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Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Geek Culture Podcast - Two life-long Nerds explain, critique and poke fun at the major pillars of Geek Culture for your listening pleasure.
Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Very, Very Star Wars Christmas
The holiday you know wasn’t born under twinkle lights. It was assembled—piece by piece—out of Star Wars, Sol Invictus and Saturnalia, immigrant folklore and Protestant pushback, department store spectacle and the irresistible pull of a good story. We follow that winding path from Rome’s calendar to America’s shopping aisles, showing how gift giving shifted from communal ritual to commercial engine and why the myth of a “pure” Christmas never really existed here.
We dig into the colonial bans and 19th-century legalization that set the stage for a retail renaissance, when newspapers sold Santa, window displays became cathedrals of commerce, and cards and ornaments scaled through industrial craft. Santa’s look didn’t start with Coca-Cola; it coalesced from poems and prints that mass marketing spread nationwide. Then we jump to 1977, where George Lucas’s bet on merchandising collided with demand: Kenner couldn’t make Star Wars figures by Christmas, so it sold promises—the Early Bird Certificate Package. An empty box with stickers and a pledge should have flopped. Instead, scarcity and story turned IOUs into the season’s hottest gift and birthed the modern collector boom.
The throughline is startling and useful: American Christmas has always blended wonder with salesmanship, moral tales with marketing, generosity with buying. That doesn’t cheapen the meaning we make; it puts the power back in our hands. Understand the machinery, keep what matters, and let the rest go. If this history reshaped how you see the season—or made you smile at the audacity of that Star Wars “empty box”—tap follow, share with a friend who loves holiday lore, and drop a review to help more curious listeners find us.
Gentlemen, let's run our minds.
SPEAKER_02:Charge the lightning field.
SPEAKER_00:Christmas. I just want to be a dentist.
SPEAKER_01:It's Herbie. All right, welcome back to Dispatch Ajax. I'm Skip.
SPEAKER_02:Happy holidays from Jake.
SPEAKER_01:That's a J Hardboard cutout of Jake, and it does this, you know, every every year. Not really heartfelt, but just know he loves you.
SPEAKER_02:Happy holidays from all of us at Dispatch Ajax. At Globo Chem. You can just put in anything really. Yeah. Sky Dance. Happy holidays from everybody at McDonald's. Sky Dance. Cock Ring warehouse.
SPEAKER_01:This holiday season, don't forget. So he's like, oh, well, I've all I've got is 75 cockerings to put in the bed. It's really good. So there is no historical source identifying the exact date of the Christian artifact known as the Nativity. None whatsoever. In fact, the date of December 25th wasn't adopted to represent what we call Christmas until sometime during the fourth century CE when the Roman Catholic Church began to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity, which was not just a single day, but kind of a whole season. As we all know at this point, a lot of Christmas traditions in the West are actually just stolen from ancient pagan rituals based around the changing of the seasons and the harvest festivals and other religious practices or just cultural or folk practices in general. But that declaration of the Feast of the Nativity wasn't even Rome's first flirtation with that date. The Roman Empire declared December 25th a holiday to celebrate the birth of their adopted Syrian god, Sol Invictus, in 274 CE. Some 50 years later, John Constantine officially adopted December 25th as a day for celebrating what we would now call Christmas. Before 1000 BCE, we have a lot of gods or demigods born on December 25th. Horus and Osiris from Egypt. Attis, the the Phrygian and later Greek god of vegetation. And I want to do a whole episode on that because it is the most bonker story I've ever read in my entire life. Before 200 BCE, we have Mithra, who we're big fans of here in the pod. Friend of the Pod, Mithra. Gotta get in Mithra. Gotta get him in. Heracles, Dionysus, Tammuz, and Adonai. Who there's a Star Trek episode called Who Mourns for Adonai? Now, the gift giving aspect of this tradition originates, I think most commonly from the Roman celebration of Saturnalia, where gifts were given to everybody you saw in your community, you had to give them a gift, and they were gonna give you a gift back. To the point where the traditional greeting of somebody