Something You Should Know - The Secret to Achieving Any Goal & Why We Love the Same Christmas Songs Year After Year

Episode Date: December 14, 2017

It is called the “helper’s high.” It’s that feeling you get when you do something nice for someone else. It isn’t only a theory, there is solid evidence that doing the smallest thing for someone else is good for you. I’ll explore that as we begin this episode of the podcast. Achieving any goal can be tough, whether it is a New Year’s resolution or some other important goal you want to accomplish. But there is a little secret that makes achieving any goal more likely. Matthew Ferry, a top executive coach for 20+ years and author of the forthcoming book, Quiet Mind, Epic Life (due in 2018) explains how he gets people to achieve their wildest dreams. And it turns out to be pretty simple. Is there a laser pointer in your house? Sure it is fun to watch your cat chase the light – and there are even toy lasers for kids. But are they safe? Could it damage someone’s eyesight if you point it at them? Interestingly there has been a case of that happening – but only one. And there are millions of laser pointers. So what’s the deal? The answer is in this episode. Have you ever wondered why there are hardly any new Christmas songs? Why do we listen to the same old songs every year? Ronald Lankford, scholar and author of the book, Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells & Silent Nights (http://amzn.to/2ACcGIu ) reveals why some Christmas songs are popular for decades and why we love those songs so much.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, how doing a small act of kindness for someone else can be the best gift you ever receive this Christmas. Also, if you want to achieve a goal or make your New Year's resolution stick, you need to understand something. The moment you can accept that the way your life is now is actually good.

Now there's the possibility of change. But as long as you're sure that your life isn't good now and it will be better later, it's not likely that you're ever going to make the changes. Then, what you need to know if you have a laser pointer in your house or office. And a fascinating look at some of your favorite Christmas songs. After White Christmas, there was a deluge of Christmas songs, and part of the reason was because White Christmas was so popular, and it made a lot of money. It was popular in 1942, and it would return to the charts every year.

All this today on Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Every year, the gym where I go to work out hangs up these little angels, these little paper angels all over the gym.

They're everywhere. And each angel represents a child, an underprivileged child whose name is on it, along with their age and their various clothes sizes and the toys they want for Christmas. And the hope is that people who go to that gym to work out will pick up one or two of these angels and buy those kids some presents. And as I like to do, I grabbed a few of those angels and my wife and I went out and bought them some gifts. And if you've ever done a small act of giving like that, you know, it just feels good. And in fact, any small act of kindness will not only be appreciated by the recipient,

the benefits to you, the giver, can be better than you ever imagined. Research conducted at Yale University and published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science found that people who perform small acts of kindness have more positive and less stressful days than those people who did not. And these acts of kindness could be as simple as just holding the door open for someone or giving someone a small gift. What was striking was how consistently beneficial it was. It worked for all 77 participants who were between the ages of 18 and 44 in this study.

With the holidays being an incredibly stressful time, one of the best things you can do for you is to take a few moments to do something nice for someone else. It will likely end up helping you feel a lot better. And that is something you should know. As I record this, we're just a few weeks away from New Year's, a time when there's a lot of focus on goals and New Year's resolutions and new things we want to accomplish in the coming year. And often those goals are set with the best of intentions, but we never quite achieve them. So is there a better way to

set and tackle a goal that makes it more likely that we'll actually achieve it? Well, the answer is yes, according to Matthew Ferry. Matthew is a coach to some top six, seven, and eight-figure earners, and he has helped many of these high achievers reach their goals. Matthew Ferry is also the author of the upcoming book, Quiet Mind, Epic Life, which will be out soon. Welcome, Matthew. Hello, how are you? I'm good. So, what is it about setting goals, achieving goals, tackling goals, what is it that makes

it so hard? What is it that we don't get? I think that people don't get what they actually want. We think that the goals are going to change our life in some way. If I achieve this monetary success, then I'm going to finally be happy and fulfilled and satisfied. And Mike, the truth of the matter is, happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, those are actually contextual shifts that we make, not circumstantial changes that we make in our life. So what is the best way to go about this? Say you have a goal, something you want to accomplish, you sit down, and you do what to frame this goal to make it more likely to happen?

