Lunatics Radio Hour
The history of horror and the horror of history.
Lunatics Radio Hour
Episode 170 - The Mega Christmas Horror Frankenstein Episode
This week we take a nostalgic walk down memory lane and piece together some of our past episodes on Christmas and holiday horror. We’ve covered so many different versions of holiday horror over the last few years, and we wanted to put together a mega-Christmas horror episode that highlights everything from the history of Yule and the pagan celebrations that pre-date Christmas, to the history of a Christmas Carol, one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, and different monsters from Christmas lore all over the world.
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Everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio MR Podcast. My name is Abby Brinker, and I am so excited to present our first ever, what I'm calling Frankenstein episode, which is sadly not an episode about Frankenstein, but an episode constructed of different previous episodes. So kind of a re-release but pieced together to be hyper-relevant to today's topic. Over the years, we've covered so many different versions of holiday horror. And we wanted to kind of put together this mega Christmas horror episode that highlights everything from the history of Yule and the pagan celebrations that predate Christmas to the history of a Christmas carol, one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, and different monsters from Christmas lore all over the world, like Krampus and Belschnickel and the Yule lads. So we are going to start out today with one of our most iconic episodes, a really, really early episode. So this was episode 57 that was originally released on December 20th, 2020. It's a deep dive into the history of Yule and pagan traditions with our friend Miranda Warzell. This is truly one of my favorite conversations that we've ever had on this podcast. And it's an episode that we reference in all of the other holiday horror episodes. So it kind of felt right to kick things off with this to establish a baseline of some of the stuff that we're going to talk about. So without further ado, let's roll the tape. And we're super excited to invite back our close friend, our pagan expert, Miranda Warzell. Hey guys. Hi, we're so excited to have you back again. Ooh, I am so excited to be back. Yeah, and if you haven't heard Miranda on our show before, we have a whole episode on Sawin, which is the pagan holiday sort of associated with Halloween, and she's also part of our Halloween radio drama. So check out those episodes. And you can also check Miranda out on Superhuman Public Radio, which is a podcast that is also available anywhere you can listen to podcasts.
SPEAKER_03:It's super, super fun. No, no, no super puntion.
SPEAKER_01:And superhuman.
SPEAKER_03:I said no pun intended, and you just you just went for it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I did. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that, Miranda?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I play a couple of different characters. Um, namely, I play a robot that is bent on um taking over the world. Um, it is gender neutral, so it's it's me and um another voice actor, and our voices are kind of like overlaid over each other. It's pretty cool the way that it turns out.
SPEAKER_03:Um sounds complicated.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's real high-tech over there, you know. They yeah, they it's it's fun. It's really fun. Um, you get a lot of cool effects on it. Uh what else? I play a villain. I play a super villain named uh Corporate, so that's pretty um appropriate.
SPEAKER_05:Pretty onboarding.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's kind of like uh it's sort of like a welcome to night vale type thing, or like a war of the worlds type thing where it's like full world immersion into like an alternate universe where it it's kind of like the Incredibles, how like uh superheroes are the norm. Right and um, yeah, it's just like their daily problems, like all the ads on the podcast are geared towards uh superheroes as if the viewer is really like a superhero and all that. It's fun.
SPEAKER_01:That's super fun. Yeah, that's that's cool. We should check that out. And you can follow Miranda at alien.meat on Instagram, which is meet like animal, not meet. What did you say? Like meet and greet. And um, it's a fun time. I follow Miranda. You get a lot of cool vegan recipes from time to time. You really never know what you're gonna get. Yeah, we like to keep everybody on their toes, you know. Yeah. And sometimes bedtime stories, which is a new thing you've been doing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I've been doing like um it's sort of like an ASMR thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly how I want to do this, exactly how I want to present myself with this. So um I sort of let everybody in on like watching me work out the kinks of this thing that I'm trying to do, but I've I've always enjoyed like uh reading to people like that and being able to read to like hundreds of people is um it's a lot of fun. The interactions are really fun. And I've been looking for good short horror stories and good short sci-fi stories, but what I found was that when I try to find good short horror stories on the internet, a lot of them are very poorly written, which actually makes for a way better time to read because they're full of um, you know, like misspellings, and sometimes the plot doesn't make any sense, and it's a really good time. I'm talking very specifically about the golden depths of Reddit again. I wonder if we talked about this a little bit last time, but it's just an endless gold mine of absurdity, and it's really fun to pull from.
SPEAKER_03:Well, if you ever need a collection of short horror stories, may recommend horror stories by Abby Branker.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Thank you for the plug. Yo, about to pick one of those up, actually, because yeah, I could use some like actually well-written short horror stories. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01:I will say that. Well, I will say Reddit is a wild time. I love reading like creepypasta stories on Reddit, and some of them, yes, are truly awful and absurd, but there are some that are so good, and you're like, you guys are just putting this on the internet for free. Like, this is this is amazing under like an anonymous username, you know? So it it's like roulette, you never know what you're gonna get.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's hard to find those little perfect golden nuggets, and then what I like about the the really poorly written ones is that when I'm reading them on live, like people will be interacting about how bad it is live. Like my friends will be like breaking down the plot in such a way, like this is absurd because, and like, I don't know, it's just it's just fun, it's just a lot of fun. We put all these authors on light roast, you know, but it's all in in the name of like we want to promote their work, and we do, right?
SPEAKER_01:You know, totally, yeah. So check out alien.me on Instagram again for a very wild time. Okay, so today is Yule. Is Yule last year we did a Krampus episode, which was fun and really specific. And this year, now that we're sort of, I don't know, diving into pagan holidays, this is, I guess, sort of a a longer form pagan holiday series we're doing. It felt cool to explore Yule and the winter solstice, and as we found out in our research, it's actually really brutal and um horrific. So I think it'll fit well on this podcast.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, before we get into what Yule actually is, I recently got into an internet argument with someone.
SPEAKER_01:How?
SPEAKER_03:How how how how do you avoid them, you know? Uh-huh. Um, where they were looking for in information on Norse mythology, Krampus and Yule and their ties. And I'm like, oh wow, you gotta check out this book. It's not a it's not an academ it's not gonna it's not an uh academic text, it's just a fantasy novel. But it ties those three things together, and this was Krampus, the Yule Lord by Brahm. Super fun book, and I just got chewed out on on the internet.
SPEAKER_01:On Reddit?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, because apparently Krampus has absolutely nothing to do with Yule, according to this one guy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Krampus is not part of any of my research. I didn't come across him. Did you, Miranda?