gift giving during Saturnalia was low low low Saturnalia. Which has its holdovers today in Santa Claus saying ho ho ho. Where them hoes at? Wait, but until the 19th century, most Americans did not celebrate Christmas, like at all. When the Puritans first came to America, or well, let's call it New England or the New World, they outlawed Christmas straight up. And the only ones who did were usually the upper crust who used it as an excuse to have all their rowdy friends over. I'm guessing to watch Monday night football. Monday night football? Right. Yeah, exactly. All that is to say that those celebrating December 25th, or even the winter solstice, which is like the 22nd, is very old, but the modern Christmas tradition is not. So why is it the way it is today? At one point. It kind of stems out of nostalgia, where there was a there was a longing by people who had moved into the urban proletariat role. Who wished for the more pastoral, family-oriented, you know, sort of like prairie existence. Which really wasn't a thing either, because they didn't celebrate Christmas back then. So we've already kind of like created this myth that isn't real in nostalgia. But Americans, because Americans are a very diverse group of people based on immigrants, they started slowly adopting old world or European Christmas traditions that sort of like helped solidify their family units. Christmas trees, for instance, were come from the Germanic peoples, which were all Christianized pagan traditions. And Santa Claus was brought over to the US by the Dutch. And we'll get to that in a second. So Christmas was introduced to the American colonies while it was really not seen favorably by most of Europe, and definitely not by the colonies, the colonists themselves, especially the Puritans and Baptists, Presbyterians and Quakers during the 17th and 18th centuries. This whole time, Christmas was most important to the Church of England, who had separated from the Catholic Church because, you know, Henry VIII wanted to fuck a bunch of other women because he didn't realize that he couldn't have boys. Puritans thought that it that Christmas as a celebration, because it's never mentioned in the Bible, was secular and unholy. And they refer to it oftentimes as, quote, wanton Bacchanalian feast. And they're not wrong. It is essentially Saturnalia or Bacchanalia. Most of them just some of them sided with the Church of England who had come over, some of them sided with the more puritanical, tyrannical versions of Christianity here in the states. In fact, in 1620, the New England Puritans spent their first Christmas day in America constructing a building instead of celebrating the birth of their Lord and Savior. The Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an ordinance in 1629 stating that Christmas must be treated as a normal working day, and anyone caught feasting, not working, or partaking in any kinds of celebration would have to pay a fine of five shillings. Damn. Sounds like a deal nowadays. That law was eventually repealed in 1681, but Christmas still wasn't a thing. Stores, businesses, shops, markets, they all stayed open. It was just another day. Now, when it became a little more popular, Christmas gifts weren't really emphasized. But there was a tradition in parts of Europe about giving children small gifts on special occasions. And so, like the Dutch colonists that settled in New Amsterdam brought, for instance, the tale of Saint Nicholas to America, in which St. Nicholas. Well, we'll get to that in a second. He was supposed to bring gifts to good quote quote good children and switches for the bad. So we're getting into sort of like Krampus territory or Belschnickel or, you know. The Germans had settled in Pennsylvania brought the traditions of the Christmas tree in the 18th century. And during the 19th century, Christmas trees became more popular because you know what? We had a lot of those trees here. Christmas kind of became a little bit more of a time of joy and celebration as a season. Now, by the 19th century, the popularity of Christmas was exploding, characterized by the legal declaration of December 25th as a holiday in all states and territories between 1836 and 1890. The first one being Alabama. Now, in the later part of the 19th century, merchants and retailers started salivating when they realized that if you're gonna give gifts to little kids, maybe we can uh get a piece of that sweet action. And they started exploiting this celebration with sales, advertising, and really starting hitting it hard that, well, it's your duty to give gifts this season.