In my view, if you're looking at it from a more enlightened perspective, you step back and you say, what is it that I'm really committed to? What do I really want? And there's going to be some kind of answer. I want more money, or I want more prestige, or I want a bigger house, or I want to lose weight this year. But then you really have to go deeper, Mike. You have to say, well, why do I want a bigger house or I want to lose weight this year. But then you really have to go deeper, Mike. You have to say, well, why do I want that? And Mike, people tend to come to

places, well, I want to be happy. I want to be fulfilled. I want to be satisfied. I want to have an enjoyable life. And if we can just come to a place of recognizing that those things, those qualities are what we're after, we can begin to go after the quality rather than the result, because the result typically doesn't give us the quality. Wait a minute. The result doesn't give us the quality. Why not? Well, of course it would. It seems like it would, except I am a person who has been coaching and training people for two decades now, and the majority of my clients, my private clients, are extremely wealthy, very, very successful people, and they're literally, and this is going to sound completely absurd,

driving around or flying around in their private jet wondering when they're finally going to be happy, when they're finally going to be happy, when they're finally going to be satisfied, when they're going to finally achieve the goals that they've set for themselves. These people are making, no kidding, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and they're wondering, when am I going to finally be satisfied, Mike? So should your goal be this thing you want to accomplish, I want to lose weight, I want to quit smoking.

This very specific thing. Or are you saying that your goal should be this bigger, deeper, broader, how I want to be rather than what I want to accomplish? I actually have a little different opinion about it altogether. While I think that money and results are important and you should focus on getting results, the more important thing to do is to focus on what do I think the result will give me and then begin to adjust my frame of mind, my perspective about life,

to start to experience those things now. So if I say, for example, I want to travel around the world. Well, in this moment, that may not even be possible. It may be possible four years, five years, 10 years, 15 years from now. But what I really want is I want to have some experience. I want to have some kind of feeling of freedom, maybe. I want to be exposed to new things and delighted by new and different experiences. And the more important thing to do is to say, okay, well, how can I start to have that experience now? Maybe I don't even have a car. Can I take the bus to a place?

Can I get on a train and go somewhere? It's about experiencing what you think the big goal will give you now. And when you do that, it's crazy how much it expands. Next thing you know, you're having the bigger holiday. You're having the longer trip. But it starts with really drinking up the experience now and recognizing that all the things that you say you want in the future, you have some version of them now that you can really get into a state of appreciation for,

and then they expand. Well, I like that. I like that idea a lot because I think people put a goal in their head of, that's something I'll get later, and then, of course, a million things get in the way, and that never happens, which is why, you know, people set the same goals every year, and with, you know, New Year's coming up, it's going to be the quit smoking, lose weight, make more money, pay off my credit cards. Same goal as last year, but it just hasn't happened yet. Yeah, and we keep setting some version of the same goal because we haven't taken the time

to understand what is it that I'm actually trying to experience. When I pay off my credit cards, what am I really trying to experience there? What is the feeling, the sensation that I'm trying to have once I'm in a place of credit card debt-free? And once I can identify that feeling, I can find that feeling in my life. And I can have that experience in my life, even if it's the smallest version of it. And the more I have it, the more effortless it is for me to take the actions of paying off my credit cards that I may have been resisting in the past. Why do I keep setting the same version over and over and over? Because I resist the thing. I don't actually take the action and I don't take the action because I'm not in a state of mental, emotional, spiritual alignment.

And getting into that alignment is critical. How do you do that? You do that by exactly the way that we've been talking about. So you're going to literally ask yourself, well, what's important to me about this? I'm going to lose 10 pounds this year. Great. What's important about that? And it might be, well, I want to fit my clothes better.

Outstanding. What's important about fitting in your clothes better? Why do you want to do that? Well, I want to look good. Okay, great. You want to look good. So you want to look good. You want to fit in your clothes better.

