of the spices with
sugar ahead of time, it binds to the sugar and
it allows it to dissolve more easily.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Oh okay, good tip.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
That was my only other tip.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I love it. That sounds pretty good. The other thing
I did was Emily dehydrates of fruits as bar garnishes.
So she had a big mess of orange peel that
she had dehydrated. So I kind of chopped those up
and threw that in the bottle as well, because you know,
an old fashion has those orange notes.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
And if you want to make the old fashion, and
I have to say, you can put this in your coffee.
You can drizzle it on a cheesecake. It's just a
pumpkin spice sweet syrup, so you can. Really it doesn't
have to be an alcoholic drink, but you're gonna make
the old fashion. I do two ounces of bourbon. You
can use rye if you want a little shake of
that angle store bitters. I do a little shake of
(13:58):
orange bitters on top. Then I love this elguappo chickory
pecan or pecan bitters.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
They're local, right, I don't know if.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
They are not, but you know, if you can find
a chickory pecan or any kind of like walnut or
pecan bitters, I think it really adds a nice touch.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
It does sound very nice. And then of course the
coup de gras, the death blow, which is the pumpkin
spice syrup.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yeah, I mean it spends on how sweet you like
these things. You can just put just a little bit
if you don't like it too sweet, and you're still
going to get that flavor. And you know, all of
this stuff. You can make it less boozy if you
want the one I made for today, since it's a noon,
or I just made a little happy so I just
did one ounce of bourbon.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Very smart. So you take that, you make sure everything
is at room temperature. You put it in a glass,
and you drink it and sayoh.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
No, no, no, no, no, what I do? I mean
you can just put it straight over ice and mix
it with a spoon or something. But if you really
want to do it right, put that stuff in a cocktail,
shake with ice, shake it really really good, and then
get a nice heavyweight cocktail glass out of at a
cocktail cherry to the bottom of that thing. Pour it
over a giant square ice cube or a giant round
ice cube if you want to really be fancy. And
(15:08):
then here's the key. As you know, Josh, you got
to get that orange peel right.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Oh yeah, you want a nice wide swath of orange peel,
no pith, no white on the bottom, or as minimal
as possible.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yeah, And you twist it.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
You twist it over the top of the drink, and
if you look closely, you can see a spray come out.
And then all of a sudden there's a little oil
slick on top of the drink, and you, friend, have
just expressed the essential oils from that orange into your
old fashion.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
That's right, And just a quick psa for all the
bartenders out there. When you make a martini or anything
with like a lemon or orange, make it a big
wide you know, they have those the little peelers that
you know, like a cocktail peeler. You can get the
kind that does the little tiny pigtail curly cue. Those
are annoying. They curl them up, they hang it on
(15:59):
the outside the glass. But the whole point of that
peel is to get that essential oil, and you can't
do that with those little little skinny things. So bartenders,
for the love of Pete, give the customer a big
wide peel so they can express that thing themselves.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Our listeners named Pete just said, yeah, that's right. What's
the last little bit? If you really want to show
off though, chuck.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Oh, if you want to, if you have a zester
like little Greater, get a cinnamon stick and just just
grate a little fresh cinnamon.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
On top, just a little bit, just a touch. That's right,
and people will be like, this is the best Christmas
I've ever had.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, Or you can stick that cinnamon stick right in
the drink if you really want to get crazy.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
One other thing that we should probably say though off
the bat is when you make the syrup, you want
to make it ahead because it needs to cool and
go in the fridge.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Right, yeah, yeah, keep that thing in the fridge. And
like I said, I use an old liquor bottle because
it has a cork on top, or if you have
those fancy bottles with the little clasp on top with
the cork, like, that's great. When I went to my
brother's Thanksgiving this year, I got one of Emily's little tiny, like,
you know, four or five ounce bottles and poured some
in there and brought it along. It's a nice, nice
(17:13):
thing to give us a gift.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
That is classy, buddy, thank you. Okay, well, I guess
we should probably let everybody pause, go make the pumpkin
spice syrup, wait a couple of days, and then come
back and we'll start the next segment. How about that.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
What do you want to do next? Chuck?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Well, I mean let's go back to one of yours.