SPEAKER_02:Can I interlude at all? Please do. Oh, yeah. In the 1840s, newspapers had special Christmas advertising sections featuring pictures of Santa Claus. And in 1841, a store in Philadelphia displayed a life-size model of Santa Claus, and thousands of children came to see it. One of the early indications of advertising to try to get kids into a store by having a representation of Santa Claus there to welcome them.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. The first explicit advertisement for Christmas gifts was in Salem, Massachusetts in 1806, and the ad read, quote, Christmas gifts. That's it. It was placed by a local newspaper, placed in a local newspaper by a bookstore, but it kind of went dark after that until the 1820s. Now, like you were saying, during the end of 1839 was the most, to this day, probably the most devastating depression America's ever had. We talk about the Great Depression as if it were the biggest economic downturn in American history. It is not. The reason it's considered that is because it was worldwide for the very first time. The 1839 Depression was actually far worse and devastated the entire country. But during this period, capitalists and retailers wanted to exploit the spirit of Christmas and the tradition, the slow-growing tradition of gift giving, by uh by advertising that it's sort of like your duty to buy Christmas gifts for your children or for your loved ones during the holiday season. One of the one of my favorite ones is certain newspapers represented this depression as a malevolent personified identity called Old Hard Times. An actual dude. And villainizing him, but then introducing his foil, the spirit of commerce himself, a positive giving figure. Santa Claus. Department stores blew up during this period. And they really saw an opportunity here. Because even during that depression, gift giving was still a thing. Now, granted, gifts that were given were usually handmade or custom-made, especially since this is be you know, around uh the implement of the Industrial Revolution. So everything was still handmade wooden things, rocking horses, you know, tr m wooden trains, things like that, which is one of the reasons that that whole archetype about Santa Claus still exists, but doesn't make a lot of sense today. The slow incremental lurch of hardcore modern American capitalism really started seeping in at this point. They started clawing out of that depression. And when department stores became more and more prevalent, they started decorating their establishments for Christmas and using different marketing tactics to draw new shoppers, either guilt tripping or making it seem like they were obligated to buy so that they could give. In fact, much of the aesthetic of what we think consider Christmas today comes from department store, you know, presentations and decorations. They used to be people used to have full-time jobs being department store decorators or like decorating window displays at department stores. In fact, it got real weird in this era. A lot of times, department stores, especially specific ones, they would install these decorations and these installations almost as sacramental. In fact, some of them were referred to as cathedrals, with Christian symbolism and a very religious-like approach to capitalism and consumerism. For instance, a department store in Philadelphia named Wanamakers, whose founder John Wanamaker, was a Presbyterian builder of Sunday schools and churches, and his stores, he would often refer to his loftest loftiest temples. Department stores contained a grand court in Wanamaker's vision, and various others in that era. They became churches, some of which had organs. In Wanamaker's, they had the world's largest organ organ as the centerpiece of the store during Christmas. They had Christmas caroling twice a day, and completely decked out Christmas uh paraphernalia, including scenes of the nativity, flags of the crusades, statues of angels, religious tapestries. And that's that tradition kind of still exists, especially in the role of the mall Santa. That's that's a that's a holdover from this this kind of era. Now they weren't the only like drivers of this, though, they were big ones. A lot of entrepreneurs fed into this. Like a German printer named Louis Prang created a market for his his new innovative color multicolor printing technique, and that's where you get Christmas cards. FW Woolworth was the one who mass produced sphere-shaped ornaments for Christmas trees, because he uh because they were produced in Germany, and the Christmas tree is a German creation. Holiday marking holiday marketing and its impact on our our cultural traditions and aesthetics, though, are nothing compared to, though I think the obvious creator of the most famous Christmas character of all time, not Jesus Christ, but Santa Claus. Now there have been many figures throughout Europe's history that have been compared to the modern American Santa Claus that we all know and love from you know his representations in Coca-Cola and whatnot, though I'd like to squash this myth, Coca-Cola did not create the aesthetic of Santa Claus. That was all based off of a poem which we call The Night Before Christmas, and it wasn't even the first to visualize it. It was just the most popular one because it was an inner it was an international company and it just made it really common. There are parallels throughout Europe, like the Dutch Sinterklos, Father Christmas of the UK, Pierre Noel from France, Santa Lucia, that's hilarious, from Sweden, Babushka from Russia, Befana from Italy, and the Spanish have something called Three Kings, and I'm and I'm I'm I'm really hoping it's just like a DVD of the movie Three Kings that they put up on their on their like on their mantle. Yeah, you you got George Clooney and Ice Cube? Come on. Is it the other one? Isn't the other one in Wahlberg? Isn't that the other one?
SPEAKER_02:I uh I can't remember.
SPEAKER_01:I'm not 100% sure either, but it just like sticks out to me. Maybe because he just does that kind of movie all the time. Who's who is the other one in that? There there are three of them. Oh, that's it's kind of a whatever movie anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, it's uh it's a it's a it's a berg.