Ultimately, what will all of this do for you? Well, it's going to make me feel better about myself. Ha! Okay. Just so you know, once you are skinny and you're feeling better in your clothes, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have a transformation in your self-image. The transformation of the self-image is an inner game. That's something that you can work on now. And the crazy thing is when you start to work on your inner game now, when you begin to shift the context about what it means to be beautiful or to be valued or appreciated, when you begin to recognize

that all of those standards are arbitrary standards that the drunk monkey in your head made up, when you recognize that all of those standards are arbitrary standards that the drunk monkey in your head made up, when you recognize that, you can begin to feel good about yourself now. And when you do that, you tend to put better things in your mouth, and you tend to move the body. And all of a sudden, the body shifts into the look that you were hoping to get. It's literally the opposite approach. Well, because you're not postponing anything. You're saying, well, let's start enjoying the results now,

and that provides the fuel to keep the effort going. It's so difficult to keep the effort going when I'm perpetually feeling like I'm not there yet. And the idea of being there or not being there really is just the framework or the contextualization. And your life isn't anything until you call it something. The reality you're living is just the words you're using to describe it, and that may sound like, you know, airy or something, but it really is that way. Two people can be experiencing the exact same thing, and they literally say something different about it, and they experience the same thing differently.

Matthew Ferry is my guest. He is a coach to some of the top earners and achievers in the world, and has been doing that for years and years and years, and he is also author of the forthcoming book, Quiet Mind, Epic Life. You know, I love my sponsors, because so often they let you, my listeners, try things out for free, like a test drive. And if you own a small business, or maybe you're a solopreneur or a freelancer, FreshBooks is giving you the ultimate test drive. There's no credit card or anything required to try out the entire thing. You simply have to. You see, FreshBooks is this amazing cloud accounting software that is ridiculously easy to use and will save you hours and hours of time. When you try it, you'll see how it radically simplifies and speeds up things like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online. I've been really getting into it myself, and I love it. Thank you. There's no getting stuck or getting frustrated. To try an unrestricted 30-day trial, go to freshbooks.com slash something

and enter something you should know in the how did you hear about us section. That's freshbooks.com slash something and enter something you should know. So, Matthew, one thing I think everyone experiences when they're trying to accomplish something is that negative self-talk, I'll never be thin, this will never work, I'll never get there, this isn't. And that can, if you do enough of that, that can just derail everything. That is the derailing mechanism. And I call that the drunk monkey. And with the drunk monkey, it's really about awareness, the game changer.

The way you get out of defense and into offense is through awareness. And so often, Mike, when I meet somebody, they don't even know that the drunk monkey in their head, this nonstop chatter, they don't even realize that it's a biological mechanism. They think that it's them. They think that the talking in their head is who they are, and that is a recipe for a subpar life. If you don't know that the talking in your head is nothing more than an outdated survival system that's no longer needed, if you're living like your opinion is valid or real, then you're living in a delusional state that will cause a lot

of suffering. And with the awareness of that, you suddenly say, well, maybe I'll stop shooting myself in the foot. It's like, gosh, I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm stupid. Wait a second. That's me holding the gun. I'm letting the mechanism say these things. Why do I keep shooting myself in the foot?

The moment you see that you're the one shooting yourself in the foot, you become flexible. It's like, well, maybe I'll put the gun down. But if you've tried to lose weight every year, if you've tried to quit smoking 24 times and never quite succeeded, it seems that those failures tell a pretty telling story that make it hard to overcome. In other words, the more you fail at this, the harder the win is. 100 percent. And the failures are an expression of not spending the time trying to discover what you actually are trying to accomplish.

That the moment you get clear about what it is you actually want, what is the experience you're trying to create, and then you begin to acknowledge and appreciate that you're having that experience now, that it already exists in your life, that no change is actually necessary. The moment you can accept that the way your life is now is actually good, now there's the possibility of change. Now you might find yourself more effortlessly putting down that cigarette and not continuing on with it. But as long as you're in a state of resistance, as long as you're sure that your life isn't good now and it will be better later once you quit, as long as you're

in that state, it's not likely that you're ever going to make the changes because what you accept will transform and what you resist will persist. You have to come to a state of acceptance and appreciate your life exactly as it is now and know that the things that you've been wanting, the experiences that you've been wanting, are there. You're just not acknowledging and appreciating and drinking them up. You're not in a state of joie de vivre and just, you know, drinking up what you currently have. Instead, you're ignoring it. So what's going on here? What is it that happens that, by accepting it, what magic happens that then makes the goal easier? I wish that I knew. I wish I had the magic recipe, the magic understanding.

