Stuff You Should Know - SYSK’s 2021 Glad Tidings Bonanza Holiday Special

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Josh and Chuck’s holiday mojo has returned and they’re back in the saddle to rustle up some holiday cheer. So put on your comfiest sweater, ugly or otherwise, grab a mug of whatever makes you happy, gather round with your favorite people, and listen in. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to The Holiday Cast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's with us in spirit and everything is merry and bright and the tidings are glad and the halls are decked and Santa's on his way. That's right, our Christmas episode that we look forward to every year, this along with the Halloween episodes are two of our favorites and they are both ad-free because we insist upon it. Because Christmas has been commercialized enough, we're doing our bit to reverse that

trend just ever so slightly and I think it's been having a measurable effect, don't you Chuck? I think so. People's fingers are spared that fast forward button for 10-45 minutes and let's do this. On the 25th of the 12th, the 25th of the 12th, when Rudolph makes his yearly ride. So what are we going to do first, maybe the mystery behind the world's most famous Christmas poem? Yeah.

Okay. Did you dig this one up or no? I believe this was a listener's suggestion. It was. So this is based on an article by Stacy Conrant in Mental Floss but it was suggested to us by one of our listeners named Adam Steverson and thank you very much to Adam for sending this idea in and the whole thing, Chuck, that we're talking about is probably the world's most famous Christmas poem, it's called The Visit from St. Nicholas and we've read it before

but it's actually in most people's mind called Twas the Night Before Christmas. That's why I was confused the first couple of times I read through this. So that poem has, the authorship of it is disputed and has been disputed for some time now and it's not one of those questions where somebody says, no, no, it was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather who wrote it instead, there's actually like evidence that kind of backs this up. So right now, here in 2021 and maybe for the rest of all time, we're not 100% certain who wrote A Visit from St. Nick, also known as Twas the Night Before Christmas. That's right.

We know it first popped up in Troy, New York's Troy Sentinel on December 23rd appropriately, 1823 with no authorship attributed and then 13 years after that, a professor and a poet named Clement Clark Moore was named as the author because of the story that his housekeeper, without him knowing it, sent the piece in, it was a poem he wrote for his kids supposedly, and sent it into the newspaper and then in 1844, which is 21 years later, it was officially included in one of his poetry anthologies. That's right. So it officially became credited to Clement Clark Moore.

That's right. And then at some point in a non-entirely certain when another family, the family of Henry Livingston Jr., and again, by family, we mean five generations grandchildren, stepped forward and said, hey, I don't think this is quite right because it turns out that great, great, great, great grandfather Henry had been reading this poem to our, to his kids, my great, great, great, great grandmother for like 15 years before it was first published in the Troy, New York Sentinel. Right.

So if that was 1823, they're claiming it goes back to 1807. Yeah. That's what I saw. All right. So let's duke this out on the Livingston side, and we're not taking sides because neither one of us know or care, but on the Livingston, they certainly do on the Livingston side. They say, you know what, we have Dutch heritage in our family and ancestry. Great, great, great, great, great, great grandpeppy Henry's mom was Dutch.

And there's a lot of Dutch references in the poem. So it's his. Yeah. And ultimately, this is where we get the names for Santa's eight reindeer. And originally, Donner and Blitzen's names were Dunder and Blixom. If you read that, I know, it's great. What makes it even? Seems like a cheap t-shirt you would buy or something.

A Dunder brand t-shirt? Well, just know, like, you know, you're off-brand toys. This seems like the off-brand Christmas shirt. Yeah. So, but Dunder and Blixom mean thunder and lightning in Dutch. So hence the Dutch references. And the thing is, is Clement Clark Moore wasn't Dutch and he didn't have Dutch heritage. So it does make it a little more sensible that Livingston, who did have Dutch heritage,

would have used those Dutch names initially. That's right. And for all of you thinking, I just stepped by a Dunder and Mifflin joke. Just wanted to acknowledge it so you know that I did think of it and I chose not to. Same here. All right. It's a Christmas miracle. We're growing up.

Yeah, we really are. So Blixom changed to Blixon first, I think, to Rime with Vixen. And I believe in 1844 Moore stepped up because, you know, he was like, Hey, this is my poem after all, right? Yeah. And changed it to the Germanic Blitzon. And then Dunder eventually became Dunder. And then in the early 20th century, he was, went to Donner because it's also Germanic.

Yeah. So there's the whole thing. Originally, Dunder and Blixom were two of the names and those are clearly Dutch words, which has nothing to do with Clement Clark Moore. There's another thing too. Remember we said that Henry's children said, and apparently a neighbor at the time said that they remember him reading this to them back in 1807, 16 years before it was published. And there's also family legend among the Livingstons that there used to be a handwritten draft

copy that had markouts and scratches and revisions to it. Case closed. Yeah. I would really suggest this is the original version of the poem. And the case would be closed had that not burned up in a house fire at some point in family history. Let's see. I was, when I was reading this stuff, I was like, all right, here we go.