SPEAKER_00:No, not at all. I all you know I did. Oh, you know what? I'm not gonna spoil anything. Um we're gonna cross that bridge when we get there. Go on though.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, all right, great.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, so Krampus, the Yule Lord, uh is a misnomer, apparently.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Well, I mean, I think that's what you can do when you're a fiction author.
SPEAKER_03:It certainly is, but I mean, we're talking mythology here.
SPEAKER_01:We're talking mythology.
SPEAKER_03:Anything goes.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. Okay, so a few sources that Miranda and I collectively used. Uh, all of them are videos on YouTube, really. And I and there were some other articles and things, but these I think were really the most substantial sources. The Germanic origins of Yule, pagan origins of Christmas and tradition, and what is Yule? The biblical origins of Christmas are commonly understood. The story of the birth of Jesus, but long before that, ancient pagans were honoring the seasons and the sun as part of Yule. So before we get into like this rich history of the winter solstice in Yule, um, which has like so many, like it's really funny. I found that a lot of the little cute like traditions that we all know for Christmas now come like so many of them are traced back to different like cultures, and and some of them are really brutal and very different than how we're celebrated today. But before we talk about all of that history, I wanted to take a second to talk about the solar aspect of this holiday. So we can't really talk about Yule without talking about its connections to the winter solstice. In a pagan sense, Yule is typically celebrated on the 21st of December in modern times, which is the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Um, in the southern hemisphere, you'll be celebrating around June 20th or 23rd. And all of that being said, when you look back, and we're gonna get into this a little bit, Yule originally sort of like marked a two-month period, and in a lot of cultures we see that it's around 12 days, and Miranda kind of called out the connection to the 12 days of Christmas and other things that come up later. So just to say, like, all days end up being like a little bit arbitrary, and there's a lot of it's it's it's a little bit fluid, right, pending on the cultures. And we also see a lot of one culture being like, oh, they're celebrating this now, so let's turn it into this, right? And so things get things like flow between cultures, you know, celebrating the birth of Christ on a certain day is is not really anything to do with when he historically was believed to be born, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Mm-mm. Mm-mm. He was born in spring. That was a springtime baby, and they say that because in the Bible they said that the uh the sheep herders were tending to their flocks at night, and they never did that in the winter. They never did it. Right. So he logically could have only been born in the spring. I think Jesus was a Pisces. That's just me though.
SPEAKER_01:Are you a Pisces?
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Uh-huh. Wait. But Christmas is in December.
SPEAKER_01:All right, all right. Just hold on to your horses.
SPEAKER_00:We'll get around to that. There's a lot of there's a lot of controversy about that.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah. So again, December 21st, which is the shortest day and the longest night of the year. And so this day is sort of seen as a perfect transition between the dark and light half of the year, right? It's when things start to become brighter again, you're moving towards spring. Yule represents catharsis and new beginnings, the return of the sun, the return of light and heat. Historically, solar celebrations can be traced back thousands of years around like this time of the calendar, so like around the winter month, so to speak, and across hundreds of cultures. For those who celebrate the Wiccan tradition, this is also uh the time when the Holly King gives up his throne to the Oak King. And I didn't add a ton about this, and there's uh some pagan traditions which talk about like the horned king and other versions of these, but there is a quick little anecdote which is that it's believed that at this time the Holly King and the Oak King fight. And the Holly King gives up his throne so that the Oak King can reign during the light half of the year.
SPEAKER_00:I read that you put that in there, and I was scanning the internet trying to find a story depicting this battle, but there's no there's no like lore story. It's just something that they said was going on, you know. Yeah. And about the horned king. Didn't uh they said that the Holly King and the Oak King were two sides of the same horned god. Is another thing I read which was kind of interesting.
SPEAKER_01:That is interesting, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:This is so cool. Wait, there's no stories of this?
SPEAKER_01:It's weird. There it was, like a lot of like modern pagan resources I found that talk about it, and I have like just, you know, sort of casually as I dabbled in celebrating Yule in the past few years. But no, I haven't found like I'm I wonder, I guess, and I don't know, Marit, if you know, like where some of these Wiccan traditions started and like how old they are.
SPEAKER_00:I don't exactly know how old this one is. I mean, this one seems pretty old. This one seems to be, from what I read, seems to be the earliest depictions of the idea of a Santa Claus because it's a it's a man adorned with he's like a he's more of like a woodland Santa Claus type figure, the Holly King. I mean. So this this all I know is that that is the first hint of what became Santa Claus in America. Super cool.
SPEAKER_01:We'll also get into a few other uh Santa Claus inspirations because there are many.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, you know what? I'm sorry, I forgot. I'm I totally forgot. There was a there was a man who was a poet who wrote a poem about the Holly King, the Oak King, and the Ivy King. And I do believe the Oak King and the Ivy King are interchangeable, but that was one of the first recordings, uh written recordings of this uh duality that would um they said would constantly fight throughout the year for dominance.
SPEAKER_01:Cool. I love that imagery too. Like the imagery of like pe like these kings or gods are fighting, and that is what's controlling like the weather and the seasons, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, this is so cool. The fact that there is not endless mythology on this is criminal.
SPEAKER_01:Well, maybe we can start it. Modern mythology. That's right. You write your own mythology.
SPEAKER_02:Screw you guy on Reddit.
SPEAKER_01:I know I should have written my story about that for this episode, but I did not.
SPEAKER_00:No, this one's gonna be good as hell. I'm excited for this one.
SPEAKER_01:Yay, me too. Yule underwent many transitions, but let's start with its Germanic pagan roots. The first mentions of Yule that we see are tied to the calendar. Yule was roughly a two-month period of time that fell between what is now November and January, the deepest parts of winter. Mentions of this month appear as early as the fourth century AD. There are also many early references to similar words, describing a similar time of year in early Norse texts. Some of the oldest traditions around Yule are are this like um Proto-Germanic, pagan time, and very old Norse um history. And so those those came up a lot for me in the research.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the Yule log was like the major part of the Germanic tradition.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The the fire and the tree specifically, just um like bringing in the uh the evergreens. Obviously, like if we're gonna be talking about pagans, they're worshiping nature. And uh back then, and still for some people, they believed that like trees are the embodiment of all that is holy. I mean, I think it's um uh Greek or Norse mythology where they believed that a tree was at the center of the universe that controlled all nine realms. This is a theme that like goes throughout um a lot of different cultures. Like trees are the epitome of yeah, holiness, like I said already. To bring it into the house, this thing that survived through this like mostly unsurvivable time was not too far off from worshipping God. You look excited.