I don't know why acceptance is so powerful, but it's something that everyone should just run an experiment on to see, to understand and appreciate. So rather than trying to be convinced that acceptance is a transformative perspective, the only way to really get it is to just practice accepting something. So let's take, for example, the body, and I've got this fat on my body, and I want to get rid of it this year. Okay, great. One of the most powerful things you can do is to literally stand in front of the mirror

naked and look at the body and find the parts of the body that you appreciate, that work, that you like, that are good, in your opinion, and spend time really assessing and appreciating and taking it in. And doing that for a few minutes every single day, for some strange reason, when you start to acknowledge, you know what, my body is okay. Yes, there's, yep, I see there's the tire right there. But boy, look at these legs and look at these arms. And you know what, I got nice shoulders and I'm looking at my nose. That's pretty good, too.

And you start to acknowledge and appreciate the body. It's amazing what happens. Amazing the transformation that begins to occur. And the only way to see if it works is to do it. Practice, that's it. I can't convince you. I can only ask you to run an experiment and to be a scientist, and human beings aren't

very good at being scientists. We're really good at making up opinions, pretending like we're psychic and that we know the future, and nothing could be further from the truth. We aren't psychic. We don't know the future. We don't know what's going to happen. And it's the survival system that makes us pretend that we do. You have to catch that survival system, which I call the drunk monkey,

and you have to say, drunk monkey, you're not psychic. You don't know if it'll work. We're just going to try it. Quickly address the issue, though, of when you're doing all this, it's still quite possible, I'm sure, to fall off the wagon to, you know, eat that extra piece of cake. So what do you do when that happens? Appreciate the cake, taking it in and really experiencing the wonderful sugar and the texture and just take it in. It is literally, Mike, it is the resistance. When we resist, what we resist will persist. If I resist me having the chocolate, then I'm going to find myself being drawn to more and more and more of the chocolate. I don't know why that is. But when you just take the chocolate in,

accept it and appreciate it, then all of a sudden it doesn't have you. It's not like you are, now it's a guilty plan. Oh my God, I'm eating the chocolate, and I'm wrong, and I'm bad, and I'm stupid, and I always do this, and I always fail. That's what comes in when you don't go into a state of appreciation. When you go into appreciation, you're like, man, it's good to be alive. I am so,

gosh, I love these taste buds that I have in my mouth, and this chocolate is just so incredible. When I go into that state, and I don't make myself wrong, and I don't beat myself up, I have such an easier time going, easing myself back into the food or eating plan that I want to be on. Yeah. Well, it is interesting to hear you talk, and when you think about it, the way people approach a goal, something they want to accomplish,

by setting it up as a, this is something that's going to be really hard, this is why I'm calling it this goal, and this is going to be difficult, and I might fail, you're just setting yourself up to fail. You really are setting yourself up to fail if you think that the goal itself is going to change your life. What will change your life is your perspective about your life. So if you can shift your perspective now, then you might want to achieve the goal. You might not want to achieve the goal, but now it becomes an optional thing rather than a conditional thing.

If I achieve the goal, then my life is good. If I don't achieve the goal, then my life continues to be bad. Right. That's a tough way to live. That's a tough way to live, and I will tell you that that's how most people live accidentally. That's a mental framework that naturally gets created over time as we're raised in our society. Well, it's such an interesting way to approach a goal. And it seems like, you know, it seems right, that rather than approach a goal as something to achieve

that will bring you happiness later, find a way to start living it now and watch it grow. And I like it. Thank you, Matthew. Matthew Ferry has been my guest. He is a coach to some of the top six, seven, and eight-figure earners, and he's author of the book Quiet Mind, Epic Life. There's a link to his probably noticed that in the last several years, a lot of radio stations have started to play Christmas music wall-to-wall. That's all they play starting right after Thanksgiving and going right through the new year.