Should we do the Frozen Fair?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Yeah, we're gonna go back in time, way back.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Frozen Fair, the Fryar's Fair, the frost Fairs. I didn't
get it once, did I?
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Featuring the Fryars.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
So we're talking about a series of basically impromptu winter
festivals that happened to London over the course of a
few hundred years and had tipped to the BBC London Museum,
History Jar, Honest History and the podcast Tales of History
and Imagination. And what we're talking about is they're called
(18:19):
the Frost Fairs. And we should give you a little
background first because the bridge that's now London Bridge was
built in the sixties. The bridge before that was built
in eighteen thirty one, and that eighteen thirty one bridge
was disassembled and reassembled in Lake Havasoo, Arizona, which is
where it stands today. And that little gift from London
(18:40):
to Lake Havasou gave rise to a really great nineteen
eighty five TV movie starring David Hasselhoff, Glate Terror at
London Bridge. Definitely worth watching. But the problem is the
eighteen thirty one bridge and the nineteen sixties bridge put
an end to this impromptu winter tradition in London forever.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
That's right. That new London Bridge has five arches. The
one previous to that from eighteen thirty one had nineteen arches,
but they were closer together, they were pretty narrow and
water didn't float through those things very well. And it
was also a time when the Thames was shallower. And
was it narrower or wider?
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Wider?
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Wider and shallower, Yeah, wider and shallower. So all of
this sort of added up to because of a strange
weather phenomenon that Josh is going to describe, a time
when the Thames would actually freeze over.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, the Little Ice Age was going on too, from
the mid thirteen hundreds to the mid eighteen hundreds. This
period about five hundred years, there was some really weird
extra cold weather. Global temperatures dropped, and that means, ultimately
for our purposes with this story, that winters in London
were way colder during that five hundred year period than
(19:58):
they are today. So you put that toge the design
of the bridge with way more narrow arches, the Little
ice Age and the wider, shallower Thames. That meant that
the Thames could freeze over sometimes like it can't today.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
That's right, And that happened in fifteen sixty four when
it froze over and people in London were like, hey,
that's pretty cool. Let's go out and get drunk and
walk around and play on that thing.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah, apparently even Queen Elizabeth I was like, that looked fun,
let's go.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
She packed up for Corgi's and slipped around on the
ice for a little while. It froze again in sixteen
oh seven eight, and this time they were like, hey,
BlimE me, this thing's frozen again. Let's get drunk and
sell some things. That was Australian. Oh man.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
The thing is is like a lot of people bade
their money by shipping and moving stuff up and down
the Thames. They suddenly couldn't so some of those people
just set up stalls to try to make up whatever
they could. That was the first time anyone used the
term frost fair for these things.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Or frozen fryar or whatever the heck, righty.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
A frozen fryar frost fair. It wasn't until though, I
think sixteen eighty three eighty four, that it really became
like a full blown thing.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Though. Yeah, I mean that was a couple of months
of frozen Thames, and this time it was like a
real like a Christmas market. Basically everybody is selling their wares.
Like you said, people that normally sold stuff on the
side of the river were all set up down there.
They had so many rows of booths that they formed
a literal avenue down the middle of the Thames. And
(21:34):
you could do everything. You could have a sit down
restaurant meal under a huge tint made of boat sails
that are propped up by rowing oars.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, and it was apparently quite a party because there
was a writer of the time, John Evelyn. He wrote
that that Frost Fair was a bacchanalien triumph, a carnival
on the water. Yeah, that's saying quite a bit. This
is again, this is like people aren't like, Okay, the
sixteen eighty three f Frost Fairs coming up, we better
start planning. These were all generally impropt too. That was
(22:05):
pretty cool that sixteen eighty three one lasted two months.
