Bittersweet Infamy - #34 - Quetzalcoatl is Coming to Town

Episode Date: December 25, 2021

Holiday special! Josie tells Taylor about Mexican president Pascual Ortiz Rubio and his attempt to replace Santa Claus with a Mesoamerican deity. Plus: Xanta Klaus, the evil pro wrestling Santa, and an update on the "deepfake mom" who probably didn't deepfake anything.

Welcome to Bitter Sweden for me. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in me, shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. Truth may be bitter, stories are always sweet. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you.

Thank you. Sorry, we can redo that. Thank you Josie. No, that's perfect. I'm aware that many of you will likely listen to this after Christmas, at which point the sheer amount of holiday content will be quite alienating, probably. You're just ready to get it over there. Yeah. But if you are one of the special few who has invited us into your home on Christmas Day, thank you.

We've gathered around your fireplace, your beautiful, glistening Christmas tree. Thank you. Or, you know, we're filling a little bit of space in your empty bedroom with nothing on the walls, and you lying on a bare mattress, but we're here for you. You've just moved or something. Or maybe it's, I don't know, Scandi Design. You're just taking it real minimal. I like that too. That's good.

In which case, thank you for penetrating your impenetrable European minimalism with our podcast. Cool times, cool times. This is also our last episode of 2021. It's true. Thank you all for listening this year. Much appreciated. I hate to go into the new year with unfinished business. So before we flip the calendar, let's take a last look back at a story we covered this year.

Okay, okay. A little recap. Little 2021 year in review, except it's all going to be about one thing. Cool. I like that. In episode 12, the Well to Hell in our Minfamous, we covered the story of the so-called deep fake cheerleader. This is a Pennsylvania woman who was accused of creating deep fakes or very realistic fabricated video evidence, depicting one of her daughter's cheerleading rivals vaping,

and sending that video along with other abusive and incriminating texts and videos to her daughter's cheerleading program as well as other recipients. Oh, rough. On a whim, I looked back into this case. Oh, look at you. Following up. Listen, you got to make sure those crumbs don't fall through because as it turns out, there has been an update.

A big one. On September 21st, about four months after the initial flurry of media activity that led to our coverage, Kelly Maria Corducki published a piece in Cosmopolitan called, The world thought this cheer mom created a deep fake to harass her daughter's rival, but the real story is way more confusing and bizarre. I love when that happens. In it, Corducki sifts through the evidence and consults experts on deep fake technology, and the result was this.

The accused most likely did not create any deep fakes at all. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Let's go back to the start. A woman whose name I didn't use during our initial coverage of the story and won't use now. Okay. Was accused by the cheerleader in question as well as the Bucks County Police Department and Prosecutor's Office of using a technology called deep faking to create a fake implicating video of her daughter's rival vaping,

which went against teen policy. And I think in our expert coverage, you mentioned something about deep faking for dummies. How would she have known how to do this? Yes. Kind of a loose screw in the story. Yeah. There was definitely a loose screw in the story, but it wasn't so loose that either you or I came out and named, like, oh wait, maybe this didn't happen.

We both bought it. I think, I don't know, the very passionate cheer mom angle was overwhelming perhaps, at least for me. Bucks County DA Matt Weintraub announced the allegation to the world proclaiming, quote, this tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone. Your neighbor down the street, somebody who holds a grudge. We just have no way of knowing. Yeah. It's also another way for an adult to now pray on children, he added.

Okay. Well, a little fear monger there. That's good. Get you up in the morning. But not so fast, says Corducky. So I'm going to be quoting pretty extensively from the article here, quote, contrary to Weintraub's claims, making a truly convincing deep fake right now isn't as simple as watching a YouTube tutorial and photoshopping a few pics. In reality, you need specialized AI software that uses machine learning algorithms to collect data from hundreds,

even thousands of pictures of somebody's face. You need to hack the mainframe. Like, that's a big job. What it means is you need celebrities. Like, that's how people can make a deep fake of someone like Joe Biden or Tom Cruise, because they have pages and pages of Google image search results. And then the program creates a digital copy of the face and can replicate its distinct movements. The curling of a lip.

Because there's so many, so many images still or moving to pull from. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. It's just sheer numbers. Whereas the likelihood of, as we said, this person reading deep, deep faking for dummies and being able to generate out of thin air, this implicatory video of her daughter's rival is significantly less likely. Yeah.

Still quoting from the article, quote. In 2021, it's very, very unlikely that, say, a cheer parent with no tech expertise would be able to wield this technology to produce an authentically convincing deep fakes as Henry Ashter, a leading researcher and policy advisor in deep fakes, disinformation and media manipulation. He estimates that the process would require sophisticated equipment and take even the most highly skilled artists months. Ooh. Says another expert, Chris Ume, who's a Belgian visual effects and AI artist who made a very famous deep fake video of Tom Cruise. Yeah, I've seen that.

Quote, I'm not saying that this mom didn't do anything, but to me, it's a fact that this video is real and that this girl was just denying that she was in this video. Oh, shit. So was this not, I mean, she went to trial. Was this not brought up in her, in her defense? She hasn't been to trial yet. Oh, she hasn't. Okay. I guess I took her to trial.

I found her guilty. You're a terrible person. And shame on you. Thank you. No problem. Merry Christmas. No problem. I'm the ghost of Christmas pass, bitch.

Time to face the music. Change, change, change, change, change. Okay. According to Ume, there are only a handful of people in the US capable of properly vetting a deep fake using specific computational forensic techniques, going through it frame by frame to comb for clues to be able to say with any authority if it is real or not. And when the Daily Dot eventually asked Matthew Rice, the arresting police officer, he admitted that he'd simply made a naked eye judgment call. Yeah. Okay.

Expert naked eye, I'm sure. In addition to all of this, it seems that police have been unable to verify the additional abusive texts that were said to have come from the accused's phone. That doesn't mean they didn't happen, but it means they're having a hard time getting to the bottom of it. Okay, okay. So what does this mean? It means the DA's case has basically crumbled. Yeah. The accusing, I think they're going after her for the texts maybe now, but not the video footage.

Okay. The accusing teenager and her family have gone from appearing on Good Morning America, decrying the deep fake menace to refusing to issue comment, although I don't say this to implicate them necessarily. Right. I've learned from the indefiniteness of covering this before that I'm not saying anything for sure. Yeah, okay. And it means that we've encountered a Momo situation where our willingness to believe in evil advanced technology and its malignant powers may have gotten in the way of a more human truth. Very true.

Ooh, that's good. Yes, that's good. One final note. Uh-huh, give it to me. About bitter sweet infamy. Often when we cover stories that happened in the past, we will explain how the courts, the media, the public acted on flawed assumptions and got everything wrong. It's true. That's a repeating theme throughout. It's a recurring theme.

Vanessa Williams, uh, uh, Jean Webert. Run Bambi Run. Run Bambi Run. So many of them, right? Mm-hmm. With breaking stories like this one, we don't have that perspective. No. We're deep in it.