And the reason they do that every year is as soon as they start playing wall-to-wall Christmas music, the ratings for those radio stations go through the roof. People love Christmas music, the ratings for those radio stations go through the roof. People love Christmas music. But interestingly, it tends to be the same songs year after year. There aren't a lot of new Christmas songs. And mostly those songs that we love come from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Well, why is that? Ronald Lankford is a music lover and scholar, and like many others, likes Christmas songs. So much so that he researched the history of American Christmas music and why we love it so,

and put it in a book called Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights, A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs. Hi, Ronnie, welcome. Hi, Mike, good to be here. I want to start our conversation, Ronnie, with a bit of a disclaimer, because it might seem strange if you're listening to this that we're talking about Christmas music and not playing any, but in podcasting it's almost impossible to get the rights to play commercial music, and if we play it without the rights,

we could get sued for that. So that's why we don't play the music. So that's why you're not hearing Christmas music during this discussion on Christmas music. But Ronnie, what's so interesting to me about Christmas music is that we don't think about it all that much. And yet imagine Christmas without it. If we didn't have the songs that we like to listen to. I mean, it truly sets the tone and the mood for the holiday. But it is interesting how, you know, we like the songs we like, we never seem to tire of them, we've been listening to them for years, sometimes decades,

and yet people love Christmas music. I like Christmas music. I love it too, and yet people love Christmas music. I like Christmas music. I love it, too. And it is strange, though, I think, because I can't think of any other kind of music that we have in American culture that every year, you know, we keep listening to the same songs. You know, nothing else I could think of like that. And if you look at old songs, I mean, White Christmas goes back to 1942, so that's over 70 years. I mean, how many songs do you know, you know, from over 70 years ago?

Right, and it just, it's perennial, it's evergreen. And yet, it is interesting, too, how, although occasionally new songs kind of make it into the repertoire, it's rare. There aren't a lot of them. I mean, the ones that are classic seem to have been classic for a long time. That was one of the things that puzzled me when I first started working on this project. I was looking at ASCAP, the music publisher. They put out a list between like 2001 and 2005 of the top 25 Christmas songs, and most of them were old songs. Winter Wonderland goes back to 1934, White Christmas 1942, and songs like Santa Claus is Coming to Town, I think also goes back to the 30s. And it just surprised me that these were still the most popular songs.

They'd been written in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. And even some of the versions that were most popular by Ben Crosby, Gene Autry, Nat King Cole, were still by the original artist. And I found that fascinating. But every once in a while, a new song does come in, like the Eagles' Please Come Home for Christmas, or Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time, or John and Yoko's Christmas song that they did. Every once in a while, a song creeps in, and yet, what is it about those songs that we all

kind of collectively say, alright, well, we'll let that one in. Well, no other ones, but we'll let that one in. That was a puzzle to me also. You're talking about, like, the original ones, say the mid-50s, after that point, it's like every now and then,

you know, Felice Navidad from 1970, and I think the Merry Christmas song by John and Yoko around the same time. More recently, you know, All I Want for Christmas is You. And I think with these songs finally do get in, I am not really sure what the factor is. I don't know if they just fit in well with, you know, what we have, our idea of Christmas songs already, if they carry similar types of messages, but they are very, very rare. When I was growing up, the list of classic rock, you know, there were a number of songs. I think the Kinks had a song about Father Christmas, but some of these songs, too, now, like, there's a lot of people making a lot of Christmas music,

and so they may get out there, but a lot of them are only being listened to, say, by people that like country or people that like easy jazz. But they don't, you know, saturate the culture as often like the older ones do. So talk about some of the specific songs that you looked at and what you found out and enlighten us. Why had a song like White Christmas, why did it become so popular? There were a couple of songs like that in the 30s, but not a lot. After White Christmas, there was a deluge of Christmas songs, and part of the reason was because White Christmas was so popular, and it made a lot of money. It was popular in 1942, and then for the next probably half a dozen years, it would return to the charts every year.