SPEAKER_01:It's it's the Marky. There you go. Marky Mark and the Christmas bunch. Um but honestly, most of the stuff that we take for granted as the visual aesthetic for Santa Claus obviously comes from that poem, but directly inspired by the Christian saint Saint Nicholas, who served as Bishop of Mira in the Eastern Church during the fourth century. That's an important thing because, like we said earlier, Christmas wasn't considered a real holiday until the fourth century CE. So you're seeing a big innovation here as we go along. And I don't want to get too much into the bog down in the details in this because we're not gonna have a long time to do this, but one of the things that's about St. Nicholas's uh school for Wayward women or whatever it was. Right. He would throw bags of gold through the windows of poor girls to pay for their dowries so that they wouldn't be sold into slavery or prostitution. Which is why he's considered generous. Well, I mean, it's a nice thing to do.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. That's really good. He also did a bunch of other weird stuff that I'm not going to get into because that we don't have time for it. But in the European tradition, he would come around December 6th every year, which was the anniversary of his death, and children were told that he would come to their homes during the evening dressed in a red bishop robe and riding a horse to distribute the gifts to those who have behaved according to their parents. Hilariously enough, Martin Luther, who, you know, obviously reflects. Formed the church and created well sort of modern Protestantism. He hated this idea of gift-given on behalf of St. Nicholas. And so he introduced a new character. He decided to rewrite the whole story. And he created, and this is because he's German, Christen Klein, a messenger of Christ, specifically. Not secular, not separate, not based on anything pagan. That character would, when it sort of migrated to the West and came over to America, was sort of misinterpreted by non-German speakers as Chris Kringle. And because America is a melting pot of immigrants and also people who refuse to learn each other's languages, those two characters simply merged. So Kris Kringle became Saint Nick, which is also Santa Claus. Now, during more modern history, Santa became this weird symbol of getting children to buy into capitalism. And I want to make this abundantly clear. Everybody who has any sort of nostalgia for Christmas and wishes it weren't so commercial, wishes it weren't so materialistic as the way it's celebrated in America, that has never existed. Christmas has always been a marketing tool in America. Period. There has never been a time in which it wasn't tied very specifically into selling people shit. End of story. There is no like weird Victorian era like nostalgic ideal that existed. All of that was done by Dickens, and even they didn't celebrate Christmas the same way as we think they did. It just doesn't exist. It never happened, it never will happen, so stop it. If you're gonna lean into it, lean into it and just own up to what happened. Santa was kind of designed to teach children that, especially in America, and especially after a certain period, that there is a thing called boundless abundance. And which means you will forever get gifts. As long as you do the right things, you follow the rules, you will always be given endless gifts. And this was never more obvious than a bunch of studies that were done in the 20th century, actually, when the whole tradition of children sending letters to Santa came under scrutiny because it's not obviously not a very old tradition. It kind of more most famously highlighted by the movie Miracle on 34th Street, which is just a really long commercial for a department store. In 1978, an organization did a study about letters to Santa Claus. It was found that in almost every case of the 855 letters sent to Santa, found in the Seattle Post Office in 1978, that children often received more gifts than they requested, that the kids actually would normally ask for things that they actually needed or wanted that made their lives better. Not ninja turtles, not stuff that they didn't see coming, not stuff that they didn't care about, literally stuff that mattered to them, and that they would in turn receive more specifically in preschool children who requested an average of 3.4 toys per child and received an average of 11.6 toys. Absurdly like endless abundance, which does not exist. But in America during that period, we all just were convinced that it was supposed to be that's the fuel for capitalism, the fuel for American expansionism, and under the ideals of American-styled capitalism. So that kind of catches us up very briefly to another watershed moment in American society. Let's fast forward a few decades. When Star Wars officially debuted in theaters May 25th, 1977, George Lucas, he was out to dinner that evening with his then wife. And when he came out of the restaurant, he walked down the street and he came across Grauman's Chinese theater. And saw lines that went out the door and wrapped around the block, not realizing right away that it was to see his fucking movie. Why? Because he was so tied up with advertisements, toy deals, merchandising, and everything that doesn't matter when it comes to the spirit of these of this concept. The lines that Lucas saw in front of Grauman's theater would be the portent of the biggest opening day in Grauman's 50-year history, taking in$19,358, which is not a lot today. The film broke eight records in the other 31 theaters, combining for a grand total single-day opening of 254,000. Jesus Christ,$254,809 on its opening day in only 32 theaters in America across the country, one of which being the Glenwood in Kansas City. It would go on to look gross, I think, a total of$550 million. And for 1977 money, it's pretty fucking good. See, when when Lucas set out to direct Star Wars, he did something kind of brilliant on par with Jack Nicholson getting 10% of ticket sales for Batman. He wanted to have full control over the entire franchise. He wouldn't get distribution rights, but he would have all the rights to the characters, locations, toys, merchandising, you know, all of the other ancillary stuff. And Fox, who was the distributor at the time, they thought that was a great deal because movies made their profits at the box office. They