We are wading through the shit. We will always do our best to get information right. But often, whether it's because the story is too new, too old, happened in another country and wasn't extensively covered by English language media, we may get things wrong. That's a fact. Maybe the sources we're pulling from are incorrect or contradict each other. That happens to me all the time, sources contradicting each other. I'm dealing with it right now in the story that I'm researching. Yeah.

Maybe we misunderstood the source while we were researching. Maybe we just screwed up, got a country wrong, mispronounced a name for the entire show. I've done that. I've definitely done that. While we strive for excellence, sadly, we are humans. So with that said, to our listeners, don't take everything we or anybody says on blind faith. If something sounds off, research it yourself, paying close attention to the credibility of your sources. And if you know we've gotten something important wrong, please reach out and let us know.

Yeah. Email us. Bittersweetinfamy at gmail.com. I actually do check it, despite what I say. And to the accused in this case, whose story we reported on without the full information, we are sorry. We will be adding a disclaimer to that episode, providing context and encouraging people to seek out the full story. Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that, yeah.

And when we host our first ever Bittersweetinfamy convention, you get three free throws at the dunk tank. So glad there's going to be a dunk tank. When we first started this, I was like, the convention needs a dunk tank. Thank you for working with me on that. No problem. We work together to get important things done. Actually, as I was researching this episode, I was like, God damn, I'm not like a real researcher. Like, I don't know what the fuck is going on.

Like, I hope nobody's understanding me to be knowledgeable. It's not happening. Yeah. I feel like we should also say happy birthday to the werewolves out there. Yes, happy werewolf birthday. Yeah. If today is your birthday, you most likely are a werewolf. And the other thing-

Or you're Jesus. Or you're Jesus. Or a little bit of a column A, a little bit of column B. I don't know if I went all into this in the last episode, but another thing with the werewolves in the days leading up to Christmas, if you are not a werewolf, you can't say the word werewolf. You have to call them like them or the enemy. And if someone, you think if someone is a werewolf, you like shun them leading up to Christmas and their birthday. Oh my God.

Okay. So it's a very isolating life being a Christmas werewolf. So you have our sympathies to all of our werewolf listeners out there. We love you. That was really good. I agree. That was really good. We just have one last piece of unfinished business, Josie.

This feels like we're talking about a body we buried or something. Well, no bodies, but somebody is about to get buried. The date is December 17th, 1995. If you are one of 7,289 people in Hershey, Pennsylvania, you are gathered in the Hershey Park Arena, enjoying the holiday spectacle that is WWF in your House 5 seasons beatings. Yes, we're getting wrestling. You asked. You asked.

Dap, dap, dap, dap. Let me set the scene for you here. We're about halfway into this pay-per-view. And the million-dollar man, Ted DiBiase, has come to the ring to basically cut a promo about how poor and disgusting everyone in this audience is, as you do. Okay. Okay. Real heel, real just bad guy. You got it.

Yes. His shtick specifically is that he is ungodly wealthy and that he can bribe anybody to do anything he wants. He's always thrown around money to get his way. And they had these vignettes where he would like go to a public pool on a hot summer's day and pay off the lifeguard so that only he could enjoy it. And all the kids get kicked out and they're crying. What the fuck? I love that. She's a bad guy.

Bad guy. And so of course he's out there. And while he's beacon off on the mic, we have some guests at Ringside. And it is Savio Vega. And Savio Vega is just a happy Puerto Rican dude. Nice guy. Always the first, if someone gets jumped backstage in the locker room, Savio Vega is always the first on the scene to kind of run off the attacker. He's a good dude.

Okay. And of course Santa Claus is there. And he's thrown out the event shirt to all the little jimmies in the crowd, you know, making the crowd happy. Beautiful. Beautiful. Christmas cheer. But sadly the million dollar man was more like Ebenezer Scrooge. He was not feeling the Christmas cheer.

And he calls Savio and Santa into the ring. And he's like, everybody has a price for the million dollar man. Savio Vega, I'll give you X amount of money if you get on the mic right now and tell everyone that Santa isn't real. And Savio, of course, is an angel on earth. He grabs the mic. He cuts like a bilingual promo, half in Spanish, half in English. Good for him. Yeah.

And we love Savio. And he basically is like, send your million dollar man. Yo creo en Santa Claus. And the crowd, by the way, is kind of like politely humoring this. Okay. They're not super into any of it, but they're like, okay, this for the kids, I guess, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

The t-shirt gun. Okay. Yeah. And then the million dollar man says to Savio Vega, I don't remember exactly what he says, something to the effect of, well, everybody has a price for the million dollar man. And Santa grabs his big bundle of gifts and wallops Savio Vega from behind and proceeds to lukewarm crowd, half interest to beat Savio Vega in the middle of the ring. And then, of course, Savio catches up to him as he's leaving with the million dollar man.

They brawl to the back, whatever. The next night on Monday Night Raw, the million dollar man. Wait, wait, wait. That does not churn up the crowd at all. They don't. They could not care less. Absolutely could not care less. Hershey, Pennsylvania, put your butt out of that Hershey's kiss and start paying attention.

They wanted wrestling. They were like, what is this shit? You don't want it. Thank you. You and me, when we start our wrestling foundation. We're going to do it right. BSW, man. It's happening.

The next night on Monday Night Raw, the million dollar man Ted DiBiasi appears and explains that this was not Santa Claus. Oh, no. This was his evil brother, Santa Claus, who lives at the South Pole and steals gifts from children instead of giving them. So just to break that down for you, Santa Claus is spelled X-A-N-T-A-S-K-L-A-U-S. So Santa Claus is like evil twin. Everything Santa stands for, he doesn't.

So by the way, on this Monday Night Raw where Ted DiBiasi is explaining the storyline, Santa Claus doesn't come out. It's just Ted DiBiasi talking about him, which is a weird choice. Give us some visual hints here. Come on. Santa then appeared in a single televised match with Scott Taylor on Superstars, WWFC show, at which point certain things became clear. Mainly the thing that became clear was this gimmick was terrible.

Santa. The audience didn't care, the storyline never developed, and all of a sudden it was January and Vince McMahon had no use for a wrestling Santa Claus. I know, exactly. Yeah, yeah, seasonal work to the max. You'd think that they would have thought about this when they introduced the character on December 17th, but evidently not. Seems a little late.

Seems like you want to get in at least beginning of November. At least. You have him show up November 30th to attack Savio Vega. You build the feud between the two of them over four weeks of television. You have your match in your house. Savio kills bad Santa, good Santa comes out and celebrates with Savio. You're done. And that's maybe why the crowd was not so jazzed by it, because they're looking at the calendar

and they're like, this isn't going to last, so why do I care? Just start. I'm already on the back end of my advent calendar, man. So Vince, McMahon, or one of his Stooges, goes to the guy playing Santa Claus, who's a wrestler named Jonathan Reckner, and he's best known for his time in ECW under the name Balls Mahoney. Balls Mahoney? Balls Mahoney.