So I wanted to know, why did people love that song so much? It's a great song, but still it was reaching something deep in the American psyche to be that popular. And what I finally came upon was, you can look at other songs from that era, I'll Be Home for Christmas, which I think was done in 1943, And these are very nostalgic songs. And if you look at the time period, this is World War II is going on. And so you've got millions of Americans that are serving Africa, Europe, all over the place. And they are a long ways from home. Some of them are a long ways from home for the first time. So you can imagine the emotional resonance that they would have felt. Ben Crosby says when he performed for Troops White Christmas, these battle-hardened men would just, like, break down. It was the

World War II era that seems to be the fertile breeding ground for so many Christmas songs, the 30s, 40s, and 50s, that's where they seem to all come from. Yeah, and that's when, in a way, you have sort of that classic American song. Of course, Irvin Berlin wrote White Christmas, and he wrote a lot of other classic songs. But yes, after White Christmas, I think everybody wanted to write their own White Christmas. And they ended up writing, you know, a number of classics. You have, again, I'll Be Home

for Christmas, you know, Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song. And I think that, one, you know, again, with World War II, they were capturing a certain feeling. And then later, I think people still liked these songs, we still liked them. But Christmas songs adapted to changes in American culture. After World War II, the economy picked up, everybody came home, and you start living in the late 40s and 50s, this kind of what we look back at as kind of a golden age American family. People are making better money. And at that point, you start seeing another kind of Christmas song,

songs like Santa Claus is Coming to Town or Gene Autry singing Here Comes Santa Claus. And in 1949, you know, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And so you have, I think, compared to the earlier songs, very upbeat, happy songs. They're children's songs for the most part, and they're really about getting a lot of stuff for Christmas. Right. And so you're saying that a lot of those songs were like basically people saying, well, look at White Christmas, how great that was. Let's see if we can do that too.

Well, right. The old think, if you go back to the 30s, the old think was sheet music is what we're really trying to sell here. And so everybody just wanted to get their sheet music at the store. But Christmas, if we look at the timeline for Christmas, it looks a little different to us today. At the time, Christmas, you would have not, nobody really started until after Thanksgiving.

And so you would not be hearing Christmas songs the day after Halloween or anything like that. And so the idea was, if you write a Christmas song in the 30s, that you're just going to get the sheet music in the stores. Maybe it gets played on the radio, but it's only going to be for a very short duration. They didn't realize that Christmas music would keep coming back year after year and being popular. And so in 1942, after White Christmas was so big, everybody was like, wow, you know, we could have this song that just keeps generating money. What's your favorite Christmas song?

If I had to name one, it would be Blue Christmas. And that became a hit in 1949 for Ernest Tubb. Unlike some of these other songs we're talking about, White Christmas or Say Rudolph, this is kind of a downbeat song. The guy in the song, he's been left by his significant other for Christmas. And it reminds us, I think, that, you know, there are people that aren't happy at Christmastime. There are people that are alone, and it's a difficult time to be alone. If I had to name, though, my favorite version of Blue Christmas is by Elvis. And he released an album in 1957. And this version of Blue Christmas is nothing like the one that Ernest Tubb did in 1949. It's basically a rock

and roll song. And you could even say it's kind of risque, the way he handles it. There's a bizarre, if you listen to Blue Christmas, there's this bizarre backing vocal. And I cannot remember the woman who did the backing vocal, but I do remember reading she was about eight months pregnant at the time. And Elvis had told her to do this kind of strange vocalese in the background. She thought it was weird, but she said, well, you know, if Elvis asks you to do something, what can you do? And so she just followed suit, and then everybody liked it. And so I think it's a great version. Well, it is interesting when you look at a catalog of Christmas songs. If you listen to the radio for a half an hour to one of those stations that plays nothing but, it's kind of eclectic.

You've got, you know, The Little Drummer Boy by the Harry Simeon Chorale, and then you've got Blue Christmas by Elvis, and then even that kind of incidental piano music from Snoopy and Peanuts. Oh, yeah. It's all Christmas, but it's all so different. Yeah, it's strange because usually when you think of a genre, you think country, jazz, pop, but it's almost like Christmas music is a genre, but it doesn't work like other genres.