And Tales of History and Imagination, the podcast I thanked earlier,
they turned up a fact that some guy bet some
other guy that he could build a three story house,
spend a night in it, and take it down before
the Thames thawed. And it's a great story even despite
(22:28):
the fact that neither we nor Tales of History and
Imagination could find out the outcome.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Of the bet. That sounds like a good show.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah it is. There's a lot of great episodes that
I saw when I was looking for that. I'm not
sure how I stumbled across it. I guess I just
came across some of their Christmas content.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
I love it. I'm gonna check it out so big
thanks to them. There were a couple of more frost Fairs,
not Friars, in seventeen sixteen and again in seventeen thirty nine,
so there. I mean, I don't know if anyone's doing
the math. There are large, large gaps between all this stuff, right.
It's not like, you know, they went on the internet
and were like, hey, the last time they did all this,
so people are you know, I guess word gets passed down,
(23:08):
you know, like, hey, here's this is a thing to
do when the times freezes. But sadly, the last Frost
Fair was in eighteen fourteen.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, and you know that somebody at the seventeen sixteen
Frost Fair was like, this Frost Fair sucks. Yesterre to
eighty four sold out eighty four rocked Man.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
So yeah. The last one was eighteen fourteen, and the
BBC talked about it in one of their articles, and
they interviewed a food history named Ivan Day, and he
said that the eighteen fourteen Frost Fair was basically food
and drink and people getting wasted. He said that there
was this one drink called a pearl it was it
(23:48):
was wormwood wine. It's kind of like vermouth gin together,
so it was hot. It was like a hot, super
potent martini. Then he said, quote, you'd get absolutely wrecked
on it. There was a spiky beer that has a
lot of spices in it called mum, which is what
you'd probably call it a winter ale today. Yeah, I
love that, And then of course this regular gin. There
(24:09):
was also other stuff too. There's tea, coffee, hot chocolate,
and there was plenty of food to eat, particularly the
roast ox. Right.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Oh man, Yeah, I don't even like saying those words together.
But this Iban Day, this food historian, he replicates cooking
techniques from back then, and for this roast ox, he
said it would take basically a day over twenty four
hours to roast this thing in front of a fire.
And Buddy, I don't know if these numbers are right,
(24:37):
but he said that that ox could feed eight hundred people.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, yeah, and he's a food historian, so he would
probably know.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
I mean, I guess you're just getting like an ox
a moose boushe. It's not a plate full of ox
for eight hundred, There's no way.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
I don't know. I mean maybe their oxes were way
bigger during the little ice Age.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
I think it's oxen, my friend.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, thank you for correcting me on that one.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
What else would they serve mutton?
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah? Sure, which is kind of like it's almost like
a sheep like meat.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
I think it is sheep. Isn't it like a grown sheep?
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
And you don't want that. Nobody wants mutton.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Really, I don't want mutton. So Jerry Seinfeld certainly doesn't
want mutton.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
So what does that one me?
Speaker 1 (25:22):
That was from Seinfeld? Remember he had a girlfriend that
he was spitting out food and putting it in his jacket,
and she was serving mutton vaguely. He would wrap it
in his napkin and stuff in his pocket, and eventually
Elaine borrowed his coat and got it backed by a dog.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Man. That was a great show, sure was. So. The
reason why the eighteen fourteen one was the last one
is because, like you said, the newer better. I guess
versions of the London Bridge have wider spans, so the
water camp back up behind the little narrow arches and freeze.
It just isn't gonna happen, everybody. Frost Fair was eighteen fourteen,
(26:01):
but parts of the Thames can freeze from time to time,
and the BBC turned up one from nineteen sixty two.
The winner in that year was called the Big Freeze
in London, and someone spotted a man riding a bicycle
on the Thames probably thinking to himself, you know what,
the Frozen Friar Fair would be great right now?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah? I hope it was a penny farthing. Yeah, for sure,
that'd be fantastic, very nice. All right, So that's the
Frozen frost Fire Fair. Where are we going next? My friend?