So whoever comes up to this guy, Jonathan Reckner, and says, look, we're killing the Santa Claus gimmick. Why don't you just stay on with WWF? We'll pay you to train and be off TV while we repackage you, etc. Reckner is initially resistant because he's like, I want to wrestle. I want to just go and wrestle. But eventually he agrees. So imagine Reckner surprised when he picks up a pro wrestling newsletter and discovers

that a source inside WWF is alleging that Reckner showed up backstage drunk. One, I'm surprised that there's a newsletter, and two, it's not news. That's a goss letter. That's a tea letter. That's a piping hot tea letter. Let me tell you a little bit about pro wrestling newsletters, or as they're also known, the dirt sheets or the rag sheets, brother. Good.

Okay. So basically there's a bunch of these pro wrestling newsletters. This one is called The Torch. Many of them are very long standing. There's this one guy, Dave Meltzer, who's been putting his shit out since like the 80s. And they're basically a mix of like wrestling results, industry news, and then every single motherfucker with a loose mouth coming and planting gossip items about people they're pissed at, about how someone, you know, everyone's pissed at Charlotte Flair backstage or whatever it

is. Right? Yeah. And so wrestlers in general have these like very love hate relationships with these like on the one hand, they're a great vehicle to get publicity about yourself out there. If Dave Meltzer really likes all your matches and gives them five, six, seven, eight stars, then that kind of like makes you as a critical darling, et cetera. But then the flip side about it is you can, I could pick up the thing and be like, everyone

in the back is saying, fly in Taylor Basso has a small wiener. And I'll be like, oh, great. You know, so it's, it's a hit and miss thing. So according to an interview that Jonathan Reckner did with Ushoot, he insists that he wasn't drunk, merely hungover, and he decides that he's going to phone up the most likely source of this leak, a WWF writer named Vince Russo, who is himself a very infamous figure in wrestling history and let him have it. So Reckner's like, I'm going to fucking call Vince Russo up and I'm going to plunge his asshole,

basically. That was rough. But okay. Yeah. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So Reckner calls up Vince Russo's office and whoever picks up, he's immediately like, put Vince on the phone right now.

So Vince picks up and Reckner launches into a tirade full of violent, colorful threats. I'm going to fucking kill you. Go fuck yourself. I'm going to blank your sister. I'm going to blank your mother's stuff. I'm not even going to repeat all of this. Whoa, just blankety blank. Blankety blank blank blank.

Blankety blank blank blank. Blank. All this stuff. This goes on for a while until finally the voice on the other end of the phone says, you know this is Vince McMahon, right? Wrong Vince. Oh shit. And that was the end of the brief yet infamous life of Santa Claus, the evil pro wrestling

Santa. Oh my gosh. So apparently, but also the way that he got the name balls Mahoney is he goes to ECW and Raven comes up to him. He's like, I heard you like rip Vince McMahon a new asshole. You got balls. You got balls. And he's just like, it was an accident, but okay.

And then and it's stuck and he became balls Mahoney. Yep. That's good. I like that. That's nice. You got to let the Christmas spirit wash out. But I guess he was Santa. The whole thing was that there was no Christmas.

And also it was like February when this was happening. So all of it was gone. All the trees had been sent to the. Exactly. Damn. Oh. I'm no million dollar man. But I did.

I do want to ask you Taylor. Do you believe in Santa? Like my good friend Savio Vega, I will never decry the magic of Santa Claus for any price. Even if he comes behind you with a chair. Then we got shit to settle at the next pay per view and I'll cross that bridge when it comes. And that wasn't Santa to be fair. It was Santa.

That was Santa. His evil brother who lives at the South Pole. No, I'm that your story is very fascinating because this idea of like just out of. Out of nothing air, but some, you know, out of left field will say the creation of a new entity in the Christmas Canon is pretty interesting. Is that so? I like that. I like that.

Because today, which is Christmas Day, Taylor, I'm going to tell you the story of how Mexican President Pascual Ortiz Rubio made a national decree the Christmas of 1930 that Santa Claus would not be coming down south to Mexico. Okay. In his place would fly in the ancient Aztec God Quetzalcoatl. Okay. So the figure that Rubio puts in place of Santa is Quetzalcoatl. Is that how you say it too?

I say, I feel like I say Quetzalcoatl. Because Quetzalcoatl is bird. Coattle is snake. Yeah. Okay. I don't know why I say it that other way because it's not like I heard that once and I went because it's not your native language or maybe I'm wrong or any number of reasons. I don't know.

Yeah. Quetzalcoatl. How do you say it again? Quetzalcoatl? Quetzalcoatl. Quetzal? Quetzalcoatl. So Quetzal, like Quetzal?

Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl. I learned this from a Nancy Drew game, by the way. Okay. Well, that must be right. Yeah. Secret of the Scarlet Hand.

They all pronounced it Quetzalcoatl in that. Okay. That's where I got it from. So. That's good. Okay. So Quetzalcoatl is the Nahuatl name for a feathered serpent, deity in ancient Mesoamerica. It ranges across a whole bunch of Mesoamerican traditions.

This one in particular is from the Nahuatl language and the Nahuatl culture, which is in central Mexico around Mexico City. So it makes sense that Rubio is attaching to this particular name and this particular iteration of the deity, but kind of in a general sense, he's in the pantheon of gods in many traditions, but in the Aztec tradition, he's known as being a benevolent ruler. He has multiple parentage attributes, but also he has siblings, and he's known as being like the nice guy of them all, selfless and giving. And he's also, I think, very interestingly, known for, along with his twin, Zolotl, he

was the product of a virgin birth of the goddess Quetzalcoatl. Come again. Why did you do this to yourself? I don't know. I always do this. Yeah, dude. It's the problem is when you look into stories in other cultures, sometimes, you know, it takes a minute to clock in to how the language works.

That's all. Coetli quay. Okay. So he's known for a virgin birth to the goddess Coetli quay, which I think is just super interesting because who else is the product of a virgin birth that we all know? Taylor, make sure that's right, baby. Jesus. It's Jesus.

Is it Jesus? It's Jesus. Jesus Christ. Jesus. Merry Christmas, everybody. Merry Christmas. So like I was saying before, it's a wide, wide tradition and they track it back to the Toltecs, which are kind of a mythical, as far as we know, mythical civilization in the

Mesoamerican area. So everybody, including like the Mayan or the Zapotec, all of them claim this Quetzalcoatl connection, but it's because it's like, oh, but we're the true descendants of the Toltecs. So that's, you know, that's why it came to us. Quetzalcoatl comes through that tradition, but I think it's also pretty interesting the tie to Aztecs because he's known as the snake figure that is covered in feathers, which is supposed to be a mix of these two, a divine mix of these two elements. So he can be on the ground like a serpent, but he can also be up in the air like a bird.

Mexico's flag, a serpent and a bird and a cactus and a rock. Shabam, shabam. Very good. I'm on it. I'm on top of my ship, buddy. Let's go. The myth behind that is that the Aztecs would establish their capital city when they glimpsed the sign of an eagle with a snake in its mouth.

So again, the combination of the two divine elements, right? And that's what Quetzalcoatl is more or less, is these two divine elements, but he's also perhaps an eagle holding a serpent, right, in some way too. So throughout these traditions, he is, and I say he because he is represented through a physical, anthropomorphized version where he looks, you know, he has two legs and he looks human-esque. And all of these representations come from various codices that are all over Mesoamerica. And so he's considered the God of the Morning Star.