SPEAKER_03:I am, we're talking about Yggrasilf.
SPEAKER_01:Do you want to say anything about it?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, it's my favorite tree.
SPEAKER_01:It's your favorite tree. The Old Norse King's sagas were a collection of poems about Swedish and Norwegian kings written by an Icelandic poet around 1230. In the most notable of these texts, we learn that King Hkon I of Norway, who ruled between 934 and 961, is credited with bringing Christianity to the country and realigning Yule to coincide with Christian celebrations.
SPEAKER_02:Quick thing. It's King Hkon.
SPEAKER_01:King Hkon?
SPEAKER_02:Hokken.
SPEAKER_01:Hokken. King Hokken. Hokken. Håken. Because Norway was so rooted in its pagan culture, the king actually allowed for pagan Yule and Christian celebrations to happen together. Jule or J-U-L, I'm not sure the correct pronunciation. What is it? Joule? J-U-L.
SPEAKER_00:It is um it is Yol or Huel is what I pronounced. I found it pronounced as is the two ways. A. Yeah. Perfect. I thought it was funny when they said it used to be pronounced as Huel, like the the it's just kind of a gross old man name, but yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Awww. Oh, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_00:I didn't mean to offend.
unknown:No, no.
SPEAKER_01:Huel is still the word for Christmas in modern Norway. It's also believed that the word jolly is actually derived from the French word for Yule. In the Proto-Germanic sense, the earliest version of the word Yule is derived from the meaning of festivity or celebration. In the darkest and coldest time of the year, the ancient Germanic people would take to their temples to honor this holiday. And their temples were, you know, sort of like wooden huts, and you know, they weren't like beautifully ornate uh carved out temples. They were embedded in nature. It isn't surprising that they would turn to the gods during such a harsh season. People would gather around a warm hearth and toast to the gods with mead and feasts. Sacrifice was a major part of this tradition, which we talked a lot about with Saoen. Uh, and this was uh notably way easier to find information about sacrifice um with this holiday than uh we found for Sawen. Livestock and horses would be brought inside the temple and be slaughtered.
SPEAKER_03:These were for the meat and feasts.
SPEAKER_01:Well, they were for the sacrifice and for the feast.
SPEAKER_03:Would they eat it or would they just smoke it up to the gods?
SPEAKER_01:No, they would eat it, and actually, in a lot of cases, they they didn't believe that the sacrifice was complete until the meat was consumed.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that's a nice touch.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And also the blood from the animal would be collected on sacrificial twigs and sprinkled on the walls of the temple, on the idols of the gods, and on the men in attendance.
SPEAKER_03:Wait a minute.
SPEAKER_01:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_03:When you say sprinkled on the twigs.
SPEAKER_01:Like they would collect the blood from the sacrificed animal on twigs and then sort of like flick it around everywhere.
SPEAKER_03:With a birch switch? Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:Potentially. Now are you just trying to connect Krampus in here any way you can?
SPEAKER_03:I y uh no. Maybe.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's also important to know that this was one of the only if I think this was the only time of year when they would eat the horses. They normally would never do that because these were like very high honor animals. But because it was specifically because they couldn't afford to feed the animals for the rest of the winter that they had they had no choice but to kill off most of them, except for a few that they would save for breeding. Ooh, that is interesting. Huh.
SPEAKER_03:Can you imagine be that one guy in town that just loves horse meat and has to like wait ever all year long for his one meal?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, I know, yeah. In some cultures today, they still do eat horse meat.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:A specific type of sacrifice we see in ancient accounts is that of the Yule boar. The animal would be brought into the king, but before it was slaughtered, the community would lay their hands on the animal and make sacred vows and oaths. And here we see the tradition of individuals making oaths to uphold for the next year, much like our modern New Year's resolutions.
SPEAKER_00:Again, another thing that I wish we really didn't get rid of was everybody putting their hand on the family boar and making little wishes. What happened to them?
SPEAKER_01:I love the New Year's tradition of setting goal setting and rebirth, getting rid of the old. And I love I that's like my favorite holiday for that reason. And I love hearing about these like ancient versions of that.
SPEAKER_00:Do you think that they would also swear on the boar like they swore on Bibles in a court of law?
SPEAKER_01:I oh my god, can you imagine how cute that would be?
SPEAKER_00:It'd be so sweet.
SPEAKER_03:I'm just imagining the the aftermath when you know you have that disgruntled spouse that is like, you swore on the boar.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I swear to boar, Heather.
SPEAKER_01:The boar has heavy connections to the god Frey, also meaning fight in Danish. When the community feasted on the sacrifice board, they were praying to Frey to be favorable in the coming year. Uh, and here you may recognize the tradition of eating ham on Christmas.
SPEAKER_03:So that's what happened to the boar.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, which I despise.
SPEAKER_03:You just don't like ham.
SPEAKER_01:I hate ham. I love the idea of a little boar. I hate the idea of eating ham.
SPEAKER_03:But you love pork.
SPEAKER_00:Hate ham, love boar.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, exactly. Oh, we should get bumper stickers that say that.
SPEAKER_00:Hate ham, love boar. Yeah. Lunatics, Roger. I love that.
SPEAKER_01:Similar to Sawin, the ancient Germanic people believed that with the shorter and darker days, the veil between the living and the dead was thin. It was believed that spirits were more abundant during this time of year, especially outside in the harsh elements. So it was sort of this idea of like warm it wasn't romantic, so to speak, but it was this idea of safety inside with the fire, even though there was a lot of like debauchery going on outside, though, with like the harsh elements and crazy snow and winter cold, was also meant to see like almost these monsters and spirits like out about out and about outside.
SPEAKER_03:Please tell me we're gonna start talking about the Wendigo.
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_00:I wish. It was probably because they were having mass die-offs of like the local people that they were like, oh, it's the spirits. It's the spirits. That's why you gotta light that Yule log, keeps them away.
SPEAKER_01:There are even reports of a group of ghostly hunters that would ride through the night visible only during this time of year.
SPEAKER_03:Were they headless?
SPEAKER_01:No. And so again, this imagery, like it it's like frightening. You know, it's it's and we understand why it's similar to this this uh the imagery of Sawin, but it's can you imagine how devastating winters were back then, right? To survive, especially in like northern places where there were snow and and very intense cold spells. So it it makes sense that they became sort of riddled with connections to the gods and sacrifices and praying to them, right, to to survive for the next year.