It's over. Case reopened. Yeah. The mysterious house fire. Now I'm like, I don't know about you Livingstons. Right. Okay. It's very fishy.

Well, then the literary professors got involved and then things got really taken off the rails, right? Yeah. There's plenty of, well, I don't know about plenty, but at least a few literary professors who have gotten in the archives and the anthologies and said, you know what, this more guy never wrote anything like this thing. It's in this anapestic scheme where you have the two syllables followed by a more stressed third syllable.

Yeah. And you never wrote anything like that, buddy. So I think you're a fraud. Yeah. And I had no idea about that scheme until I kind of spelled it out myself. And you got it wrong though, did you notice that? No, I didn't. You got the first half right, but then you lost it after and all through the house.

Oh, I did. Yeah. That was pretty much like, oh yeah, I see now. Okay. Can I read it like you wrote it? Yeah, please do. Please do. It was the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring,

not even a mouse. Oh man. This is like my math. You got tripped up. Yeah. That's all right though. So that's anapestic scheme. They said you didn't write anything like that, buddy, but Livingston wrote plenty of stuff

like that. Yeah. So again, case closed, right? And if you want to put a nail in that coffin, another professor from New Zealand, a guy named McDonald Jackson, stepped up and said, get this everybody. I've devised a statistical analysis machine and I set it loose on Clement Clark Moore's manuscript notebook and it says all of those poems are Clement Clark Moore's. So when I feed that same machine towards the night before Christmas, you know, a visit

from St. Nicholas and everybody goes, oh yeah, that one. He goes, it just starts coughing and smoking and sputtering. Error. And it broke. Error. Yeah, basically. If you talk to the Morris, they're like, yeah, but you know what? You're just constructing this in a way that makes it look like he never wrote anything

like this because I know for sure he wrote the pig in the rooster and that's anapestic. He wrote one like this. Yeah. And that's that. I should spell out some of the pig in the rooster and anapestic scheme and see what happens. So on the Moore side, this, I mean, I sort of get this, but Moore was buddies with Rip Van Winkle who was very much into the Dutch culture up there in New York state. And I guess the argument is because he was good friends with Irving that it just, he

picked up on that Dutch stuff. Is that the argument? That's the argument. The argument that I saw that basically is like, no, it's Clement Clark Moore. Is that Clement Clark Moore, who has otherwise never been accused of doing anything nefarious in his life, stepped up and claimed credit and authorship of this. And that just doesn't seem to be something that he would have done had he not done that. And the Livingston's Henry specifically, who was alive after the thing was published

for five more years, never stepped forward to take credit for it. Oh, interesting. And to a lot of people, they're like, well, that, I mean, that's that. Like yes, you can create statistical analysis machines to say whatever. But as it stands now, if you go onto the poetry websites foundation, they say that there's a lot of scholars that credit Henry Livingston with authorship, but they still, if you search Clement Clark Moore, the poem that they have on their website for him is a visit from St. Nicholas still.

So everybody's like, who knows, but ultimately, who cares? Just read the poem. It's so great. It doesn't matter who wrote it anymore. I agree. So I think, Chuck, that we've done our first little segment, which means it's time for some of Jerry's delicious Christmas interstitial music. All right.

Let's hear it. Oh, boy, that's so much better than an ad. Yeah. Jerry really knows what she's doing. She's gotten really good at this stuff. All right. Where are we headed next? Oh, jeez.

I'm driving, huh? Okay. I guess. He said he wanted to skip around. Yeah. Let's do one of yours. How about red and green? It's Christmas colors.

Yeah. We'd need to thank Wonderopolis, Reader's Digest, and our old buddy, Robert Paulson. Mr. RP funding himself. Long time listener. I think he's done this past few years, sends us a bunch of Christmas ideas, because it gets hard, you guys, to think of new things and to find new stories, and Paulson's always sent us good stuff. So this was inspired by Robert, and this is the idea that where did green and red come

from for Christmas? And there's quite a few theories, and no one knows for sure. No, which is fun, because that means you get to toss out a lot of theories that might be right or wrong. Who knows? But if you go talk to a Christian and say, hey, that whole red and green thing for Christmas, you're a Christian. Where'd it come from?

And they'll say, well, sit down, friend. I'll tell you. It turns out that the green represents an evergreen tree, which in turn represents Jesus. And you say, I didn't see Jesus coming in this, but here we go. Yeah. It's only Christmas. And the reason that the evergreen represents Jesus is because Jesus has eternal life or offers eternal life, and the evergreen is representative of eternal life and living through the winter

time even, the bleakest part of the winter, and evergreen is still green, hence the green part. And you say, well, what about the red? Don't say blood. Don't say blood. What do they say, Chuck? Blood. Yeah.