As we as we load up the sleigh and prepare
to take off.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
I don't know. I feel like I don't know. What
do you want to do? You pick one?
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Let's do our tribute to Vince GERALDI okay, I came
up with this one, I know. In one episodisode we
certainly talked about the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and kind
(27:05):
of dabbled in this, but I wanted to just sort
of do a little tribute to the man himself, because boy,
oh boy, for my money, there's no better Christmas music
than the Charlie Brown Christmas Special vince Garaldi Jazz Trio.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
I'm protective of that. I keep it at bay because
I don't ever want to get sick of it.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Okay, I don't get sick of it, but I do
appreciate that because we both certainly cherish it.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Like I can't even listen to Journey anymore because I've
heard their songs too many times. I don't want the
Charlie Brown Christmas to become the new Journey.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, who wants that?
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Right? So let's talk about vince Garaldi, though, because if
you know of him from the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack,
you essentially are familiar with the vast majority of vince
Garaldi's work.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, and big thanks to The New Yorker, specifically an
article from Ethan Iverson I think from twenty Seventeenish Piano
with Johnny dot com that's jo nn why and Unconservatory
dot org, who all had little bits and pieces about
the great vince Garaldi, who was born Vincent Anthony Dalaglio
(28:14):
in nineteen twenty eight and San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, his mom Carmela Divarce's biological father, Vincenzo Delaggio, and
married a guy named Tony Garaldi. Tony Garaldi adopted him,
and as a head tip and a thank you to Tony,
Vince said, let's change my last name, shall we? Guys?
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Yeah, I mean, is there ever a more Italian name
than Vincenzo de Laggio.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
No, there really isn't.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Yeah, maybe Tony soprano.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So he he ended up. He actually wasn't very musically inclined.
I think he took some piano lessons, but it never
really got under his skin. When he was a kid,
his uncle's introduced him to jazz, and he was like eh,
And he didn't really start playing until he went to
San Francisco State University for.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
A little while.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
And then there was an interlude between that and them
really getting going playing the Korean War, where he served
as a cook in the army.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
That's right, he went to the war. He came back and,
like you said, sort of started playing around a little jazz.
Clearly a talented guy, and he started going to these
jazz clubs in San Francisco, started playing wherever he could
little sort of I guess, not open mic, but open
key nights or whatever you would call those, and eventually
he got his first real gig, playing the intermissions during
(29:28):
Art Tatum shows at a club called the Blackhawk.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah. Art Tatum, he was actually from Toledo. He was
a self taught piano virtuo so who was nearly blind.
He's great, and he was so his talent was so
intimidating that vince Garaldi later said working with him was
more than scary. I came close to giving up the instrument,
and I wouldn't have been the first after working around Tatum.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, pretty intimidating.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, so he did not give up the instrument. Fortunately,
he went on to play with the likes of Cal Jader,
who who he was a vibraphone player who was into
Latin inflected jazz.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah, he's awesome, by the way, if you're into that
sort of Latin jazz thing. He's probably the most famous
non Latin Latin jazz guy. And the vibraphone is just
it's it's well, it's a vibe, it really is.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I love a good vibraphone. Jazz trio.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, same.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
He formed his own trio I think in nineteen fifty
five with a couple of friends, Eddie Durant and Dean Riley.
Now was that the all time vince Garaldi trio.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
I don't know, because they're not the guys who played
on the Charlie Brown. So then I think there were
iterations of the vince Garaldi trio over the years.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Gotcha, So as he's starting to kind of pick up
steam in the fifties, he played the Hungry Eye in
San Francisco, He played with the big band leader Woody Herman,
got back together with Carl Jader for a little while,
and he was basically the leader of several different jazz groups.
The thing is, he would probably be in name among
(31:00):
jazz cats and hepcats in San Francisco still today, but
it would probably be about the extent of his career
had he not created this one particular song called cast
Your Fate to the Wind. It's the other song that
he's known for, just a little threeish minute jazz song
from nineteen sixty two that he buried at the end
(31:21):
of a very odd album that he came up with.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, there was a movie in nineteen fifty nine a
French film called Black Orpheus, and what he did was
offer some sort of jazz arrangements of Brazilian music from
that movie, and it was called Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus.