SPEAKER_03:Tell me more about these spectral riders.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I will. We see this tradition survive through the twelfth century, where it was also reported that a pack of huntsmen on black horses, bucks, and demon-like hounds with haunted red eyes raced through the night. Those who kept watch at night for this group would claim to see twenty or thirty huntsmen on the prowl.
SPEAKER_03:So we see this the wild hunt.
SPEAKER_01:So we see from sort of like ancient times all the way up through the twelfth century, this motif of spirit riders almost with but like with very distinct ties to demonic images.
SPEAKER_03:But they're always a hunting party.
SPEAKER_01:But they're a hunting party. The leader of this hunt shifts and changes over time. Sometimes it was believed that local folklore legends um would take the helm, but we often see Odin depicted in this scene. In England, it's known as Walton's Walton's Hunt. In Scandinavia, it's known as Odin's Hunt, and in Germany as Odin's army.
SPEAKER_00:Love that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The the Odin, I guess, that I grew up with was very much, I guess, like a Marvel character, you know what I mean? But like to read about Odin in this light, like this gothic, like Lord of the Dead and Leader of a Dark Army, is kind of like worlds away from the Odin that I've come to know and love. I mean, like that theme is sort of carried out through all of these old myths. Like they used to be so much darker, so much more brooding, so much more serious, you know. But it I don't know. I like I like this Odin very much.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, totally. I feel like you have so much to say about Odin.
SPEAKER_03:I have so much to say, but I'll keep I'll keep it brief. The good segue for me between you know Marvel Odin and classical debaucherous Odin uh was uh American Gods Odin.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Where yeah, he's the a little little little column A, a little little column B.
SPEAKER_01:American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which uh everyone should read if you haven't. We're big fans. You bet.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I still gotta read that. It's been sitting on my bookshelf. I know, I know I really have to, because it's a classic. It's like a must, it's a must read for anybody, no matter if you're into the legends or not.
SPEAKER_01:It's fantastic. It's dense, but it's good for it's a good winter read too, because it is sort of like a dense, cozy book. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's also been made into a TV show and a full cast radio drama.
SPEAKER_00:Was the TV show good? Wasn't that on HBO?
SPEAKER_03:No idea. I love the book too much. I didn't want to touch it.
SPEAKER_00:Feel that. I super feel that. Good for you.
SPEAKER_01:They have they also created comic books like off of the TV show, which I have some of, and those were fun.
SPEAKER_03:I've only seen clips from the show, and it looks amazing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean they have HBO budgets, you know.
SPEAKER_03:But then again, not everything HBO touches turns to gold.
SPEAKER_01:But it usually looks good.
SPEAKER_03:Game of Thrones season ended.
SPEAKER_01:Alright, alright. We don't talk about that. Exactly. In the old Germanic times, Odin's role was god of death, and he led the hunt across the sky on his eight-legged horse. It's almost mind-blowing. Yes. No? Okay. Come on, what's his name on the thing? What's the horse? Just say the name. Sleepnir. And the horse's name is Sleepnir. It's almost mind-blowing to think that this brutal hunt led by a death god is now what has turned into a modern story of Santa Claus and his friendly reindeer. So now that we're going to talk a little bit about Santa and his origins. Like Marida said at the beginning, there's obvious connections between Santa and the Wiccan tradition of the Holly King, right? We see connections to Santa, obviously with Saint Nicholas, who is known for giving gifts to the less fortunate in ancient Anatolia, which is now Turkey. In order to really understand, though, the history of Santa, we have to look at the intersection of paganism and Christianity. Santa pulls parts of his identity from both the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas and the pagan god Odin, along with many, many other influences. To honor Saint Nick after his death in 343 AD, an annual day of giving, of gift giving to children was instated. Originally the 6th of December, which was the day that Saint Nicholas died, which was then moved to the 25th after the Protestant Revolution. And Saint Nick was renamed Santa Claus. You can see that sort of like this canvas, um, this like tradition of death hunt, right, and celebrating Yule and the winter solstice around this time of year, and then oh, St. Nicholas died around this time of year, that it all sort of just like clicks in and merges and meshes into you know what it is now and with so many other influences around along the way. But you'll see this over and over again of kind of like, oh, well, this is kind of like around the same time of year, and it's kind of similar, so let's just sort of like mesh it all together and see what comes out the other side.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Santa Claus was a very eclectic character. I don't know, he he changed his forms even just when he was an American character, he changed forms a lot of times. He was um he was like a a pagan wizard for a little while, he was an evil elf that like came through the floorboards, he was also a uh a drunken businessman who had a sleigh that was drawn by turkeys. That was one of the iterations of Santa Claus, and I'm glad that we did away with that. There there's an interesting tie, real quick, to the businessman aspect of Santa Claus, and then the Santa Claus that we know today, which is um also kind of a a corporate symbol, a little bit, not to sound too you know, like it's the man, man, but like for real, like a little bit. I found this extremely interesting. One of the old traditions, I think in Germany or England, was that the poor would go around well, they would get really drunk, they would get super, super, super drunk. That was a major part of this whole thing, and they would sing outside of the buildings, uh the homes of the richest people in town so loudly and so annoyingly that um the person would eventually have to let them in, and after that they would uh the poor people would demand the rich people's best food, clothes, anything that they had, they would just take it for themselves.
SPEAKER_03:Take their holiday boar from them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. They took the boar, you know, everything including the kitchen boar. So Saint Nick becoming um a businessman, like from this idea of like the gifts that you got were from the rich. Sometimes it was voluntary, sometimes it was very much involuntary. So I'm pretty sure we can assume why like the rich people wanted to do away with that tradition, even though it was no skin off their backs, it wasn't much of a loss for them. This this bounty from the local rich people would make up, they they in their diaries they said um it would make up for a year's worth of I don't know, hardships, however you want to put it. It would make everything worth it, it would make their slave labor pretty worth it.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, that's that's like an intense thing that they could take, like it, you know, which I know is like today so much more so, but that you could sort of like skim the surface of somebody's belongings and it lasts you a whole year in terms of like survival.
SPEAKER_03:Just imagining the rich folk in town, just oh, the the quick, the poor are coming, hide hide the good stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Hide the good bowls. They loved cups and bowls. I mean, obviously, like we know that those things were very important back then because you had to be a skilled craftsman in order to make any of these things that would last. So yeah, they were all about those cups and bowls. A lot of the songs that they would sing outside of the house was about um oh, oh, one of the songs, which why did this not stay a Christmas carol? They would sing about like, you're gonna give us your gold, you're gonna give us your best robes, and if you don't, uh down will come butler, bowl, and all was one of the lyrics. So, like, we will take your butler, we will take your bowls, we will take your bores, whatever we get our hands on. And this is a tradition that I think we should bring back a little bit because they got rid of that for a reason, but we were we were having a good time. Sometimes the rich people would get super drunk and like enjoy it by accident, you know.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. It's it's a good time. Let's make a list. A list of the traditions we want to bring back.