Blood of Christ. It's always the blood of Christ. So supposedly that's where the red and green came from as far as Christian scholars are concerned. That's right. And other people say, well, I'll tell you what, in the 1300s, churches would put on these miracle plays, is what they were called. And on Christmas, they would perform one called the Paradise Play, which retells the story

and genesis of the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. When Adam was instructed not to eat from the tree of good and evil, did so anyway. They were banished from paradise. And when they put on these miracle plays, apple trees weren't in season, so they couldn't drag a dead apple tree in there. So they would bring in a nice, lovely green evergreen pine and then fasten apples to them. And that is where the green and the red comes from. And every single year, there was always one townsfolk, one annoying townsfolk, who would

stand up and point and say, that's not an apple tree. That's right. Cleetus the Slack Geldeokal. But then now we get into probably the true origins of it, because we're going back beyond the origin of Christianity and starting to get into pagan and Roman culture. And as we've seen time and time and time again with a lot of the holidays that we celebrate these days, they're ultimately based on pagan and Roman rituals. And this is no different.

They think that Saturnalia actually used to claim as its holiday colors, red and green. Again because of evergreens and the berries they bear. And we talked about Saturnalia before in a Christmas episode, right? We had to have. Surely. At some point. That's the way I would know about it. The Celtic people also, the ancient Celts, they loved their holly plants because they

were evergreen. And holly is very much associated with Christmas. And they were saying, well, that's where the red and green comes from. And then a little bit later on, they were these religious greens called roots and medieval churches were dyed red and green. But other people say, well, that's because those were the pigments that were available at the time. Right.

So no one really knows for sure. No, but it does like present like a connection between Christianity and red and green. Those medieval church greens definitely do. So the Victorians came along and they had a bunch of different color schemes. Blue and white, blue and red, red and green all were pretty much equally associated with Christmas with the Victorians. And it wasn't until 1931 when Coca-Cola commissioned Haddon's Sunbloom to do his famous illustration of Santa Claus, where Santa Claus became fat and fully clothed in red for the first time

and for the rest of all time. Before that, he was naked as a jaybird. That's right. It was a gross Christmas tradition. All right, Jerry, how about some more of that music? Take it away, Jerry. Okay, Chuck, so now I think it's your turn to pick which one we're going to do next. It's like opening Christmas presents.

We're going to just switch off. Well, you know where I'm headed? Where? I'm headed to the 1980s. I'm headed to December 1987, and I'm watching the TV show, Alph, and I'm shocked at what I'm seeing on my screen, mainly because I never saw an episode of Alph. Oh, yeah, you were a little over for it. I definitely did.

It was a cute show. 86, so I was 15, maybe just on the cusp, but yeah, I didn't see Alph. Way too old for it. What was Alph like, an eight-year-old show? Really the right age to hate Alph more than any other age group on the planet, I think. Yeah, I was like, I started listening to Pink Floyd when I was 15. Right, okay, yeah, you wouldn't like Alph. For people who've never seen Alph, like you, I was thinking our younger viewers, but I

guess anybody who's never seen Alph, it's a 80s sitcom about an alien who crash lands on earth, takes up a residence with a family who he in short order starts to drive crazy with his wives cracking, his trouble making. He's good-hearted, but he's just a handful, and then on top of that, they have to keep him a secret from nosy neighbors, from the government. It's a cute little show that a six-year-old can follow the plot line of. You want to hear something more shocking? Yes.

I didn't know until yesterday that Alph was an alien. What did you think he was? I don't know. I never thought about it. I knew it was a puppet. It looked like a little fuzzy beast of some kind. I never really thought about it. I had no idea what Alph was, but now that I see this and I see the year clearly capitalizing

on a post-ET kind of thing, let's do a sitcom. I'm sure that was brought up in the room. Yeah, and Alph actually stood for alien life form. It was the name that the dad, Willie, gave to him. His real name was Gordon Shumway, and he was from the planet Melmac. Was it really Gordon Shumway? Yeah. Have you ever seen that movie, Permanent Midnight?

Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. That guy that was based on Ben Stiller plays, he was a writer for Alph for a while. That's all I knew of Alph was that movie. Okay. Got you.

That was one of my favorite lines from any movie is when Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller have lost their Percocets, Owen Wilson in his voice goes, if I were a Percocet, where would I be? I love that line. I can totally envision that. Wow. That was a dead-on Owen Wilson, by the way. Wow.

There it was again. With Alph, what you see was what you got. It was very straightforward as far as episodes were concerned. Sure. It was jarring, like you were saying, when you tuned in on December, oh, I don't remember, but in 1987, and you found out that there was not just a one part as a standard, but a two part episode shot on film of Alph, and it was a very special Christmas special of Alph.

Yeah. It was, to say the least, not very funny. I watched some of it today. They didn't forego the jokes entirely. They tried to use them effectively to punch up some moments here and there, but it was definitely different. It was, Alph gets outside the house, hitches a ride with Cleavon Little from Blazing Saddle's fame as Santa Claus, and they go to a hospital where Alph is mistaken for a Christmas toy

and given to a little girl who is dying. Yes, which is basically the main plotline of this episode, Alph hanging out with this dying girl in her hospital room, and this is not like the kind of thing where the dying girl doesn't know she's dying. She actually talks openly and frequently about dying and how she's- And being scared of it. Yeah, it's awful. Being scared to die.