didn't make their profits from t-shirts and fucking, you know, action figures. So he agreed to take a pay cut from what he was originally offered to$150,000. That's all he made for directing Star Wars. But he got full rights to the sequels, merchandising, advertising, and so on. And intellectual property, which is a big deal. Now, one of the biggest parts of this was Lucas' insistence in a toy line from Star Wars. Which, to be perfectly honest, almost didn't happen. Every company that Lucas went to to present the possibility of toys for Star Wars as toy tie-ins turned him down. Including Migo, who had made a lot of money off of Marvel, DC, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, and other big movies, like not just multimedia franchises in general, but also a lot of movie stuff. Even they weren't interested. They were like, nah, that's we're not gonna make any money of this. It's sci-fi, it's niche, nobody's gonna like it, nobody's gonna watch it. So they obviously didn't see what was about to happen. So Lucas is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. He's desperate, he's gonna need some money, and he really needs this deal to go through to create the toys so that he can pay back, you know, the investors and the people that had, you know, put up money for the creation of the film. So enter Kenner, a sort of dark horse that would decide to take the chance on Lucas and invest in a contract to create the Star Wars action figure line. Which, after the premiere of the movie, every single person that rejected Lucas suddenly was like, What the fuck was I thinking? Kenner, smartly, and if you really want to get grand about that thing, go watch The Toys That Made Us. It's a very mainstream, sort of shallow, but you know, informative uh account of how this worked. Kanner ends up making toys for Star Wars, and they become extremely sought after by every adult and child in America. And so, come Christmas time, a mere few months later, after the premiere of Star Wars, you'd think there'd be an abundance of Star Wars gifts under your tree, right? I mean, that's what everyone's waiting for. Well, the problem was Lucas couldn't get an investor or or or a company to even bite on the creation of these toys until Kenner, and that was really late in the game. It was quite a bit after Star Wars had blown up. Well, I mean, he signed the deal before that, but like they hadn't really come into production until Star Wars very blown up. So Kenner was only a few months away from full-scale production of Star Wars toys, and Christmas was coming up fast. So, let's fast forward to Christmas of 1977. Picture it, Sicily, 1922. All these kids are expecting these Star Wars toys. They're like excited. They know they're coming out, they're viny, they've exuberant about the idea that there might be toys that they could play with about this fucking kick-ass movie that inspired uh kids and adults alike. Hundreds of thousands of kids would tear into their gifts from under the tree one by one until they finally get to the coveted Star Wars toy box. And with rabid resolve, they rip open the only package they really cared about in the entire thing. And there, before their hungry, greedy eyes, was an empty box. A cardboard envelope, which contained little more than a few bits of cardboard and a handful of stickers. This was what was known as the early bird certificate package, a collection of uh essentially leaflets and some other printed paraphernalia. Reassuring promissory notes. Yes, IOUs. Literal IOUs saying, guess what? I know you want these toys. They're coming. Just hold on. That's the most bizarre bonkers capitalistic thing I think I could ever possibly imagine. All these parents bought these things for their kids on the idea that they might get toys later. See, realizing that it would be impossible to create a full line of Star Wars toys in time for Christmas for the demand, Kenner, executive Bernard Loomis, no relation to you know the psychiatrist to Dr. Loomis, uh, he knew he had to do something fast. And instead of waiting until 1978, when it would probably be ready, he came up with this idea known as the early bird certificate package or the early bird campaign. Now, the idea was literally to create IOUs for kids, which is on paper a terrible idea and should not work at all. You would think everybody would be so fucking pissed that no one would ever talk about Star Wars ever again. But that's not exactly what happened. Kenner, smartly, limited supply of these of this pre-order campaign to only 500,000 kits. And they stopped the sale of them by December 31st, 1977. They basically rigged the market to make those scarce. Which was smart because then that kind of like tamped down the the sort of disappointment of not getting their fucking toys with the idea that not only are they coming, but they're gonna be but even having just this empty box is rare. Kenner's president, John Beck, at the time, told the telegraph that action figures take a long time to produce. They have to be designed and sculpted, and those sculpts have to be turned into steel molds, and then the toys have to be cast, painted, and safely tested. Then they have to be packaged up and shipped off to toy stores. It usually takes a year of production time for toy figures like this. And even though we hired extra people and cut production time to seven months, we still couldn't make it by Christmas. And in desperation, they threw up a Hail Mary. Faced with the prospect of losing millions of dollars in sales in the 70s, they were like, Look, if we can't give them the action figures, why not just sell them an IOU? Terrible idea, and yet what do you know? In an attempt to soften the blow, no, go ahead.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it helps you at the biggest property of you know, at least that generation and generations to come. I mean, you can't do that with everything. But Star Wars was and still is special.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And today we would consider this potential vaporware. We actually have a term for it, because this is the kind of thing that people do nowadays with Kickstarter and things like that. But included in your package was just a cardboard box. But you got, hey, stickers, and and a Star Wars fan club membership card. And the the promise that after months, and well into 1978, they would finally get their thing.