He is known as the inventor of books and the calendar, the giver of, what a resume. I know. Well, books and the calendar, well, and maize, my friend, and corn as in my yeast. We know how corn will take over the world. So it all comes back to corn. Yeah, yet again, yet again, yet again, it all comes back to corn. The corn is stalking us. You were sitting on that one.

No, I didn't. No, I wasn't. Shut up. One thing I thought was super interesting too. So there's a kind of like historical controversy over whether when Montezuma, the second, who was the ruler of the Aztecs when Cortez came to Mexico, there's a controversy over whether or not Montezuma thought the Cortez was the Quetzalcoatl return. So according to one of the codexes, there's like verbatim of what Montezuma was meant to

have said to Cortez when he appeared in his court. Meant to have said according to whom? According. Whoever wrote this codex, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it goes something like Cortez, you have graciously come on earth. You have graciously approached your water, your high place of Mexico.

You have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you. Huh. That does, that pings my bullshit radar though. Yeah, it does totally. And do you hear about rulers just immediately and voluably giving away their throne to a perfect stranger that doesn't scan to me? No, no.

And there's a lot of the, the naysaying about it, about this being an actual like relationship that they had or a way that Montezuma saw Cortez is that within the Aztec rhetoric, it was really common to be extraordinarily polite. To be like polite to the nth degree was a sign of power. As it should be. And so for, for this stranger to come in and you're like, oh my God, where have you been? You came off. You fall from heaven.

Oh my God. Here's my throne. You poor thing. Oh my God. Sat in it. Let's take a picture. Let's take a picture of you in the throne. Yeah.

Exactly. Was, was not like, oh my gosh, you're, wow, you're heaven on earth, you're a God. It was just a common day practice that you would do with another ruler. And it was actually a sign of power because most likely it was, you are no threat to me. The same reason you fight over who gets to pick up the bill at dinner. Exactly. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think maybe some background might be helpful for Christmas in Mexico because I feel like it kind of, you know, impacts a little bit of the setting where we find ourselves, right? Yes. I love to unpack the setting.

Where am I? Mexico City, my dude. And of course, at much like your episode the other week, how people celebrate and how what people believe in is different from person to person. So trying to encapsulate a large region like Mexico is somewhat futile, but you get a sense of maybe some, some shared beliefs, some shared practices, some community practices that happen around Christmas. So in terms of Christmas in Mexico, there's a mixture of indigenous and Catholic beliefs

and practices, of course, because that's kind of, you know, the distilled version of Mexico is indigenous, Catholic Spanish, right? So there's customs from Spain and customs developed themselves in Mexico with influences from the U.S. and from Germany as well, you know, Germany powerhouse at Christmas. You can't get away. You can't get away from the German Christmas. I'm trying really hard not to go military here for obvious reasons. Right.

True. So, but I mean, even, even without that, there's a pretty substantial German influence in, in Mexico, like in Texas and Mexico. So that's, you know, even outside of, outside of the Christmas spirit, that's there too. And in terms of like the larger festivities that surround Christmas in Mexico, it typically starts with the Virgin of Guadalupe Saint Day on December 12th. And the Virgin of Guadalupe is like the patron saint of Mexico. So she's like, she's up there.

She's your lady. So she kicks off the season and it goes until, technically it goes until February 2nd with a candle mass. February 2nd apparently was when baby Jesus was brought to a temple. And so it's celebrated as like you go to church and you light all these candles to welcome baby Jesus. I like candles. But I think February 2nd is also Fat Tuesday.

It's like the start of the, it's like the end, I guess the end of the Christmas season to start the Easter season kind of deal. Or no, I guess to start, I don't know, I used to know some things. No, I don't. Anyway. No, they're all gone. My mom did used to teach Sunday school. So are you now?

I guess so. Yeah, they are. That's true. Although this is, this is the only episode not to come out on a Sunday. So maybe not. Mmm. Oh, good point. Should we rename our podcast bittersweet Sunday school?

No. Okay. Just a thought. Just spit it on. No, we put it on the board. Put it on the board. Put it on the board. Let's put it on the board.

Park it as we say in meetings. Park it. Let's put that idea in the parking lot. Let's put a little box around that and put it there in the corner. Put some more boxes on it. Where we don't have to look at it. And then we'll come back to it later and throw it away. Exactly, yes.

So throughout the season, there are pastorellas, which are called, they're known as like shepherd's plays or, or I recognize them more as like a nativity play. So it's the story of, of baby Jesus. And these were actually some of the first nativity plays in the new world because missionaries used them to, I don't know if convert is the word. Yeah. Yeah. To teach.

Apostletize. Yeah. Yes. There's also posadas, which are processions of the Christmas story. So it's like the nativity scene, like the, or like the nativity story, the pastorellas, but it's like on the road. So usually it's a parade where they'll select a little boy and little girl from the community and they'll dress up as Mary and Joseph and walk around.

No pressure. No big pressure. I would have loved that if I was a kid. I would have been like, what if we give Joseph a solo number this year? Me? What am I going to wear? Concept breakdancing Joseph. Am I right?

Bring it up to the modern times. Yes. Let's do it. Beautiful. If there aren't actors depicting, then they'll have like a nativity scene that they'll carry through the streets kind of thing. Homes and sing songs, sing, you know, kind of hymns, but also like more traditional Christmas, what we would call carols kind of thing inside and outside of the home.

There, of course, be a big feast. There's always a piñata, which I was reading the, like a traditional piñata has like seven points on it. You know what I'm talking about? Like a ball with all these points. Star ones. Yeah. And maybe they got little, little tassels on the end of the points.

Seven points are to represent the seven cardinal sins and you bash it with a stick and the stick represents Christianity. Yeah. Yeah. And the candy represents repentance. I guess. Like fuck it. Yeah.

Yeah. Or maybe it's just candy. I don't know. Maybe it's just fucking delicious candy. We had, we had a piñata Thanksgiving, which is not, I don't know why we do that. It was just fun. We don't have any like little kids in our family. So my aunt filled it with like mini booze bottles and wads of cash and like eyeglass repair

kits. She was like, it's an adult piñata and my brother and I were like, it's filled with dildos. I don't get it. It's filled with the stuff that she had in the drawer. A little bit. Corkscrew. Yeah.

That's projectile flying out of the piñata. Cool. I've always been pro piñata. I'm a big piñata fan. I went to Salt Spring Island when I was seven years old for like my seventh birthday or my sixth birthday or something like that. And on my birthday, the kid next door come over and on my birthday, the kid next door come over.

You're so Canadian then. Just that, just in that one moment and never before since. When he come over, he says, my name, like his parents are there and they're like, oh, his name is Taylor and it's his birthday. Do you want to smash this piñata? And I was like, I, through the power of cosmic ordering, I've manifested this. Really. Anyway, happy birthday to me.

Smashy, smashy, let's go. That's cute. I like that. Of course, the tradition of these posadas, the processions of the nativity scene, they began by Spanish evangelists to teach the Christmas story to indigenous peoples. And it was explicitly designed to supplant the rituals related to the birth of the God. And I'm going to say this wrong. I tried.