Yeah. Not exactly like the typical Christmas themes you would expect. There's also a part in the second part where Alph talks Cleavon Little's character out of taking his life by jumping off a bridge. Not another. Actually, I was about to say that's not like a very Christmassy thing, but thanks to a wonderful life, jumping off of a bridge actually is kind of Christmassy now that I think about it.

Yeah, but being Alph and being a TV sitcom from the 80s, you would think at the end, of course, the doctors come in and they say, we're going to save this girl, or Alph, your heart was big enough to heal this girl. But no, it ends with Alph leaving and waving from the backseat of the car, and she waves from her hospital window, and the assumption is that she dies. Yeah. So there's a part early on in part one where Alph over here is a doctor talking to Cleavon Little and saying, yeah, she's a goner.

There's nothing we can do from her. This is going to be her last Christmas, and the show makes no efforts to change that whatsoever. And so today, if you read about it on the internet, people like to tee off on it in some pretty annoying think pieces. It's an easy target if you look at it from a really cynical point of view. But if you actually stop and watch it, it's an extremely touching episode. Oh yeah. Apparently viewers in 1987 were very touched by it, and Alph went on to become a big hit

in part because of this kind of daring limb that they went out on. But there's a guy who writes for Yahoo News named Ethan Attler, and he noticed that at the end of part two, there's a little title card that said that that episode was in memory of another girl named Tiffany. So he was like, well, what is this? That's the name of the dying girl in the episode. Who's this Tiffany? And he started to dig into it, and he found out there actually was a real life Tiffany

who was dying, who was a fan of Alph. That's right. And apparently this was something that happened a lot, is that kids who were battling cancer or something terrible like that would get involved in either with Make-A-Wish or just had a wish to see Alph and to meet Alph because kids loved Alph. And that's what happened. Tiffany went through Make-A-Wish, wanted to meet Alph, so they set up a video conference in 1987, no small feat, between Alph and the puppeteer, Paul Fusco, obviously.

And then Tiffany was in her hospital room, and the mom says, you know what, if it hadn't been for this, like this gave Tiffany an extra month of life, it like picked her spirits up so much. Brandon Tartikoff, who was running NBC at the time, heard about this. And of course, you know, you can imagine what happens from there. That's how this story was born. He was like, this is gold. This is gold, everybody.

That's right. So they actually did make this two-part episode, again, shot on film. And they dedicated it at the end title card to Tiffany Lee Smith in her memory, which is pretty sweet. But I mean, that video conference, that meeting between those two was significant enough that like they did that, you know? If you go back and watch it, I've only seen part one because I accidentally stumbled onto an internet mystery, Chuck.

Part two is not on the internet. Part one, you can get anywhere. And you watch it and you want to see part two, and you can't see part two anymore. Interesting. I watched this, you probably saw this, too. There's like a 10-minute video where this guy kind of breaks it down and goes over the story and shows clips from it. Apparently, Alp delivers a baby at some point, too.

That's where some of the laughs come from. But yeah, it's interesting. And the guy in the video, too, said that on Alph fan sites, it can be rated the worst or the best episode of Alph, depending on which one you go to. Yeah. I read like a little article on Me TV and they were saying that Alph Christmas Special is the Alph movie we always wanted. But anyway, it was nice, it was very pleasant to watch at least the first part of it.

I recommend anybody who can go check it out. It's good and it made me want to watch more Alph again. Yeah. I looked up the girl. I was like, I wonder where she is today. She's born in 75, so she's a year older than you. And she didn't do a lot of stuff after her childhood, but she was on that TV show as a cast regular, not full house, our house.

Yeah, yeah, with Wilfred Brimley. Yeah, I never saw that. Shannon Doherty and Wilfred Brimley. She was one of the little girls in that, too. So now she's locked into Christmas history. That's right, trapped forever with Alph. All right, Jerry, this is your chance to shine. Tune up that violin and let's hear it.

Man, we're just careening from Christmas spirit to Christmas spirit, aren't we? I know. I love it. So that was yours. Why don't we go with... Well, no, you pick from mine. Oh, is it my turn? Yeah, that's what we're doing.

Okay, because we got a big finish, if you ask me. Let's do Christmas songs, which is interesting, but you know the one I'm excited about most. Okay. All right, fair enough. Okay. Yeah, Christmas songs. This got me thinking about... I saw the movie about a boy recently, again, a movie that I really love.

And in that movie, Hugh Grant's character is still living the good life as a fat cat because of a Christmas song that his father wrote. I can't remember the name of the song, but it's sort of the idea, and it's correct, that if you are a pop star, or even not, if you write, and especially if you write and record and have all those rights to a popular Christmas song, then you are living on Easy Street, my friend. Yeah, you can pretty much just retire, and it's possible your kids and their kids might be able to retire too.