And like you said, he stuck cast your Fate to
the Wind here at the end it is I'm sure
you know the song right. It is an amazing jazz
(31:45):
tune and the bones of everything you know about that
Charlie Brown Christmas Special music is in cast your Fate
to the Wind. It's just this. I mean, I think
who was it that called it a breadth of fresh air?
I think that was the ultimate producer of the Charlie
Brown Christmas Special, Lee Mendelssohn.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, so this is where fate really steps in because
there was a San Francisco jazz show hosted by al
Jasbo collins Man, what a great nickname. And on this
show on KSFO, he would play vince Garaldi's stuff because
by this time, the early sixties, vince Garaldi was pretty
well known around San Francisco. And Lee Mendelssohn, who was
(32:25):
starting a documentary project on Charles Schultz that would ultimately
be called a boy named Charlie Brown, and he was
looking for somebody to compose the music for it, and
he heard cast Your Fate to the Wind and was like,
I think this.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Might be it. Yeah, that was it. He said, hey man,
you want to compose some music for this documentary? He said,
because they were both Bay Area guys, and he said, sure,
I'll do it. And he created an entire original piece
called Lenis and Lucy. That was the theme. And that
is the you know, the very famous sort of Charlie
Brown theme song that we all know and love.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
You do a little measure or two of it.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
D oh wait, I gotta do my hand.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I'm dancing like in my arms in the air and
then down and then up. Then now you're supposed to
come in. That's very nice.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I can't keep doing that. People are about to tune out.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
I think that was a great one. I'm sure everyone
who's ever heard that song is like, oh, yeah, that one.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
A lot of people probably don't know it is Linus
and Lucy. I don't think of it. I just think
of it as like the Peanuts theme.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Yeah, So he made Linus and Lucy. The documentary went
over and then Coca Cola came around and they said,
we want to do this Christmas special Charlie Brown Christmas
in spring sixty five, and so Giraldi was an obvious
choice to come back and record music. So he recycled
Linus and Lucy and also wrote Skating and Christmas Time
Is Here iconic.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Skating is one of the most beautiful songs of all time. Agreed, Yeah,
and like you said, when you when you hear cast
your fate to the wind, if you aren't familiar with that,
you would immediately be like that sounds a lot like
the Peanuts guy. He had a style that was all
his own, that was instantly recognizable, and Charles Schultze even said, like, hey,
he's his music is really to be credited in a
(34:14):
large part for the success of the Charlie Brown Christmas specials.
If you've heard Christmas Time Is Here too, there's an
instrumental version that's all Giraldi, and then there's a well
another Garali version, but it has lyrics of the little
kids singing, and I guess Lee Mendelssohn basically did what
a producer does when he couldn't find a lyricist. He
just took the reins and did it himself.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, apparently he was having trouble and he said he
wrote it in about fifteen minutes on the back of
an envelope. Pretty simple lyrics. But Vincecaraldy never went on
to be known for a lot after this. His output
after that wasn't super famous. But you know, I think
it was Ethan Irison from that New Yorker article made
it a great point. He was like, you know, he
(34:56):
shouldn't be cast aside in the history of jazz. He
should very much be remembered because his really his effective
and efficient techniques on the piano. He called Charlie Brown
Christmas like a gateway drug for people who were never
into jazz before, and I think that kind of says
it best.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, And he didn't have much time to grow as
a jazz musician after the Charlie Brown success because he
died ten years later in nineteen seventy six at age
forty seven.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, but his music lives on.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
The Charlie Brown Christmas album was voted into the Grammy
Hall of Fame in two thousand and seven. The only
travesty with that is that it took so long, and
it's part of the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry culturally,
historically or sthetically important American sound recordings.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
That's right. I wish we could play all of that
music today, but we can't because we don't want to
get sued.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, you're probably already going to get sued just by humming.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Oh I doubt it. They've said. The judge would say,
now that was not recognizable. Is the work at hand dismissed.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Let's have a little jingle interlude of our own making
that's in the public domain, and we will head on
over to the dark of night in Wales.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
How about that. Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Okay, Chuck, We're in Wales. It's dark, it's cold, it's
one of the twelve days of Christmas somewhere in there.