Who's the brother of Quetzalcoatl? Just so we know. Like we were saying before, like the Mexican traditions are this really fascinating tangle of pre-contact, but like a huge history of pre-contact. Like, you know, it's not just a blanket. It's like, you know, it's not just a blanket. It's like thousands of years before Christ's deal. Yes.

And after as well. Yeah, exactly. And then the Catholic traditions and then like, you know, modern nationalist traditions and then blah, blah, blah. Right. So everything mixed in between. A mezcla. A mezcla.

Yes. Mexico is a mezcla. Mexico is a mezcla. And then Three Kings Day is not the official end because there's the candle mass that comes later, but it's like, it's a little bit closer to the end of the Christmas season like January 6th. Did your family do any epiphany or Three Kings Day? No.

No, no, no. We do Christmas day pretty much. Yeah. My mom had a thing where she would leave the Christmas tree up until Three Kings Day, until epiphany. Huh? I think she may have just been like, I don't want to take it down because it wasn't that we took it down on the 6th or on the 7th.

It just stayed up at least until then. I can relate to that. I've had my Christmas tree last till like February 2nd, man. No, I mean candle mass. That makes sense. Yeah. There you go. There we go.

Yeah. So Dia de los Tres Reyes celebrates when the three wise men came bearing gifts to Jesus. I remember they were following the star. They're like, what the fuck? Where are we? Who was it? La Bufana is like, wait up, guys, wait up. La Bufana.

Total FOMO. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. So tradition, I shouldn't say traditionally because tradition is just keep changing, but probably around the time of the 1930s when we're talking about this switch in a Christmas tradition, kids in Mexico would have been giving gifts on Three Kings Day. Because that's when the Three Kings brought gifts to baby Jesus.

So that's when adults would give gifts to kids. That's when it would more or less happen. And what day is this? So they got to wait. They got to wait. Yes. Kids got to wait. Kids got to wait.

Actual, I shouldn't say actual because it's all Christmas, but like the 24th and the 25th, you go to, you know, you go to mass, you go to church, you know, you do, you do a big feast because it's the actual day of his birth. Yeah. But the gifts, which we obviously in like a North American, well, I guess Mexico's North America too, in a Western context understand like Christmas is like gifts, gifts, gifts, gifts, gifts, right? Yeah.

But Three Kings Day is when kids would get gifts. There'd be more gift giving then. And in Mexico, there was also, or there is a tradition as well where kids will either attach notes or insert notes into a helium balloon and let it fly in the air. And the note is like this thoughtful little meditation on why they've been a good kid and why they're worthy of gifts. So it's, I mean, for me, that would have been a letter to Santa, but this sounds more like an actual argument.

Like, I'm going to put four. This is, let me make the case. Let me make the case here. Listen, I saw my brother fall off the tricycle. I picked him up. I didn't want to. But I did it. I thought about this balloon flying in the sky.

And I'm like, I'll do it. Three Kings Day is also marked with eating the rosca de res, like a Three Kings Day bread. That's the fucking baby cake, right? The baby cake is like a circular cake. And then there's a little baby figurine in there. And if you get the piece with the baby figurine, then you are responsible for cooking the tamales on candle mass on February 2nd.

But they don't, here's the thing. I love cake, but you don't want me cooking your tamales. So I'm in a bind. Like you don't want me to get the baby. No, it's true. If I got the baby, I'm going to need help anyway. I, I hear you. I totally hear you.

So yes. So that's kind of a general overview of like a Christmas tradition. And again, it's going to vary from region, Mexico is a very large country with a lot of different, a lot of different people, a lot of different histories. But generally speaking, that's what we're looking at. It's, you know, growing up our Christmas was like, you buy Christmas gifts and you put up the tree and you do that all during December. And we're like, oh, we're going to church on the 15th or something like that. You know, we're like, we would go to like, oh, the annual holiday party at, you know, Barney's annual holiday party or whatever. And like, oh, the school, we would do like a school choir thing, but it wasn't, it was like a personal and like family based tradition rather than like a more cultural community based tradition.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. That's, that reflects my experience more or less as well, except like cut out the school choir and the Barney's holiday party because that shit ain't happening. But, but it's, it's a lot more about like being a time to kind of gather intimately with family and yeah, exchange gifts for sure. And listen and listen to music and watch movies, watch snow dogs, you know, could be turning junior these sorts of things. I feel like it's also a time to kind of wear more decadent things. It's like, get your sequence out. You know, get like, get the, I can wear a bow pattern, get a bow, get a bow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, dress to reflect the sumptuous richness of the season.

We're going to be eating rich foods. We're going to be spending money. We're going to be loving with abandon. We're going to be writing letters to hopefully not Santa Claus. Not Santa, not Santa. Another beautiful X name. We'll be watching Rexling altogether and being nonplussed by their Santa storylines. Wow. This has been going on for like 11 minutes.

I don't need to wrap it up. So that kind of sets the stage for the Christmas that Pasquale Ortiz Rubio steps into. So it's 1930. Rubio has been, he wasn't voted in, but he was, we'll say he was appointed by a Congress because the president before him had been assassinated. Ah, okay. Yes. One of those presidents, yes. So 1910 to 1920 is the Mexican Revolution. It's a long revolution.

It's a civil war. It skirmishes. It involves Pancho Villa, Miliano Zapato. Like there's a lot of, I don't know at all, obviously. But 1917 was when the Constitution was ratified. It was a strongly nationalistic Constitution. It gave the government power to expropriate foreign ownership of resources and, which, okay, but let me stop there.

Expropriate foreign ownership of resources. So while the US, the US was trying to come in and take oil. That's pretty much. Oh my God. Thank you. I was that math lady when you were talking. Like you can smell the burning hair in my apartment. I was like, expropriate means what? Like I was just not following. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah.

They just didn't want foreign interest to come in and buy everything up or take everything, maybe not even buy. So they wanted more power to do that. The Constitution also enabled land reform. So they put together this Constitution that also includes extended state power over the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and its role in education, which is pretty important because what they were able to do was to take away some of the power from the Vatican more or less, or from like European interest. They were able to take a little bit more power. Because it was a nationalist interest that put the Constitution together and that came out of the Mexican Revolution.

They weren't necessarily all that interested in religion. It wasn't a huge big priority. There was, you know, if you think about that era, there was a lot of socialism in Mexico. And a lot of socialism that was, you know, at the top, we'll say, had influence in Mexico. So like, I guess my entry point is Diego Rivera was a huge Marxist, right? And he, he got to paint the inside of the Plaza Nacional, like in the, in the major Zocalo, right? He got to tell the history of Mexico and his murals that are in the Plaza Nacional. And part of that was Marx was up there. You know what I mean?

So, Obergaum has been assassinated in 1928. So we're a little bit past the, past the revolution. Things have calmed down a little bit, but obviously not that much. And the president previous to the assassinated president was this guy named Plutaco Ilias Calles. And he would have loved to have stepped in and taken over the presidency once the Obergaum had been assassinated. But the Constitution had also put into place term limits. And this was super important because there was a president before who had, who had served, served or had ruled however you want to look at it for almost like 30 years. Right, right, right.