Oh, for sure. And such is the case, Chuck, with Jim Lee, who figures prominently in this article you found about Christmas music in the music industry. He was the bass player for Slade, who until today, I didn't realize was the originators of Quiet Riots Come On, Feel the Noise. Oh, yeah. It's actually Slade's Come On, Feel the Noise. And I went back and listened to both of them, and I was like, this Slade Boyn is so much

better. I mean, I love the Quiet Riots song, and then I heard the Slade version, and I was like, oh, wow, this is amazing. Yeah, Slade, and by the way, this is from Rob Pechetta at CNN, but yeah, Slade, I love Slade when I was a kid. They had that great video, MTV video hit Run, Run Away, and that's how I got introduced. But previous to that, in the early 80s, they were a big glam rock band in England, and Jim was the bassist, and he was talking about the pressure of writing that next big hit

all the time, and he was sort of dry of ideas, and apparently, as the story goes, in 73, in a hotel bathroom, kind of wondering what to do, and remembered that his manager and his mom had both said, why don't you write a Christmas tune? You can bloody retire. He said, and that inspired him. Get out of my room. I mean, a hotel bathroom. So that inspired him, and he came up with the outline of a verse, and then a bridge,

apparently, and then all of a sudden had a Christmas hit by Slade, which isn't as big here in the States. I've certainly heard it quite a few times, but it's really big in the UK. Yeah. I'd never heard it before in my entire life until yesterday, I think. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It's called Mary Xmas, everybody, and yeah, I think it's enormous in Britain, because

again, Slade was British, but I mean, it's so big in Britain. I'm very surprised I'd never heard it before, but it's a cute, fun little song about how not so Christmas is, but it was a huge, huge hit for him, and it's kind of one of those things where Slade, the guy, the bass player, Jim Lee, when he came up with this idea like to do a Christmas song, it wasn't like the band had been thinking of doing a Christmas song. He really had to go sell it to talk this awesome hard rock and glam rock band into doing a Christmas song, and they didn't release it as like a single or a special.

They released it on one of their regular albums. Yeah. Are you going to say the name of their lead singer? Oh. It's great. Hold on. What is his name? Naughty Holder.

That's right. It's a great name, and he actually looks a lot like a naughty holder. He does, but Lee talks about the fact that it's like having a pension basically here as he's aging, and he said, you know, my grandkids, just like we were talking, he said they're going to be getting money for this thing because Christmas tunes don't go away. If you managed to wed yourself in there with a popular tune, at least in your home country, you're going to make a lot of money, and that's why Freddie Mercury came to Jim Lee at one point and said, hey, I'm kind of thinking about doing a Christmas song.

Is that okay? I'm not going to be stepping on your toes or anything, am I? Yeah. Well, I mean, that was part of it. I think also Slade was the ones who made it okay for people who weren't Bing Crosby and Gene Autry to record Christmas music because after them, Bowie recorded that little drummer boy with Bing Crosby. Oh, yeah.

They came along and recorded theirs, and it just kept going from there. I have the distinct impression that Slade were the originators of that trend. I think you might be right. It seems to be what this article is indicating. And now it's, I think they said that, and this was in 2014, no one knows for sure because no one really wants to share these numbers, I think partially because it goes against what you want to think about at Christmas. But like that Mariah Carey song in 2014, they estimated it had earned her about 16 million

bucks. Yeah. It's a great song. I'm not even a Mariah Carey fan, but I love that song. It is a really good one. Apparently she has some more upper sleeves that have been coming out lately, too. Well, she got a whole Christmas album, I think. Yeah.

I think she just released another one. But that, I mean, that is like a, it is a definitive recent Christmas hit, but it also points out how hard it is to make one of those, like, because she's definitely not the only artist who's working still today who's released a Christmas song. Every Christmas, tons and tons of artists like take their shot at a Christmas song. And one of the reasons why they take their shot is because they will basically be able to stop working whenever they want if it's a hit. It's just so rarely a hit.

And there's this guy who was interviewed in the article who basically said, he works for PRS for Music, which manages royalty payments. He said, basically, you can count on your fingers the number of artists in the last 25 years who've had like a bonafide Christmas hit. And it's true. Like, you know, there's plenty of Christmas songs, but Christmas hits are few and far between. Yeah.

I do think it's funny though how everyone, even bands you don't think are doing it, they try to get some of that Christmas juice because if you will bring up like a modern Christmas rock playlist, it is just littered with bands that I haven't even heard of. That are throwing their name in the hat, basically. Yeah. I mean, I love a lot. I love Elton John's song. I love Queen's song.

Thank God it's Christmas. I think my favorite might be Tom Petty's and the Heartbreakers Christmas all over again. I don't know that one. Oh, it's great. It's great because at the end, I think I talked about this on Movie Crush a couple of years ago, at the end, it's kind of fading out with some jingle bells and Tom Petty in that sort of Florida Southern drawl says, Santa, this Christmas, I want a Fender Twin reverb, a Chuck Berry song.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And he's just like listing things out as it even fades out on his voice. It's very cute. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that song.