SPEAKER_02:And it came with a cardboard display stand for 12 figures. So it's like the promise you're gonna get these figures, and here's a place to put the rest of the figures so you can keep buying. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:Don't worry, they're coming. They're gonna happen. And nowadays, honestly, because this thing has been kind of not exactly replicated, but done a lot in in, especially in crowdsourcing, most people cynically would be like, no, that's it's just never gonna show up. But the crazy thing was, this is quoting Beck again. We did some research, uh, we did some market research research to see if people would settle for certificates with the promise of the toys that they'd be delivered by February 15th. The research told us it would work. And the crazy thing is, Star Wars merchandise had such a clamor and such a desire, and nobody had done this kind of scheme before, that it was a huge success. In fact, packages were selling so fast that Kenner found itself taken by surprise. They really had no idea what to do with themselves. In a newspaper story published on the December 18th, 1977 report, said that the packages had sold out all over New York and Chicago. And the certificates were only on sale for a very limited time. A lot of stores refused to even stock them because they were like, we sell things, not promises. But then, in mid-January of 1978, Kenner began shipping the toys to those who had bought those pledges. 3.75-inch figurines of Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, R2D2. Now, those toys came in a plastic tray, in a little rectangular box, and then a small plastic bag that had little tiny white pegs that could, you know, with a hole in the foot of one foot of each of those characters so that they could be put on a stand and kept upright. So the company enclosed in this period a leaflet advertising a further offer to fill out a form and send two dollars. And then Kenner would send a collector's action stand designed to house the eight other figures that would fill those slots in that eight-figure plastic trade that they put out that spring. And to their credit, by the end of 1978, Kenner had managed to shift an estimated 40 uh shift, I think I meant ship, managed to ship an estimated 40 million Star Wars toys based on 500,000 of these promissory notes. Which means it fucking worked. It shouldn't have. Alright. He told the Evening Independent. Wouldn't hold your breath. Today, the early bird set online goes from, depending on its quality, depending on the seller, anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to over$8,000. People are still falling for the scheme to this day. And they created the collector market. Without the love of Star Wars, and also without the quality of the toys, which were great for what they were. They were very unique and rare. And so to me, this is like the perfect like encapsulation of how though December 25th has been celebrated throughout the millennia, what we consider Christmas, especially American Christmas, is completely intertwined with American capitalism. And I don't think there's a a better, more perfect encapsulation of that than Kenner selling an empty box of toys to kids for Star Wars in 1977. I thought that was better than just doing commercialization of Christmas history.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I was aware that it was a, you know, later on, many years later. That it was a thing that happened.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'd heard about it, but I really never looked into the history of it. And also, I thought it was a more unique thing to talk about than the what which is ironic, a more unique thing to talk about than the Star Wars Christmas special. Because it seems like everybody can have access to that now. So it's not as Yeah. Interesting. I came across this and I was like, holy shit, wait, hold on. They sold you empty boxes? Holy shit. Yeah, it's like what a what a perfectly American thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then like uh World War II was a huge driver of the commercialization of Christmas. And and there are actually some real fun, interesting anecdotes and stories and all that, but I I I felt like if I do all of that and then just talk about this one Star Wars thing, it's gonna be like really front-loaded, and then nobody's gonna give a shit by the end. You know, they're like, oh, that's it? Okay, well, never mind, you know. So I tried to just like skip over a bunch of shit that I really wanted to talk about that really wasn't germane necessarily to the conversation.