So we've put measures in place to make sure that doesn't happen again. And it's a six year term limit and they couldn't be reelected once you had been the president you were done. So this guy Calles, he couldn't be the president again. And so he had Pasquale Ortiz Rubio appointed to the position so that he could fulfill the rest of the six year limit or six year term limit. Okay. But Rubio was a little known politician from Michoacan. He had been the governor of a town in Michoacan. And though he was educated, his parents were one of his parents was a lawyer, the other was a landowner and like he was a smart guy, but he didn't have any political sway.

And so he was more or less just kind of a little puppet dude of Calles. And actually this whole era, the six years in Mexican history is a period known as the Maximato. And Maximato refers to Calles' name when he was president, which was like El Jefe Maximo. He was like the big boss, right? Jesus. So it becomes known as the Maximato because he's pulling all the strings, even though he's not sitting in the presidential chair, the presidential desk. Understood, understood. That's that is scathing, by the way. Yeah, isn't it?

That's really mean. Yeah. I like it. Continue. Maximato. I think that's good too. So one of the things that Rubio does do is he sets out this decree, the December of 1930. So he's been president for like a year and a half or so.

How's it going? He's getting a few things passed, but Calles wants to do everything and there's a little bit of bad beef, but Rubio doesn't have much, much power really. So. Right. I didn't read this anywhere. So this is me contextualizing, but I get the feeling that this was kind of this idea of like getting rid of Santa was his, his like maybe soft power move where he was like, Calles won't care about this, but I care about it. So I'm going to do it. I need, I need, I need to put a big move on my resume.

I need something here. Okay. I need a Christmas gift. It can actually be a big move because my hands are tied. So I just need to pick something flashy, but meaningless. Exactly. Exactly. Got you.

So. So. Quetzalcoatl. He appears December 24th at the National Stadium. Okay. 1930. Rubio has built a replica of a temple. Sick.

There's not any word on what exact temple it is. So it might be like an amalgamation of like. They made a temple. Yeah. Yeah. They made a temple. They made a temple. Shirley temple.

They plopped it in the national stadium. They had representations of Aztecs. They had dancers, priestesses, other indigenous people. Yes. Yes. The national anthem was playing in the background the whole time. The whole time. The whole time.

Maybe there's some other like Chris. I don't know if they. Do they have to have had another activity? There must have been. There must have been some other soundcrack. Does the fucking bird get here? Exactly. Exactly.

And 15,000 people are in attendance. Okay. Children. That's a good turnout. Diplomats all invited to the great event. The first lady. Josefina. Amira.

Is she here? Uh huh. Josefina de Ortiz Rubio. She is the president of the society for the protection of childhood or children? I think that's a translation. She was there giving presence to all the orphans who had been congregated in the crowd. This is getting a little on the nose. Okay?

I love it. I love it so much. around in Dexavio Vega. That's what happened. Yeah, that's where it was setting up. The national anthem, paying in the background. Yeah. Yeah. Quetzalcoatl is there. He is represented by a man who's dressed with a huge headdress of these long, billowing feathers. He has a beard, which in some of the codices, he's marked as a man who has feathers and a beard. So they went with that. There was debate on whether or not they would have some more representation of Quetzalcoatl based on the codices where he's like a serpent with feathers. But they decided

that would be a little too scary. So they thought, no, we're not going to do that. We need to go back to old way. We scare the children. Right? Exactly. This is what I'm saying. But they were trying to make moves, trying to do stuff. And so it was just a dude with a beard and a huge headdress. And he was passing, like the first lady, he was also passing out candies and gifts to the children. Okay. So he's a benevolent figure, as is his reputation. As his reputation. He's the centerpiece, right? There's some speeches that come before. President Rubio is there. You know, cameras are flashing. It's a big event. The national anthem is rousing in the background for hours. Hours. Hours and hours. The second they stop it, they start it again.

Exactly. Right after the big entrance of Quetzalcoatl, they have regional dances and gymnastics performed by orphaned children under the care of the state. It's maybe you should maybe you should fix your orphan problem. It's about the children. It's about the children, Taylor. That's why. That is why. So. Oh, terrible. Or wonderful. Who can nobody can say nobody knows. So the idea of getting rid of Santa Claus. Rubio had this idea for multiple reasons. One, Santa Claus was relatively new to Mexico. He'd lift right out. He's not deep in there. Yeah. Yeah. Just put a little, you know, stain remover gone. He goes, right? Yes. And of course,

he's in in an American tradition and Mexicans are well aware of that. But he had it had only been like a decade of him like being in the country at all. And so there's this idea of getting rid of him for that. But there was also this idea of getting rid of this Americanized tradition, getting that out of Mexico and replacing it with this strong Mexican identity, Mexican heritage. Of course. Of course. And bringing that back in, which of course, jives with the entire nationalist movement of the revolution and Rubio and to a certain effect to Calle Maximoto, dude, also with his with his line of thinking about reestablishing an understanding of what it means to be Mexican and working that into a Christmas tradition, I guess seemed like a really good

idea to Rubio. So cool. And when I initially heard that, I was kind of thinking like, okay, I get that. That's cool. That's awesome. But why are we getting rid of Santa? Like, why not just like Santa and his buds? You know what I mean? Krampus and Satanic, like bring them all together, right? And I did a little bit more research on this Santa Claus that would have appeared in Mexico in 1920s, 1930s. Okay. And I have to say, I got to agree with Rubio. Okay, okay. So we know the traditions of Saint Nick from your episode, that he was a saint, he died, or he like saved some daughters from prostitution. He whipped those kids, those naked boys out of the tub. He's a real good guy. His bones oozed. It was dope. Yep, he's just he's a thumb in every pie, truly. Truly a thumb

in every pie. Yeah. Yeah. So kind of picking up with that, we'll start there with our good buddy Saint Nick. You're giving me the end of my story. I'm picking it up, baby. That's so fun. Good for you. I love that. Let's go. So by the Renaissance, he's the most popular saint in Europe, even after the Protestant Reformation, which like, you know, the great schism, everything is torn apart. And especially because Protestant Reformation doesn't really like the canonization, doesn't really like the veneration of saints. He's still kind of like, he's a cool guy, don't worry about him, even in Protestant Holland. And Holland is where we see the development of what becomes Santa Claus in the US. So they were calling Saint Nick, the Dutch name, Sinter Claus. And they, of course,

they brought it to New Amsterdam, which of course became New York, New York City. I like New Amsterdam better. It sounds like mushrooms. I just think it would be harder to sing about. New Amsterdam. Tough. You've got more syllables, more breath control. That's rough. That is rough. So he's starting to come over in the 1700s. In 1908, there's an American author, Washington Irvin, who helped popularize the Sinter Claus in the US by linking him specifically to New York. He calls him the patron saint of New York in his book, The History of New York. Wow. Yeah. At this point. That's why Kevin McAllister had such good luck in New York City. That's why New York is seen as like Christmas capital. Pigeon Lady is one of his minions.