And we want to thank Alexandra Stock, who has sent
in plenty of ideas before she's sent this one in.
We also want to thank Museum Wales, Skynews and Wales
dot com for all the info about what's known as
the Mary Lloyd, which is not spelled like it sounds,
(36:47):
at least not the second part. It's Lwyd and that
is Welsh. It's Welsh's Welsh gits and it's a Christmas
tradition that clearly dates back to Celtic tradition. By the
purpose the point, all that stuff has been kind of
lost to history, but it's peculiar to Whales. You can't
(37:07):
find this anywhere else, and even in most parts of
Whales you're not going to find it these days. But
it still survives, and for good reason, because it's actually
a pretty cool little Christmas tradition for sure.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And here's how it goes down. On a certain night,
the Mauri Lloyd, which is a ghost horse, very pale
ghost horse, rides from house to house kind of looking
to be let in, looking for hospitality for people that
are in there enjoying their pumpkin spice, old fashions and
their apple ciders by the fireplace. But how it plays
out is it's a hobby horse. These men get together
(37:41):
it's a broomstick and they get covered in a white
sheet to form the body of the horse. They have
these colorful ribbons from the neck to form the neck
in the main, and then here's the most disturbing part
is I think sometimes it would be like paper machet
or wood or something like that, with like a hinge jaw,
(38:01):
so it looks like a horse's head, but in the
olden days, traditionally it was a real horse's skull.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Yeah, and it's frightening looking. If you see some old
timey mari Lloyd's that they're scary, And one of the
reasons why they're scary is they're supposed to represent like
death and spirits and being out in the cold in
the dark in winter. Right. But as scary as that sounds,
(38:28):
it's not like a crampus tradition where mari Lloyd's going
to come get you, like take you away and leave
you cold or something like that. It's in the tradition
of mummering, where caroling also came from going from house
to house, getting as drunk as you possibly can and
engaging in this kind of Christmas tradition, which is again
this is fairly peculiar. But the whole thing takes place
(38:50):
when the mari lloyd they're processing through the town essentially
a parade, and they go from house to house. When
they show up on the doorstep of a house, they
start seeinginging verse and they through the closed door and
on the other side of the door the family starts
singing verse back and essentially a verse battle goes back
(39:11):
and forth between the two.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, it's a rap battle. The weirdest thing about this
is the door is closed, right, But I guess the
whole point of this thing is they go back and forth.
Sometimes it could take like an hour until one side
finally gives up. I guess they can. You know, they
can't come up with a new next line, or they're
(39:33):
too drunk to and they say, all right, you guys win.