That is a cute one. What's your favorite? I think we've talked about this before. My favorite Christmas song of all time or recent Christmas hit? Favorite pop rock of any era Christmas song. Man, somebody's going to find me on the street and strangle me. I'm going to say Last Christmas by Wham. Oh, it's great.

Are you kidding me? Yeah. A lot of people really hate that song, but it's not because it's a bad song. It's just because it's really overplayed. And that's one of the other problems with the fact that so few Christmas songs are Christmas hits because that means that there's a small pool that gets played over and over and over again. Such good stuff.

What a big mistake to get a Christmas heart and the very next day, give it away. It is a big, big mistake. There's one other person I want to give a shout out to though is Kylie Minogue. She had some good Christmas songs and there's actually, she did a duet with James Corden called Every Day is Christmas, I think. Okay. Very, very cute. It's not a hit in the United States, but I would bet a lot of Marmalite that it's a

big hit in Australia. I know people are sick of hearing it, but I still love Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time and I love John Lennon's, so this is Christmas. Good stuff. Yeah, it is good stuff. And then I also, the thing I've been playing Chuck, and this will come probably as a little surprise to you, but I just wanted to shout it out too, I found a YouTube video that's an hour long called Kmart Store Intercom Christmas Music 1974.

Whoa. It'll knock your socks off. Is this a playlist? It's apparently an hour that they took from the Kmart Store Intercom because at one point they call for security in section three, but it's just instrumental, schmaltzy Christmas music that will make you pucker. It's so sweet. Emily has been, she usually likes her rock and roll Christmas mixes, but she's a big

Christmas music person from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It's always on in the house. But this year, she's just so crazy with work and really stressed. She's listened to nothing, but I mean, we're calling it jazzy Christmas, I don't know what it is, but it's sort of like dentist office Christmas piano stuff. Oh yeah. Nice. Very relaxing, but I do miss step into Christmas and Christmas all over the world, and so we're

going to have to rock it out soon. Okay. Oh, another one that we should mention is that Donnie Hathaway song, This Christmas, I think is what it's called, This Christmas. You've heard it a million times. You know, listen to Dolly, I think I put this before I left social media last year. A full 30% of Dolly Parton's Christmas songs are about having sex. What?

Go listen to Dolly Parton's Christmas songs. About 25% of them at some point, she's talking about like screwing Santa or like the kind neighbor or like- What? It's really funny. I'm telling you, just do it. Are you- And you know, it's in the Dolly Parton way.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, of course. Like if you drinks and can do it all or something. Really? I had no idea. It's really funny. But she deserves another shout out just for her hard candy Christmas alone. God bless her.

Well, I think that one talks about it. Yeah, I think she talks about going to the bar and picking up somebody maybe at one point. See? I know what you're talking about. I hadn't really thought about it because it's just Dolly, you know. All right. I'm going to look at the lyrics for that. Well, we need to move on or else we're just going to spend the next 45 minutes talking

about Christmas songs that we thought of. All right, Jerry, that's your cue. All right. Is it my turn? It's your turn, buddy. All right. Well, I guess there is nowhere else to go for you than Advent calendars. That's true.

I don't know how that happened. Did you choose first or something? I must have. All right. I'm not sure. It's kind of like the Anapestic Rhyme Scheme all over the place. But we're talking Advent calendars and I realized that I didn't set out what an Advent calendar was.

Maybe not everybody understands that because I was raised Catholic, so I had an Advent calendar every year. Did you? No. I got into them when I took German in high school and we sold them for German club. Okay. All right. So they're a super German thing, but also if you're Catholic in the United States, they're

a pretty Catholic thing too, but I think they're also a lot of Protestants use them. But it's just basically a little calendar, but it's a calendar plus because for each day from December 1st to 24th, that's the extent of an Advent calendar. Each day it has like a little door on it, each day, and you open up the door and there's like a suite inside or something like that. And the whole point of an Advent calendar is to get kids jazzed about the coming of Christmas as if they needed any extra jazzing whatsoever, but that seems to be the whole point of Advent calendars.

Yeah. I don't know why I didn't get one this year because we've been getting them and I've seen with my own eyeballs how delighted my daughter is because it becomes the ritual every day just to open that door and get that little piece of chocolate. Yeah. Oh, geez. I didn't get one this year. I did dope.

It's not too late. You can just pick up the pace and just start it like December 12th. Oh, yeah. I guess that we're recording this on December 9th, so you're right. I need to find a local German club, high school German club to support. All right. Stat. All right.

So these things, there isn't one on the 25th. Does it end on the 24th? I've seen both ways and I don't remember. I haven't had one for years either, but I feel like there was. The last one you opened on Christmas, I thought, but maybe it is Christmas Eve that you open the last one and you wake up and it's Christmas and you burn it and you set it on fire. Latin in Latin, coming or arrival is what admin means. So obviously the arrival of Christmas and the first admin calendar that we kind of recognize

as one was introduced later than I thought in 1908 in Munich or as we would say in German club, München, Germany by Gerhard Lang. Gerhard? No. I think it would be Gerhard Lang. That's what I thought too. He really threw me off and suddenly we're in Saxony or something. Yeah.