SPEAKER_02:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:Germaine chat.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I think it totally worked.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah. So I guess we'll yeah, I guess that's it. So that's what I got for this one.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's uh we'll wrap it up. Uh uh. Well, we hope your uh your Christmas present of a pod this year wasn't a promissory empty box, and that you uh we delivered uh on some interesting information and a a some insights into the commercial and capitalistic nature of Christmas and its origins. Yeah so uh do enjoy unwrapping that. And if you'd like to on this Saturnalia uh give give gifts to your your friends and loved ones in the form of our podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We wouldn't mind if in this vein of uh wassailing, if you wouldn't sing mind singing the praises of your favorite geek podcast on a podcast app of your choice, ideally Apple Podcasts, where you might give us five early bird starter boxes jolly uh early bird uh starter boxes. Uh if you wouldn't mind uh giving uh five shillings um to uh the the uh St. Nicholas whore of your choice. I was gonna say straight straight urchin. You over there, boy. Any of the above.
SPEAKER_00:What part is this? Well, it's a spit Ajax, huh?
SPEAKER_02:Or stop lying with with the men of the street uh and and raise yourself up.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, a new podcast. That's just what I need to cure me rickets.
SPEAKER_02:We are proven to cure all rickets. Uh Lyme disease. Sometimes scurvy. Um sometimes scurvy. Depends on the the podcast topic of the week.
SPEAKER_01:Um ironically, if we ever talk about Lyme disease, the lime, uh the citrus from the lime will cure rickets. Or scurvy. I mean, scurvy. That's because you put the lime in the coconut. In the coconut, and then you drink them up together. Just like your favorite pod. Uh but do please. Also, these are cola nuts and these are unkola nuts. You can't see it because this is an audio format, but I'm literally cradling two men's nuts and telling you about how that works. Miles, get down.
SPEAKER_02:Smiles, Miles, get down.
SPEAKER_00:Get down.
SPEAKER_02:Uh but yes. Uh uh do like, share, subscribe. We'd greatly appreciate it. Um uh thank you again um for joining us on this holiday season. Uh we have uh holiday pods going years back, so uh please do check out the archives, uh see what you can find that uh might trip your trigger this uh festive season. Um and until you unwrap a new pod uh the next time we come out, uh skip. What should they do?
SPEAKER_01:Well they should trust they should trust that we're gonna deliver on our empty boxes. Also, they should wait for my we'll deliver to your empty boxes. Delivered to your empty box. I uh wait till that uh you know the point in which I uh decide to go off on my probably very unpopular opinion that that it's a wonderful life, it's not a Christmas movie, but a new year's movie, and which is whatever. Whoa. Uh well what I'm sorry, I I have an argument for it. I have an argument for it. I do, I really do, and I have thought it out a lot. But it's a debate, and I'm willing to listen to that. We'll get into that later. So perhaps in the new perhaps ironically, in the new year.
SPEAKER_02:We did uh an episode on that. Um The Great Christopher Lloyd is in that movie, some for some reason. You do check out that that spook tacular episode.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we tr we tried real hard to get through that one. That was unwatchable. Anyway, so what they should do then instead, while we're, you know, instead of us ranting, they should probably clean up after the selves to some sort of reasonable degree. I know it's gonna be tough. It's the holiday season, you have friends, family over. There's gonna be a lot of paper plates and plastic forks and whatnot, all these things that eventually are just gonna get dumped in the ocean. But make sure that you've tried your best, make sure that you remember the spirit of the holiday season, whatever that means to you. Make sure that you have paid your tabs, make sure you support your local comic shops and retailers, and from Dispatch Ajax, we would like to say no matter where you go, there you are. Thank you, and good night. I watched Buckaro Bonzai like a week ago. Yeah, well, not even a week ago. I watched it the other night and I was like, yeah, I why don't I say that more? That's such a good fucking sign-off. It's so good.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I think this might be your first sign-off where we didn't do the uh yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and I was it uh the reason that I didn't used to do that was because like that was my sign-off for karaoke, but I have I don't do karaoke anymore, and so that's when I did the God Speedfair Wizard.
SPEAKER_03:Please go away.