So the reason the door is closed is because if
there is a victory by the mary Lloyd crew, and
they usually won, the whole point was to be invited
in after that. So that's why the door is shut.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Right. But again, the mary Lloyd is scary. It's death
that kind of thing. That's why the family's trying to
keep them out. But when they come in, they're like,
here's some wastle, here's some rich crackers with the olive
on it. You know, they welcome them in, and the
mary Lloyd a role at that point is to run
around and like nip at the children and scare them
and maybe knock some stuff over. They might put the
(40:08):
fire out in the family's house. Just general mischief and revelry. Right,
there's a BBC like five to six minute documentary showing
mary Lloyd. Well, it's called a Ponka pwnco That verse
battle take place, and it's the most stayed presentation you
(40:30):
can ever find. Like, if you just saw that, you'd
be like mary Lloyd seems like a very serious thing,
it's not. It was again drunken revelry going from house
to house basically spreading the Christmas spirit and in return
for letting the mary Lloyd in you your house would
be blessed with good luck for the new year.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
That's right, we're the mary Lloyd's and we came to say,
we came to bring you luck in the usual way.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
I love fruity pebbles in a major way.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah. So in the end it turns out to be
a good party. I guess your home might get slightly wrecked,
but you got good luck. There are a couple of
theories about what that name actually means. One translation is
gray Mary, and it's a legend linking mary Lloyd to
the Nativity story and that it was a pregnant horse
that was in the stables where Mary is said to
(41:21):
have had Jesus. So they're like, we need some room
in here to have this very special baby. So I
know you're pregnant as well, horse, but hit the road. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
The horse is like I was here first.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Yeah, and I'm also pregnant by the way.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
And apparently the horse spent days trying to find a
place to have her full It's a very sad story. Yeah,
but it's Christian in origin, and a lot of people
are like, this is not a Christian tradition. This is
pagan as it gets. And there's the other translation of it,
the gray Mayor, And in Celtic and British mythology, the
(41:57):
gray Mayor or pale horse was of generated I guess
animal that could kind of cross over from this world
to the underworld fairly easily, which really kind of gets
across the whole horse skull and explains all that kind
of stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah. Well, you know what they say about the gray Mayor.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
She's not what she used to be.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
No, she ain't.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
So this is a very old tradition probably, but it
saw its hating in the nineteenth century and in the
most delicious way, right.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Yeah, But ironically, in trying to decry this thing that
was a Christian scholar saying like, you know, we can't
do this it, you know, like all things like the stress.
In effect, it brought more attention. They didn't call it
that then, but it brought more attention to it, and
all of a sudden, like how to manuals sprung up right.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
And so finally, though that heyday in the nineteenth century
kind of died off. By the nineteen sixties, it was
totally gone. They think, like they don't think anyone was
celebrating it anymore. But some groups of merrymakers found out
about it or revived it, and it still goes on
today in a few different places. And apparently it's when
they do it. It's pretty big and pretty fun and
(43:05):
pretty rowdy and just colorful and not really scary at all.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
I love it me too. Hats off whales, Hats off whales,
Hats off Tom Jones.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Mm see Welsh?
Speaker 1 (43:20):
Yeah, well that is name the singer with the Elvis hips.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah he was Welsh.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Huh he's Welsh, baby, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
All right, Chuck, we've arrived at the last piece, which
I love you found it and I think it's very
helpful and I love how it adds some like good
advice to this episode.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
That's right, because everyone loves putting up If you celebrate
Christmas and you celebrate with a Christmas tree, you love
putting up those Christmas tree lights. But storing those things
and then unveiling them the next year can be a
real pain in.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
The rump, a real drag, right.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
That's right. So we're gonna tell you at least some
Internet source tips on how to properly store those Christmas
tree lights.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
The first one, I like this one. It's complicated, but
it's cool. So you take a wrapping tube of Christmas
paper wrapping tube first, unroll the paper on end, throw
it away, and just take the tube and you make
a little notch in the end, one end of it
about an inch long, and you run the end of
the Christmas lights through and you stick your jam like
(44:31):
the plug and into that notch so it can't come out.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Okay, yeah, well, I mean the plug goes into the
tube hole, right, and then you just pull the electrical
cord through that slit.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Okay, that's another way to do it, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But then you take the lights and you start twisting them, twist, twist,
twist around the tube. Well, you twist the tube and
the lights kind of diagonally go around the tube, and
then you get to the end, cut another slit, put
the other plug end in, and there you go. You've
(45:05):
got one way to store Christmas lights. That seems pretty
great to me.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Yeah, you know, depending on the length of your tube,
you might have to go back over the other way.
But the point is it's not getting wrapped and wrapped
and wrapped around each other. Maybe just like one overlap.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Okay, that's one way. What about another way?
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Well, this is I mean these are all fairly similar.