SPEAKER_03:All the things we want to bring back.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. I was gonna say, should we start at Jeff Bezos? Great.
SPEAKER_03:Watch, he's been like prepared for all these, and every year he sits around waiting for the poor people to show up and just lonely.
SPEAKER_01:He's a pagan expert and he's Yep.
SPEAKER_03:He brings out all his bowls and his bores every year, lays them out in his lawn.
SPEAKER_01:Could you imagine?
SPEAKER_03:Poor guy. He's really the big guy on this.
SPEAKER_01:Stop it. While Christmas elves were invented in the US in the 19th century without any clear ties to pagan tradition or religious lore, the Nordic house spirits or Nyssa are a huge part of the Yule celebration that hasn't made its way over to America. You can find connections between the Nordic house spirits with the Celtic Fey and Pagan Fairfolk. The house spirits came out at Yule time and saw offerings, mainly of porridge, to keep them happy. If they were not satisfied with this, they would punish the residents of the house where they dwelled with pranks and tricks, sort of like little evil elf poltergeists demanding porridge. This is clearly tied to the theme of sacrifice that we we just talked about and that we see over and over again, right? In the 19th century, the Nyssa developed into gift givers, and they were often portrayed to be similar to Santa in that way, bringing holiday gifts to family members. Dating back even before the Nyssa, the Nordics believed that the Yule Goat would deliver the holiday gifts. And before the Yule Goat sort of was uh tasked with delivering your gifts, men actually used to dress up as Yule Goat and walk through the village singing and walk through villages and towns singing and performing skits, um, which also, in addition to like what Miranda just talked about, is also like a tie to to modern caroling, right?
SPEAKER_03:Mm-hmm. Tell me about the Yule Goat.
SPEAKER_01:Many believe that the Yule Goat is derived from either Thor, who is known for his goat-drawn chariot, or from the ancient harvest traditions. This lore is especially prominent in Sweden. There is a city in Sweden that builds a huge wooden Yule goat in the town center each year. Um, and since being instituted in 1966, this huge giant Yule goat has been burnt down 37 times.
SPEAKER_00:That's right, it's been burnt down more times than it hasn't been.
SPEAKER_01:I know, isn't that crazy?
SPEAKER_00:That is crazy. They've been doing Burning Man. It was just Burning Goat. They're so smart.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's also interesting. We just um did a bunch of research for last week's episode on the Druids, and they sort of built like um the movie The Wicker Man, these huge Wicker men that were filled with like people and burned. So I don't know, it's it's an interesting theme there. So let's talk about the Yule log a little bit again.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:So the Yule log is a log that has been specially chosen to be burned for Yule. The Yule logs of tradition were so big that it took several days, usually twelve, for them to burn in entirety. Its purpose to keep evil spirits and sickness at bay.
SPEAKER_00:This feels like it ties into the water, the the open water fact from Sawen, in that it's just like practical like self-care that was sort of um draped in magic, you know what I mean? Like all they had to do was um just stay warm just to prevent themselves from getting um hypothermia. But for them, they were like, Oh, the fire burning like rids the house of evil spirits that would come to us with sickness. Yeah. And so it's kind of the same thing. It kind of makes sense. It actually makes perfect sense.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and the Sawin open water fact is that what was it that you couldn't have if you got like blood like from animals into the water, like that was seen as a sin. Get it, am I butchering it?
SPEAKER_00:I don't remember the what it was that um if yeah, if you have uh open water in your house in Sawin, then your family will uh likely be met with hard times, sickness, or death. And that was just because like if the the home water that they would use to wash up or even drink got contaminated, then obviously they would get they would get sick from these some um like blood or or whatever flesh juices they had.
SPEAKER_01:And there was so much sacrificing of animals going on at the time that it was likely if you did have an open water source in your home that it might get, you know, infiltrated with with bacteria. Neat. Neat. There are also a lot of pagan ancient traditions that connect to the Christmas tree as we know it today. And Mr. again, we also like talked at the beginning about the how hit like symbolic for Nordic pagans this idea of the tree is, right? And in Nor in Nordic mythology. But in Nordic regions, we have seen people bringing pine trees into their home and decorating with candles or orb-like objects to represent the sun. Again, sort of connecting back to the original like roots of the holiday, which were like this is the longest night of the year, and tomorrow and every day uh ahead of this in the season, the days get longer and longer. So it's very connected to the cycles of the sun.
SPEAKER_00:I saw that they would originally decorate the trees with apples. They said that it was symbolic of the Garden of Eden and the abundance of life therein. And I think that's the first like inkling of any sort of like Christianity stepping into the tradition. That was the first sort of like shadow of it appearing, was the the placing the apples on the Christmas tree. And that's why the most like um stereotypical Christmas ornament is just a red ball.
SPEAKER_01:Gotcha. That's interesting. Yeah, I also saw some yeah, there's a lot of like uh tradition of decorating trees in round things to represent right solar energy and things, but also with candles, which is so scary and must have ended in so many house fires. That's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_03:I'm like, And they had no open things of water to throw on it, that they're really setting themselves up for trouble.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, I thought that was so foolish. I'm like, you picked the driest tree to adorn with candles. You know, you can't you can't just put the candles around the tree, you have to put them in the tree. Right. So silly.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And when they moved to putting candles in windows, I think that was a step in the right direction.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, good thing, good thing cats weren't invented yet.
SPEAKER_01:One thing that about the Yule log that I found really poetic was this idea of each spark that kind of comes off of the burning of the Yule log represents a baby animal that's meant to be born in the spring. Um, like a baby calf or a sheep. It's it's so if you have lots of sparks and your log burns for a long time again, it's like symbolic of this year is going to be really fruitful for the birth of livestock.
SPEAKER_00:Just babies and babies and babies just popping off from that fire. It's yeah, a lot of reason to celebrate. Yep. Very into babies. This is very much a baby-oriented holiday. We'll get to that.