There we go. It was all over. See? There we go. There we go. New Christmas traditions popping up every feature release. Absolutely. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. So at this point, Sinter Claus or Santa Claus, as he was becoming to be known, was seen as all these various entities. So he could be kind of a rascal in a blue three-cornered hat. Maybe he had a red waistcoat and yellow stockings with a broad brimmed hat. So they didn't have the character together. No, they were workshopping. It was a long workshop. We were still getting to the bottom of it. Yeah. Perhaps he wore a huge pair of Flemish trunk hose. I don't know what that is. I'm not going to be the one to help you. I'm sorry.

Early 1800s, Christmas is also kind of turning to this gift-giving scenario that's happening. So while the Americans are kind of like getting on board with Santa Claus, it's becoming more of a gift-giving entity than ever before. So in 1822, an Episcopal minister wrote the Christmas poem, what we know as Twas the Night Before Christmas. He wrote it for his daughters and he thought it was kind of a frivolous thing, but it largely is responsible for our modern-day image of Santa as this jolly old elf kind of thing. Oh, okay. The portly figure with the supernatural ability to fit down your chimney, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, cool. Yeah. In 1881, there was a political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, and he drew a whole bunch of

cartoons during the Civil War. He was kind of pivotal and like, he was actually responsible for giving the American Democratic Party the donkey as their totem. This story has everything. Everything. Donkeys, yes. So he depicted Santa in Harper's Weekly as this rotund, cheerful man with the full white beard, with the sack, with all the toys, and it's Nast, this political cartoonist, who gave Santa the bright red suit with the trim of the white fur, his North Pole workshop. That was him. He put him in North Pole. Great place for him. And Mr. Nast married him off, gave him Mrs. Claus. Mrs. C. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be lonely up there. It'd be so lonely. They probably, they've got this thing down to a science at this

point. They probably need what, a three-month lead-up up to Christmas? Totally, yeah. And then the rest of the time, they're just fucking at the North Pole. Totally. Living the life, living the dream. Santa's like fucking around with his drone or whatever while she makes margaritas inside. Around this time too, stories begin to advertise Christmas shopping in a much bigger way. It became like the Christmas shopping season. Yes. And they were interested in ramping up this season with, of course, advertisement, which included Santa Claus. And so a lot of what we know of Santa Claus is generated by a market economy. That doesn't really surprise me. No, it doesn't at all. It doesn't at all. In fact, the Coca-Cola website, if you go to the Coca-Cola

website, they have like a fun Q&A, Frequently Asked Questions situation. And one of them is, did Coca-Cola create Santa Claus? I guess they get enough of those questions that they put it on here? Or I don't know, it's free advertising. Who knows? Coke has a very iconic Christmas campaign. Exactly. Those polar bears, man. Those polar bears. Yes, yes. And Santa loves that crisp, crackling Coke after a long night's work. Who fucking doesn't? Coke is as good as the advertisements. I'm sorry. I don't like fucking... The first sip of Coke is, but then everything else is not. The rest of the can is not. The rest of the bottle is not. You're clearly not as hungover as I am when you're drinking Coke. Okay, maybe that's true.

I'm like, oh, neck it in one gulp, go back to bed. So the Coca-Cola agency answers this question on their website by saying, Coca-Cola did not create the legend of Santa Claus. But Coca-Cola advertising did play a big role in shaping Jolly Character Reno today. Before 1931, there were many different depictions of Santa Claus around the world, including a tall, gaunt man and an elf. There was even a scary Santa Claus. But in 1931, Coca-Cola commissioned illustrator Hayden Sundblom to paint Santa for Christmas advertisements. Those paintings established Santa as a warm, happy character with human features, including rosy cheeks, a white beard, twinkling eyes, and laughter lines.

So that makes sense. Totally. All that's in there. He's got a bigger reach than Coca-Cola. It's true. It's that's very true. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was a creation of Robert L. May, a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward Department Store. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Don Jayper. Yep. Yeah, it's Don Jayper. 1947, Miracle on 34th Street comes out. A young Natalie Wood. Episode 34, by the way. Oh, shit! Miracle on Episode 34th Street. Miracle, I don't know. The National Stadium. Surrounded by orphans. You're just checking them candy. And that movie, for me, that, like, is a wonderful little bow, because that movie is about, like,

the American belief in Santa, right? Yes. They go to court room, and the court room, it's determined from the American currency. Yeah. In God we trust, in Santa we trust. A million-dollar man. Yo creo en Santa Claus. La verdad. La verdad. Sí, sí, sí. So, with this understanding of Santa Claus and the 1930s Santa Claus, too, because that's when Coke is coming in, being like, Santa loves Coke, and Montgomery Ward is, like, fashioning new characters for the Christmas canon, and it's all super, super commercial. I can see why El Presidente Rubio is, like, no Santa Claus. No gracias. No Santa Claus. Santa, aquí, no. But sadly, or not sadly, I don't know, there was some pushback from the Mexican population

about getting rid of Santa Claus and replacing it with Quetzalcoatl. Okay. So, for one, it wasn't doing much to come back the commercialization. There were still ads in Mexico that were kind of, like, drafting off of the American tradition. There was one general electric ad, newspaper ad, that said, from the Kings, Santa Claus, or Quetzalcoatl, there is no present like this, the general electric refrigerator. Oh, cover your bases. You gotta get in that extra greeting. Yeah, yeah. Get your three Kings. It saves you from a social faux pas. Exactly, exactly. It's very wise, very wise. So, and then there was also some people who felt it was an affront to their religious beliefs, too. And religious beliefs, I know, is a little squishy with Santa Claus,

but there was also this idea because Quetzalcoatl would be the figure that was going to bring Mexican children gifts. That meant that the three Kings would not be bringing them gifts. Crisscross applesauce. Yeah, at least President De Rubio didn't make that explicit enough that, like, no, no, no, we can have the three Kings. They're okay. Or, or he felt like, no, no, no, it's a dumb Catholic tradition. Why do we do that anyway? It's all Quetzalcoatl, dude. He's our man. Let's get him in. I still don't functionally understand what banning Santa means. How does one ban Santa? What does that, like, if Santa's at a department store, the policia will come and start busting the thing? Like, what does that mean? I think what he was trying to do, what