And I think it's fascinating, too, that you could take a song like Blue Christmas, and you could go from being a country song to a rock song to a pop song. So these songs have been very malleable, too, and who decided to record them and, you know, which category they would work for. But you're exactly right. I mean, if you listen to Christmas, it's almost like, you know, free-form radio or something. Well, and too, especially in the 60s and the 70s, and in country music in particular, perhaps, as well as pop music, every popular artist seemed to have recorded a Christmas album. And yet, few of them ever had much in the way of staying power. But, you know, I think I can think of a couple of artists that, you know,

recorded a couple of Christmas albums, but nothing ever stuck. Right. I think in the 60s and the 70s that I think the culture became less interested in Christmas music. American family was changing a lot. That ideal we look to in the 50s, by 1960, the divorce rate was going up. I think with Kennedy's death in 63, and then a lot of the turmoil of the 60s and early 70s, that it caused people to know, people to rethink, Americans to rethink their own culture.

And I think when we look at these songs, if we look at one theme that's consistent in the American Christmas song, I think it's about family and home and wanting that perfect family and that perfect home experience. And I think Americans for that time period, the 60s and 70s, were having a more difficult time buying that vision. By the time we get to the 80s, I think, though, there's a resurgence and people want that again. And you can argue whether or not we've been able to recreate that in our culture, but I think that's what people want. We want chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Exactly. And, you know, every time I hear that song, as soon as I hear those violins in the beginning, it's just like, ah, I love that song. It's just, that means Christmas to me. When

I hear that song for the first time, I'm feeling like, okay, now it's Christmas. Exactly. Everything syncs, I think, when you hear that right song. I used to work as a disc jockey at radio stations that played Christmas songs, and from that perspective, it was always, oh, God, it's the same old... Couldn't somebody come up with something new? And it's not that they don't, it's just that nobody wants it. Everybody wants the old songs. Yes, everybody does want the old songs,

and everybody wants to record old songs. I think as a listener, I feel the same way that you would have felt playing the music to me to keep it interesting. Well, this is really interesting. I appreciate your time talking about it. You obviously spent a lot of time looking at it, and I think, like so many people, we find it interesting and we find it enjoyable. We don't necessarily know why, so it's nice to talk to somebody who can explain the why.

Ronnie Lankford has been my guest. He is a scholar, a writer, and author of the books Sleigh Rides, Jingle Bells, and Silent Nights, A Cultural History of American Christmas Songs. And as usual, there is a link to his book in the show notes for this episode. Well, I hope I had a few answers, but I have enjoyed talking to you and enjoyed talking about Christmas music. Yeah, me too. Thanks, Ronnie.

Thanks a lot, Mike. Hey, what's more fun than watching a cat chase the light of a laser pointer? But laser pointers may not be as harmless as people tend to think. A bus driver in Germany reportedly suffered permanent eye damage after a child's toy laser ricocheted off his rear-view mirror and hit him directly in the eye. Now, although this is the first time a toy laser has ever been reported to cause bodily harm, doctors have suggested that it may be time

to take these items out of children's hands. But now, wait a minute. There are a lot of toy lasers out there, many of which have been pointed right at people's eyes and nothing ever happened. In fact, there's even an urban legend about a student pointing a laser at a teacher and that caused her permanent eye damage. But that turned out to be completely false. So what's going on here? Well, humans have a blink reflex. You know that when somebody shines a light into your eyes, you blink or close your eyes.

And when you blink, it cuts the contact with the laser light before significant damage can be done. Doctors believe that that bus driver in Germany looked into the mirror several times in an attempt to see where the light was coming from, and that natural defense was overridden, which is why he sustained such damage. In any case, parents should probably keep lasers away from children just to be safe.

Even a toy laser, which was the type used on that bus driver, can be dangerous. And that is something you should know. I hope you enjoyed the program today. If you did, I invite you to leave a rating and review on iTunes. Those are always appreciated. And please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, because we publish items on social media that don't make it into the show that I think you would like. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager,

but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot,

and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God

and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.