SPEAKER_01:Even though the weather at this time of year was not as difficult in Rome, they were also known for their December festivals. One week before the winter solstice, Romans would celebrate Saturnalia, named for the sun god Saturn, uh, which, you know, the celebrations, as all of them do, included feasting and getting drunk and all that kind of stuff. It's described uh in one of the documentaries as a wild and delirious time, a time meant to turn the social order on its head. So kind of this idea of celebrating the disorder of the universe. That right there also is super connected to what you said about the poor caroling, right? And getting to go in like into the house and take what they wanted. In this documentary, they also talked about master and slave switching for a day, like that kind of stuff happening around this time.
SPEAKER_00:They would also crown the um like the town drunkard as the he was like the king of one of the evenings. He would he like he was the the ruler. Um there's a painting in which they would um adorn him with sort of like a sloppy crown and like carry him around on the chair and like celebrate him as the king. He had it, oh, it had such a silly name. It was like the king of debauchery or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:That's amazing. I love that. Put it on the list. It's on the list, yeah. We gotta bring that back. The more wealthy Romans had far more serious celebrations. They would worship Mithra, known as the god of unconquerable sun. The birthday of Mithra, December 25th, was the holiest day of the year. He was believed to have been born out of a rock into a field, and shepherds had come to worship him. So, right there, right, like you see very on the nose ties, right, between this legend of Roman god Mithra and the birth of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00:Not the son of God, but the sun god. Whoa. Very easy to rewrite the narrative, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:That was just one typo away from exactly. Yep.
SPEAKER_01:At first, the resurrection of Jesus was actually much more important than his birthday, and there was actually like a lot of debate around whether he was sort of this man, right? Or if it was this idea of an extension of God's spirit, right? But they kind of decided that yes, like he was he's like his birthday is important to this religion. So because the Bible doesn't mention exactly when he was born, uh, there was an unclear time to honor this holiday. But there are actually lots of historical hints if you look during um certain scriptures that suggest he was born in the spring. Because it was already practiced to honor Mithra on the 25th, the church felt that it was the easiest transition to turn that into the birthday of Jesus Christ. This decision happened sometime around the fourth century.
SPEAKER_00:This is such a dense holiday, especially with how many times it's been around the world and like picked up all these different traditions from anywhere. There's a lot to talk about. It's very juicy. Mistletoe was not it was always a part of Christmas, always, but it was not just something that you would go under to smooch, like. This was a fertility-based holiday. Imagine you're inside the entire time.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And you gotta keep warm. So there's only like a couple of ways to get creative with that. So there were for for a long, long time, there were major booms in the population, like after after Christmas time. There was a lot of kid making happening. And because everybody was so uh drunk and wild, it was extremely common for people to just kind of get it on in the living room while everybody else was there. And it also goes into like honoring the chaos of the universe because it was very improper to even kiss a woman in front of your family at the time. So all bets were off for like quite a long time. There are paintings that depict this. They say that, like, oh, couples would commit the the un uh just unholy activities, and there are pictures and paintings and woodcuts of people making out on uh feasting tables, you know, dining halls in the middle of the home. It was it was wild. That was mostly what this holiday used to be about was drinking and uh getting down and dirty. That's what this was about. Like like Jesus only came uh into the picture when the church decided that it was over like the pagan lifestyle in general. Obviously, we've seen the way that they take this over at every opportunity that they get. And you know, like getting drunk, taking from the rich, uh getting it on with whoever you felt like these are all very like unchurchly um hobbies, so they believe that they these had to be done away with. Toot sweet. But I think that that's shameful. I think that we need to bring that back because uh, you know what? Like, people need to let loose sometimes, and that like it it just seemed just seemed like a little more fun, a little more loose. I don't know. We've completely we have lost sight of what Christmas really means.
SPEAKER_01:Well, add it to the list.
SPEAKER_00:We really have. We've lost sight of the Christmas spirit. Christmas is really about yeah, getting as drunk as you can. I read that the three days around Christmas, you had to drink a gallon of liquor per day. So three days of one gallon of liquor per day was the average. I believe that one was for Rome. That's a lot of liquid. Yeah, they were getting swashed. Yeah, people were getting mad at like uh uh alcohol poisoning left and right, but they didn't care because everybody was banging. So like they're busy having the time of their lives.
SPEAKER_01:So it's a miracle they remembered anything to write it down. I know, I know.
SPEAKER_03:Well, they they they wrote it down improperly, clearly, hence why we now have Christianity.
SPEAKER_01:It's just everyone was so drunk and confused all the time.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Except the artists at the time, they would remain outside of the festivities where they would just paint the people just doing their thing. That's not true. It's just something I'm assuming.
SPEAKER_01:I like that that idea of just the artist almost like the press box being like, okay, well, we have to we're gonna stand over here, we have our credentials, we don't have to drink the the three gallons of liquor, and we're gonna paint everybody doing what they're doing.
SPEAKER_00:Mm-hmm. It's a far cry from what happened when like the the pilgrims came over to um North America, where okay, so when they were trying to escape from the rule of the crown, they thought it only made sense to also get rid of Christmas at the same time. So for a while, yeah, for a while, they would um it was outlawed to have uh to uh exhibit the Christmas spirit. It was outlawed to exhibit the Christmas spirit. You would get charged five shillings if you were caught enjoying the Christmas spirit. Yeah, I know, I know. That's like I don't even know how many bucks that is these days, but I'll tell let me tell you, it's too many.
SPEAKER_01:Too many bucks. It's too many bucks.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and so they they did away with Christmas entirely when they came over here, and then um people started getting antsy. They started there's several um like uh recorded diary entries of people saying, like, I really wish we had some sort of a tradition. I really wish we were doing something during this super depressing time. And then they brought it back, and then they made Santa Claus, who became very quickly a commercial property. Yeah. I know we already talked about the transformation of Santa Claus and how interesting that is, but uh he became a product very, very, very quickly after um after his conception, which I'm pretty sure was just some guy telling a story to his children, and that was the um that was the story what was like um on the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring. That's that guy. He invented like the modern image of Santa Claus and then department stores, got a hold of him, and now he's like the the Macy's saint. He's the saint of the department store now. I don't know that transformation is long.
SPEAKER_01:I I also want to like talk a little bit again about the businessman turkey Santa that you talked about, because can you imagine like a creepier thing than like a drunk businessman coming through your chimney to give you gifts? Like it's so offensive to me. It's so upsetting. Hey, kids, who gotta this thing? It's like my hell.
SPEAKER_00:I know, right? Nothing puts lights in the children's eyes, quite like um a drunken businessman getting dragged down the street by a by a uh eight birds, eight turkeys.
SPEAKER_03:I always thought that the modern, like big red jolly Santa Claus came from a Coca-Cola campaign.