In this case, though, You're going to cut a rectangular
piece of cardboard from a box. You know, depending on
how big you want it, maybe eighteen inches by nine
inches okay, And this time you cut little square notches
about an inch from each end on both sides, and
those notches are going to do the same thing that
that slit did. They're going to secure that plug and
(45:45):
then you just wrap it around that section of cardboard box.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Yeah. Like, if you've ever done any plumbing work or something,
sometimes whatever piece you're replacing, it'll come with a little
thing of teflon tape. It's the exact same thing in
miniature that we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah, exactly, I like that one.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
That's probably the one I would try of all these. Okay,
this one sounds really not super helpful. You use one
of those coffee caddies with the four little depressions for coffee,
and you stick the plug in through one of the
You know that each little hole or depression has some
slits in it. Yeah, you stick the plug in through that,
(46:27):
and you just start wrapping that guy over and over
and over again, rap, rap, rap, and then when you
reach the other plug in, you stick that through a
hole too.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yeah, not too bad. This way is maybe a little
likelier to get tangled because you're wrapping it over itself
through the center of that thing, over and over.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
Right, But what about what do you do? Chuck? I
think that's what the people want to hear.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Well, the Chuck method is very low fi. I found
that it works for me, may not work for you.
I take the lights off the tree and then I
lay them sort of out, one at a time on
the cow, which because the whole point of all of
this is you don't want those tangles, you know, that's
the biggest hassle of these things. Sure, they're kind of unwieldy.
And then I take that one of those little plastic
grocery bags that I'm about to go recycle, and instead
(47:12):
I just sort of bunch up that individual cord and
stick it in the bag. Each one gets its own bag.
As I said in this piece that I sent to you,
it sounds super yanky, but I found that it doesn't
really tangle when you take them back out, and they
pack really nice, you know, much nicer than these big
long tubes because you can just sort of flat pack
(47:33):
them in a bin and as long as they're each one.
The whole point is just to do one per bag
and to keep them separate. And when I unveil them,
they don't really get that tangly.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
That's amazing. There's got to be some sort of fluid
dynamics or something at play that somebody could explain. But
I don't get how that works. But that's cool.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
What's your method?
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Well, first of all, I want to say, you didn't
say super yanky in the piece. It says JANKI af.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
That's right, because I'm a hip kid.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
My method is I follow two different methods. One, you
can just leave the lights up throughout the year and
just don't turn them on.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Until Christmas on the tree. Okay.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
The second what I actually really do is I just
do that method where you have your you stick your
arm up at the elbow at a ninety degree angle.
You just kind of wrap from between your thumb and
forefinger across the palm through your elbow palm elbow, palm, elbow,
and you have to say that out loud while you're
doing it over and over again. It helps if people
are watching you while you say that too. And then
(48:32):
before you get to the end, maybe about six inches left,
you wrap that around the middle of that.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Com okay, and then like a like an extension cord style.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Precisely, as a matter of fact, that's probably the best
thing to call it. Extension cord style is what I do.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
All right. I bet that works pretty good, huh, it does.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
But I want to try yours.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
It sounds fun, yeah, I mean, like I said, it's
pretty yanky. You can also, you know, we should point
out that they obviously sell all sorts of contrap and
storage devices for these now, but I don't know, just
be a little more fun. Come up with your own method.
Don't buy some other dumb thing.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
No, as anyone who's ever done the holidays really knows
that's cheating. That's right, and that's it, everybody. That's the
twenty twenty five Stuff you Should Know holiday extravaganza special
of all time.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
That's right. And as we say every year, you know,
whatever however you choose to celebrate your holiday this year,
we hope you're doing it right. We hope you're surrounded
by friends and loved ones. And it sounds trite to
say that if you're lonely this holiday season that we're
thinking about you, but we truly truly are, because this
can be a rough time of the year for some folks,
(49:44):
and so you know, we really think a lot about
those those situations this time of year.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
That was very sweet, Chuck, Yeah, and everybody out there,
we hope you guys have a happy holidays, that it's safe.
That it's Mary Bright and all that jazz and from
us and Jerry and the whole stuff you should Know.
Crewe where you wish you a merry Christmas and a
happy New.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.