Gerhard Lang. So Lang actually said, it was my dear sweet mother who introduced me to the advent calendar. She used to make them for me by hand herself, put little pastries in there so that every day I would get to eat a little sweet and that was my treat for Advent and he loved it so much and loved his dear sweet mother so much that he grew up as an adult and in 1908, he released the first advent calendar, but it was the suckiest advent calendar you could possibly get because it was just a flat piece of paper. There were no treats involved, there were no doors to open, you just crossed off the

days. Terrible. And I think Gerhard Lang's mother haunted him by his bedside for years until he finally in 1926 added doors to his advent calendars and put sweets inside and then everybody said, okay, and his dear sweet mother could rest in peace from that point on and went off to heaven. Oh, that's nice, German heaven. This went throughout Germany, of course, and they were selling and printing these things

like crazy up until World War I and in World War II when they stopped doing it because of the paper rations, but you'll be glad to know that in World War II, the Nazis still printed their own advent calendars with Nazi propaganda stuff behind the little doors. Yeah, they took all the churchy stuff out. Yeah, put in little pagan symbols. And then after World War II, they kind of cranked up the operation again. Yeah, they got back to normal and everybody's like, thank God. And apparently they just stayed basically in Germany.

It was a German tradition among Lutherans and other German Protestants. And then in the 50s, Dwight Eisenhower, dear old Eich, was photographed with his grandchildren around Christmas time opening an advent calendar and everybody said, I like Eich. So they went out and bought advent calendars and they suddenly became a lot more widespread in the United States. And today, they are widespread to say the least and they really bear little resemblance to that original sucky 1908 advent calendar that Gerhardt Lange came up with. Yeah.

You know, when I bought them, they do resemble it. It's still sort of the traditional advent calendar with just the simple little chocolate in there, but they can get quite fancy now. Apparently you can get large calendars with beer or wine or whiskey in them, which I think is kind of cool. What else? If you're a little kid and you're like, I really want to be exposed to branding all month long to really get me primed to ask for a certain presence, then they've got advent

calendars for you. They have Roblox. They have Lego, Hot Wheels, Minecraft. Some of them managed to be doubly branded. There's Harry Potter Lego advent calendars, Pokemon Funko advent calendars. It's an advertising bonanza all about the arrival of the baby Jesus. I bet Amazon sells one that's just a tiny little QR code for 5% off something. That's right.

And like you open each door and the message is you love Amazon. Right. You love Amazon. You cannot do without Amazon. And then there is one that, I meant to look this up and see a picture of it, but apparently if you have way too much money and you're a, no, I'm not going to say what kind of person might do this because it's our kids are listening. But you can get one from Tiffany and company, which has, it's a big crate with legit jewelry

inside each day to give your special someone. 24 individually wrapped Tiffany gifts, I think, in this crate. The spirit of giving, that's what they call that. I guess so. And by the way, everybody, advent calendars was the suggestion of another little helper named Alexandra Stock, who sent in that one and a whole list of others. So thanks for that. And Chuck, I think it's Jerry's time to shine again right now.

All right. We're back and we need to shout out a time magazine and, and this is going to be a dead giveaway. Festivusweb.com for this next bit. Yes. So we're talking about Festivus, Chuck, Festivus, the festival for the rest of us, or the Festivus for the rest of us, depending on who you talk to. That's right.

If you don't know what we're talking about, then you probably are not a Seinfeld fan, but Festivus was in the 1997 episode of The Strike in the ninth season when Frank Costanza, the great, great Jerry Stiller, has he left us or is he around? I don't know. When Mara died. I don't know. All right. Should we get our, our, our person to check on this?

Hey, check on that, will you? I think people think we do have like a dedicated researcher at our side at all times. And they're not very good. So Jerry Stiller, this is great. He staged a war on Christmas and created Festivus with one of the great lines in Seinfeld history. He said, many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. And here's the line.

As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way. That's right. I watched that episode twice, twice today. You watched it? Twice today. Oh my gosh. It is flawless, man. It has it all.

Dramers on a bagel strike, aliens like giving your fake number out and trying to get a free sub, Kruger's in it, George's human fund, like fake charity, Jerry's two-faced girlfriend, like everything is in that one. It's just an amazing flaw this episode. I love it. So this is on the show. It's celebrated on December 23rd because he wanted to get a leg up on Christmas. And he practiced Festivus with the Festivus pole, which was a bare aluminum pole in the

living room or the backyard with no decoration. And they have, of course, the airing of the family grievances and then engage in the feats of strength. That's right. So everybody knows that Seinfeld and Seinfeld writers just created this out of whole cloth and Festivus was born. And I mean, almost immediately, people just started taking up Festivus and celebrating Festivus as well and still do today very much.