SPEAKER_00:Really? Wait, really? What I saw was that it was a writer, um, an American writer who literally just stepped in and decided, like, this is what he looks like. They just said it, and that's the way that like most things happen back then. Some dude just decided, like, this is the way it is, this is what he looks like, and it was unanimous. Everybody was like, we like that version more than any other version that you've rolled out yet. And he was speci I'm not making this up, he was specifically designed to look like most elder Freemasons.
SPEAKER_01:Whoa. Yeah, that's intense. That's interesting. Yeah, that blew my mind.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And there's so our friends over at dark.internteriors on Instagram, who it's an account run by Adam Bashian, who's a Broadway actor, but during this COVID time, he's taken to selling like oddities and curiosities and bones and things. Like he's like a collector, he has crazy artifacts. But so if you if anyone out there is into uh secret societies and stuff, Adam has so many lots that he auctions or sells of like old, um, like really, really old secret society or like fraternal organization books and journals and bibs and pins and all kinds of just like creepy stuff, which I think is kind of like maybe bad vibes to bring into your house. But if you're into that, check it out.
SPEAKER_03:So yes, uh, just did a little bit of a little bit of fact checking. Um, and my I was I was mildly correct. So uh up until nineteen thirty-one, the image of Santa was was completely up to the artist. Uh whether he was tall and gaunt, whether he wore a bishop's robe, whether he wore animal skins, uh it just was completely different. And then in 1931, Coca-Cola made this giant ad campaign that put this big, fat, jolly guy in a red suit and white trim, which is their brand's colors, uh, and that completely caught on, and that is the modern depiction of Santa that everyone pictures today.
SPEAKER_00:Wild. No way. 1931? That just happened. That's insane. Yo, I thought you were gonna say like 1842 or something like that. 19, that's that's like yesterday that they just decided what Santa looks like. That's blowing my mind right now.
SPEAKER_03:There are people alive today that remember gauntish elf animal skin Santa.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_03:So on that note, man, am I thirsty.
SPEAKER_01:Coca-Cola, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Where's that polar bear money, by the way? The polar bears are still suffering. I'm just this is something I that I noticed. Yeah, seriously.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I wonder if they just stopped advertising the polar bears because they realized it was a losing, a sinking ship, if you will.
SPEAKER_01:Well, maybe they could give some of their billions of dollars to help save them.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think a single dime went to any polar bear. No. No.
SPEAKER_03:No. You don't see any rich polar bears walking around.
SPEAKER_00:No, and that's the problem with this country.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we always like this is what what I'm feeling right now, but we always see like all of these things on Instagram or other social media that's like everybody be environmentally conscious and everybody give back. And yes, we do, and those are really important values and morals to have. But like the truth of all of it is is like Jeff Bezos has so much money, right? Or like companies like Coca-Cola, like the top GE, the top companies are the ones whose carbon emission is ruining the world, right? And so it's like, yes, everyone has an individual responsibility, but when we really talk about what's wrong and what needs to be fixed, like us as individuals don't have the power to change the world. But like not that many corporations and individuals do, and they just have to make that decision, right?
SPEAKER_03:So this year, when you're buying your lucky holiday boar, buy local.
SPEAKER_01:That's right.
SPEAKER_03:You know, find out where your holiday boar comes from.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. That's great, Alan. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much. This was kind of just like fun and weird, and just like I didn't know it. You know, the um, oh god, is it called a perennial or am I getting the name of the flower wrong? The big red flower. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so pointsetta.
SPEAKER_01:Poinsetta, pointsetta.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, poinsetta, so sorry, thank you. Yes, poinsetta. Oh, well, now that I'm saying it loud out loud, it kind of sounds like a Spanish word, but I didn't know that it was a Spanish flower, and that one random white guy, I think his name was Julius, was um just taking a trip down to Mexico, and he found this big, beautiful red flower, and he was like, I've decided that this is for American Christmas. And then he took it back, he took a couple of these flowers back to the US, and um people became very quickly interested in this very exotic looking flower, and now it's completely normalized. It's very much like, you know, standard Christmas tradition. I had no idea it was a flower from Mexico that was just stolen by a white dude, and he was like, I've decided that this is the new adornment, and everyone shall follow suit. And they did. They didn't question anything.
SPEAKER_01:And it's also very poisonous for animals, so if you do have them, keep them away from your pets. Oh, this guy sucks.
SPEAKER_03:Appalled to hear of a story of a white man stealing something from another culture.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Especially a flower. How dare you? The nerve of this man. He didn't have any culture, so he went down and he just found anything that he could find growing out of the ground, and he was like, This is it, my new tradition. This is ours now. No one will tell me otherwise because I don't know what anyone's saying.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. So here's some suggestions, Alan. If you would like to honor a more pagan uh tradition of Yule in the winter solstice this year. So the first thing I have here, which is like a little bit preachy, maybe, but there's so much that we've talked about today that's about not just sacrificing, but almost like the equaling out of wealth, right? Or this idea of giving back in quotes in weird, weird but different ways. And, you know, and I know it's a little cheesy, but this is still a hard time of year for everybody. This year is an even harder time of year for everybody. So the first thing to do, I think, that really does like get back to these roots are you know, can you sacrifice$10 or$20 to someone on Venmo who's having a hard time? Can you volunteer at a soup kitchen or a local shelter for people who are really cold? Can you give some old winter jackets that don't fit you anymore to someone who doesn't have one? So just things to think about. Um, because you know, every winter is hard. Uh, but this one I think is is a lot harder for people.
SPEAKER_03:Are you a pharmaceutical CEO just sitting on the cure for cancer? Release that shit. Come on.
SPEAKER_00:Come on. Yeah, it's the little ways to give back, you know? You can be creative. If you have 30 to 45 minutes, break into the richest person's house on your block, take whatever you can get. It's only tradition. It's the right thing to do in these hard times, in these times of major inequality. It is our civic responsibility as Americans to reach back through history, grab our roots, and honor them. So you walk up in that house, you get your robes, you get your Christmas ham. That's yours, baby.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's your boar. Uh, second thing is to decorate your home with things that might be considered the sacred plants of the winter solstice, right? So evergreen wreaths and trees, which of course we do, but also mistletoe, holly, and ivy, which there's a lot of uh probably like fake versions of those things going around. But if you want to connect with nature, connect with the elements, connecting with nature in any way is certainly pagan and cool, but those things specifically might make you feel connected to this time of year.