President De Rubio was trying to do, was a national decree where instead of maybe banning Santa, there was this idea of instead of Santa, let us celebrate this figure. Let us celebrate Quetzalcoatl and bring him into our traditions. If we're going to bring in some floating entity that's, you know, quote unquote, created, why should it be this commercial American one? Let us have our own roots in our understanding of this figure. Let it represent us as a people, a very nationalist point of view. But I don't think it was like, you were going to be fined if you believed in Santa or, you know, like it was like, it wasn't quite the like grinchy, scroogey vibes there. Because I think that the idea of the Santa ban, it's a interesting idea. It's an interesting

hook for a story, right? And so because of that, I feel like this is so often the conversation that happens when, say Dr. Seuss decides to stop publishing six books of their own accord, and everyone runs with it as Dr. Seuss was canceled. Right. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of like, did they explicitly cancel Santa? No, it's basically what I'm trying to get to the bottom of. It wasn't a cancellation of Santa. But I also think it's important to consider the context where like Santa wasn't the ingrained entity quite yet in 1931. And then two, it was this idea of, if we're going to bring something else in, let's bring in on our own, on our own terms. You know, does that make sense? That answers my question. Yeah. Also, I feel like 1930s presidential

decree was maybe a little different too. You know, like, I'm sure this did not really leave Mexico City. I'm sure. Yeah. No one in Sonora was like, oh, okay, cool, cool, cool. Like, they got it in Oaxaca on like February 4. Yeah. And they're like, hmm, yeah, those crazy kids. Yeah. Yeah. But that's also part of the pushback to it as well. And this is from a historian, Elena Diaz Miranda, and she's quoted in El Universal, a Mexican newspaper, and this is translated so it's, I'll try and clean it up where I can. She says the year in which Quetzalcoatl stole Christmas from Santa Claus, her terms. See, that's, that's the angle though. That is the angle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And sorry, that's not her terms. That's the terms of the article

where she can be quoted. Yes. Again, headline, headline. Headline, headline, headline. They canceled Santa, hashtag, Santa gate, et cetera. Exactly. So Elena Diaz Miranda historian says, a tradition cannot be imposed by presidential decree. But also society's traditions are the ones that make laws. In 1930, we were already a collage of traditions from different parts of the world. Celebrations could coexist without problem. Yeah. So I think that's a really like interesting way to think of it too is why have any type of negativity towards Santa? Why not just be like, Santa and Quetzalcoatl are buds. Look at them hang out. Fun party fun. That's not the same anti American imperialist statement though, is it? It's not. Another thing that I think is really

important to note when it comes to integrating Quetzalcoatl into the tradition is that during this time, and kind of drafting again off of the, I used that term before drafting, I kind of like it, but whatever. Like Tokyo drifting. Yeah, Tokyo drifting. Just like sliding in on some fucking wet concrete. So with the influence, we'll say, of the Mexican revolution, there's this idea of the nationalist push, right? But nothing is perfect, of course. And after hundreds of years of the colonial rule and the Eurocentric dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and, you know, the Habsburg Empire in Mexico, all these kind of Eurocentric ideas, the New Mexican state integrated its national identity into a concept of indigenismo. So an ideology that praises Mexico's past indigenous

history and cultural heritage. So this idea of the ancient Aztecs and the figure of Quetzalcoatl and how it's connected to all of Mesoamerica, all of that. So it's a past indigenous history, but it's not the current indigenous history in the 1930s, right? So rather than acknowledging the ongoing struggles of contemporary indigenous people and incorporating that into new state governance, they go for maybe the little safer, the stories that can be distilled because of the lapse of time, right? Distilled or maybe told in a way where there's still control. So I don't know, I'm very down for Quetzalcoatl being in the Christmas story. He's going in my nativity scene, for sure. Yeah, yeah. But I also feel like that's an important note on perhaps this integration.

It's like a more careful critique considering the context of the nationalist movement in after the the Mexican Revolution, you know? But still, like I say, that feathered serpent is definitely going to be chilling up next to baby Jesus in the crash. Crashing it. Crashing it. So 1932, Pasqualotes Rubio calls it Quetz. He resigns from the presidency in protest because Maximato Caes is just way too dominant. Rubio just says like... Snip in the strings. I give up. This is dumb. This is super dumb. It's partly that and partly there's a lot of pressure from Caes for him to do that because if he calls it Quetz within the two year mark, then it's not enough time, not enough time has elapsed to call a new election. So Caes has the opportunity to

control Congress to appoint another president to fill out the six year term. Gotcha. So there's a little back and forth there. But that still leaves 1931 available for Rubio to bring in Quetzalcoatl again. But there was such a negative backlash to it that they didn't do it. No. Oh, these all these Christmas, these terrible Christmas idea stories end the same. The ending is it was probably a bad idea. But I mean, you know, who knows, maybe there was there was obviously a lot of political strife happening at the time. And I'm sure that the Mexican people were like, okay, Rubio, sure, sure, sure. Pat him on the head because they knew that Caes was the one really pulling the strings. So he had no political backing, even with this like, kind of soft

power, cultural situation where he was bringing Quetzalcoatl into the into the crash, right? So it flopped. That's okay. That's okay. It was worth trying. Pick yourself up and dust yourself off and try again. Yeah, I think he did self exile to the US. Well, my shitty idea flopped him out. But you tried. You really tried. Yes. That's what's important. Yes. Right. So this is a blip in Mexican history of a weird little blip here. Modern children have been asked. What would what would you think of integrating Quetzalcoatl into your into your Christmas celebrations? A 11 year old Mariana Perez Cordero said it would be better if Quetzalcoatl brought us ancient things, quote, like the ones they used before. Huh? Which I think what she means is like,

turn that aspect into like a little history lesson. Make it a feature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, make it a feature. And I'm sure she just means like, bring me some dope, like ancient toys. Like I want a top that's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pleasant. Thank you. Yeah. Anything carved out of Jade really would be great. Yeah. Mariana knows what she's talking about there. And then a 11 year old Annabelle, she's asked, this is from the Mexican newspaper El Universal. Annabelle is asked, how would you feel if a feathered serpent came into your home to give you presents? And she said that she would be scared to see an animal like that. But, and I quote, I'd accept it. You know, it's hard to say no to a gift. It's hard to say no to a gift. It's a

Christmas spirit, my dude. Yeah. And that was 1930 Mexico City. If only we could have been there Taylor, if only we could have entered the National Stadium, heard the National Anthem play ad nauseam, watch orphans do gymnastics. Maybe ourselves get a small gift or candy from Quetzalcoatl. That would be dope. I would have loved it. We would have looked fly too. I think. Oh, yeah. I would dress up for that. I would have been wearing my finery. Wow. Okay, you might run into a diplomat there. Who knows? It's true. Sick. Well, Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Thank you. And we'll see you in 2021. No, 2022. Oh, fuck. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com

or search for us wherever you find podcasts. We usually release new episodes every other Sunday. You can also follow us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. If you like the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just telling a friend. Stay sweet. The sources I used for this episode were the article when Quetzalcoatl took over Christmas from the Mexican newspaper El Universal, the English version. This is what I read. Published July 12, 2019, written by Carla Ibet Diaz-Maya. I also used the article on Santa Clause from history.com, number one factual entertainment brand. Published December 14, 2020. I used the article, The History of Mexico, written by Megan Flatley,

published on conacademy.com. I read the article, Mexico's New Old Santa Clause. Quetzalcoatl, who replaces St. Nicholas, was an Aztec god of many good deeds. Published in the New York Times, December 14, 1930. I also looked at the Coca-Cola Company.com website, and their frequently asked questions, Dave Coca-Cola and Vint Santa, question mark. I used the Wikipedia for Quetzalcoatl, Pasquale Ortiz Rubio, Jotarco Elias Calles, and Christmas in Mexico. Throughout the episode, I make a few pronunciation errors, and I apologize. I hope not to offend anybody. I really sometimes just can't get my pronunciation at all. The interstitial music was written and supplied by Mitchell Collins,

and the music that you are hearing now is Tea Street by Brian Steele. Happy holidays!