But it turns out, and I had no idea about this. But one of the writers on Seinfeld, Dan O'Keefe, his father, Daniel O'Keefe Sr. actually created Festivus back in the 60s. And little Dan O'Keefe as a kid in the 70s and 80s celebrated it with his family every single year. So Festivus was a real thing that the other writers of Seinfeld forced Dan O'Keefe to basically include in an episode. Yeah, I think I may have heard that at some point, but didn't really have it ingrained

in my mind until this popped up. And it just makes it all the better, the fact that this was a real thing. As the family story goes, in 1966 on the eve of the first date that Daniel Sr. had with his fiance to be Deborah, they commemorate Festivus. And they became an annual tradition. One of the differences is they did not have a Festivus poll that was created for the show. That's a good one. And it was not on a set date.

Apparently in the O'Keefe family, it happened at any time in the year and never actually happened at Christmas. Yeah, I read an interview with Dan O'Keefe and he said he never knew when they were going to celebrate Festivus until he got off the bus after school and his dad had the decorations on, was playing weird 60s French music and he's like, oh, I guess it's Festivus. I love that so much better than it being a Christmas thing. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, there's no idea when, but they actually did air grievances.

That was part of it. And that seems to be part of like the actual theme or reason for Festivus as Daniel O'Keefe Sr. conceived of it, that it was partially just kind of like blow off steam, get out what was bothering you about the rest of the family and then you'd move on. You know, it's a healthy thing to do. It really is. They didn't call it the airing of the grievances. They just basically spoke about their beefs.

They apparently were inspired or the senior Daniel was inspired by a Samuel Beckett play called Crap's Last Tape where the protagonist in the movie, or I'm sorry, in the play tapes himself speaking at different points in his life. And so the O'Keefe family used a tape recorder to record their Festivus and some of these tapes still exist apparently from little Dan's life, which is great. Yeah, and there's actually in that episode, Frank Costanza brings in the old tape recorder and plays an audio tape of one of the Festivus' where they just saw the whole family descends into screaming and George is crying and it's pretty good.

Forgot it. Seriously, you need to watch that episode again. Yeah. It is so good. I'm like, man, this show was good. That was a really great episode. I'm going to do that right after this, actually, that's exactly what I'm going to do. One of the traditions that they did that was not on the show was, and this is really

funny, it was called a clock in a bag or a clock in a bag. And the thing here is that apparently even the kids still don't know what that was all about. This is something the dad did and they would ask him like, dad, what is the clock in the bag all about? And he would say, that's not for you to know. So they just had to go along with it and honor the clock in the bank. That was so great.

And apparently one of the other famous things about Festivus, the Festivus for the rest of us is what a lot of people say it's the slogan that's on that episode. So that actually was a slogan for Festivus with the O'Keeffe family. They call it the festival for the rest of us. And initially it was kind of a bit of dark humor reference to Daniel O'Keeffe's senior's mom dying. And so it was a festival for the rest of them left over after his mom died. That's really sweet.

Because part of the point was to move on each year to like, you know, air your grievances and kind of bid a due to whatever problems you had and just move on rather than dwelling in the past and your problems and that seems to be tied in with that. So it was, if Festivus could have gotten any better, it just did for me. I love it. So we should do that now. Josh, I've been meaning to say, you're not so great at math and that's all I have to say.

But your put downs are actually not that bad. How about that, Chuck? That's my big problem. All right. We've gotten it. We've gotten that out of the way. I feel so much better. I do too.

That's good. I love it. I think it's great that it was a real thing and the writers had to kind of put him up to it. Apparently Dan was a little reticent about sharing this, but his sense, I think he went on to write a book about it even. Yeah, I think so too. So he fully embraced it.

Yeah. I mean, he's sick. With a sack of cash. Right. It makes that loose a huge cultural juggernaut on the world, which is cool. I love it. This makes me think of Aaron Cooper. So we want to shout out Aaron, because I know Aaron loves Festivus.

Yeah, for sure. Happy Festivus, Cooper. And happy Festivus to all the rest of us. Yeah. And thanks for another great year, everybody, and you and Jerry. Yeah. Dave and Max, who helps us with the ads and the ad sales team and everyone at iHeart who helps us put this thing out.

We've got to thank Dave Ruse, we've got to thank our newest member, Livia, and we've got to thank Grabinowski and Julia. Yeah, that's right. Julia Layton. And also thank you to our special elf helpers, Adam Steverson, Robert Paulson, of course, Alexander Stock for coming up with these great suggestions for us. We appreciate that big time. And like Chuck said, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, happy New Year, happy Hanukkah,

happy Kwanzaa, as they say in that episode of The Simpsons, have a tip-top tet. And we appreciate you guys joining us every year for this thing, because we really look forward to it. And Chuck, I have to say, after a wonky-ish 2020 episode, which I think was very appropriate for 2020, I feel like we got our Christmas spirit back in this one. I think so. And of course, if this is a tough time of year for you, which it often is for some people, we're thinking about you, hang in there, get through these holidays, and look forward

to hopefully a better next year. Yeah. In the meantime, everybody, happy holidays from all of us at Stuff You Should Know. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.