SPEAKER_00:Stick that mistletoe over your memory foam mattress and also honor those traditions. That's your business, but it's a great way to celebrate.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah. Picking a tree maybe with um some intention, right? So can you get a tree from, you know, a local farm? Can you, you know, check what's going on at your local farm? Just trying to find something that really resonates with you. Also decorating your tree with sun symbols, right? And and maybe less corporate, don't buy a bunch of like really cheap ornaments from Amazon, but can you handmake something? Can you get something from a local artisan? That kind of stuff is really cool.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. Oh, can I throw out a suggestion? Yes, please. So, I mean, this is kind of niche because like I live by the shore, but if if anyone who's listening like also lives by the shore, I suggest grabbing a bunch of seashells. And um, like a little Dremel drill is super affordable, or sometimes the shells are so like um kind of uh thin that you can just poke right through it. It's really, really, really cute to make a bunch of Christmas ornaments just out of seashells. I don't know. My dad and I did that one year, and it looked really beautiful, so I highly recommend it to anybody who's able to do something like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and actually my dad just sent me photos, and this didn't happen last year, I think, but the shore where Miranda lives is also the shore where my parents live. And sometimes on the beach there's a Christmas tree that people put up, like an evergreen tree, and they decorate it with the shells. Um, and I've seen it a few years in a row and it it seems to be back this year, so I'm excited to see it. Yeah, burn a Yule log uh in a hearth or in a bonfire or by burning candles. Um, but as always, with pagan rituals, fire is very much a part of that. So that would be a really cool thing. Obviously, you you know, don't burn it for 12 days if you're gonna leave your house. Be fire safe about it. But Ewolog is a really strong tradition to tap into here. Um, and the the last thing is a little woo-hoo, but to meditate on the rising or setting of the solstice sun. So it's still a powerful, I I think, like symbol, right? Uh a day. It's the shortest day, but the longest night. Like I think there's some still some cool prompts there if you're into journaling or meditation, things like that.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so I saw that another tradition that a lot of other modern pagans practice is that they they do light the Yule log, and then for about five to ten minutes, they open every single door in the house to um make room for the bad spirits to like see their way out. Cool. And I kind of like that because it's also a way to get like super fresh, clean air, like up in the house as well. And then, I mean, yeah, just like five to ten minutes of like um like an atmospheric refresh, let's call it, just to yeah, rid the house of bad spirits. I like that one. I love that, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's neat. I always like what I think one of the most simple things you can do if you're in a funk or just feeling stale is to open a window, which I know maybe sounds cheesy and obvious, but it really does just like having fresh air and a little bit of breeze and some you know, brisk air at this time of year can kind of like wake you up in a new way.
SPEAKER_00:It's really good for you too. Yeah. Yeah. Fake heat is really bad for you, it turns out. I mean, like this probably isn't news to most people, but I just learned that like, yeah, the natural cold air and like a shock of it every now and again is super, super duper good for your immune system and your skin.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and we're Alan and I are in New York City and we both have apartments with like forced fake heat, and it's can be difficult to manage, like not getting super dry, and everyone has like a hundred humidifiers and keeps their windows open, but also like I live on the first floor, so at night I have to close my wind, you know, like on the street. So there's a lot to manage, but it's very refreshing when you can have a window open in the winter. Shall we move on to the big finale?
SPEAKER_03:I want to hear this big finale.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So because Miranda is such a talented actor, voice actor, of course we had, of course we had to include a story, and I I knew right away what I wanted the focus of it to be, and I ended up making it, I wouldn't say it's a poem, but it's kind of more spoken-wordy or or less traditional than I've dabbled with in the past. So I wrote a tale, I'll say a winter tale that Miranda is now going to read for us.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_04:The hunter.
SPEAKER_00:All was quiet. All was dark. A stillness enclosed the land, but not a peaceful one. Something was coming. It was coming tonight. He felt it in the air. It was time. He inhaled the frigid cold air, but it got caught in his throat, freezing his windpipe before it reached his desperate lungs. Pure white snow blanketed the crags, cliffs, and jagged trees of the north. If he tried to deflect, his footprints would be covered by falling snow in only a moment, erasing any proof that he had been there at all. His breath fogged his vision. He craned his neck, scanning the night sky. Back and forth, back and forth, his eyes darted across the crystal clear expanse. A deep, dark blue, vivid gold and silver stars. He kept waiting. It was coming. Vibrant orange sparks danced near his feet. His small fire. Just enough to keep him alive. Not enough to keep him comfortable. He didn't want to be comfortable. He wanted to see. The cold was biting at his bones. It had penetrated through his bare skin cloak within minutes. The coldest night of the year. The longest night of the year. A bird flew from one pine tree to another, gently knocking snow from its perch, causing an ever so slight disruption in the stillness. And then another bird shifted, and another, and another powerful wings beating against the frozen air. And then the sky was darkened by a mass of wings. Powerful, dark birds of prey descending from the northern constellations, chasing away the smaller local fleet. These new heavenly warriors dove and pecked at the ground, somehow able to see rabbits in their burrows and rodents in their holes. Within seconds, the startlingly white snow was stained with deep crimson. Blood had been spilled. Again filled with wings and the deafening sounds of chaos as a new order arrived. Foxes and hounds their eyes red and glowing. From above, dozens of hounds and hundreds of foxes descended. He watched as the creatures patrolled the night around him, leaving him be. Their red eyes matched the decay that littered the scene around him, these hellish beasts going after larger targets, local cattle, livestock, mammals left as sacrifice. It was intuition that drove them, but not earthly senses. They knew. They just knew where each and every living creature was. He did not know if it was impeccable smell or sight or just omniscence. But nothing was left alive. Except for him. The heavens above cracked and split in two. He could feel his ears bleeding from the explosion. The night erupted around him. Cackling filled the air. His hurt ears could not discern if it was from the hounds, the foxes, or the night itself. Was it around him? Or inside of him? Winds, rain, snow, and other elements he hadn't seen before. Light and blood poured on him from above. He was not scared. He had been waiting for this moment his entire life. From the opening in the sky emerged horses or what might be close to horses on Earth, but these celestial creatures were something else entirely evil and beautiful heavenly and feared. Their bodies rippled with muscles, their eyes narrow and focused. They charged towards him from above, crashing with a steady grace around him, making room. He did not flinch. Their tail wind easily extinguished his fire, but he no longer felt cold. There it was coming towards him faster and faster. The eight legged chariot, the god himself. His human brain could not comprehend what he saw. The figure before him was both solid and ethereal. He seemed to be made of lightning, rain, and wind. The horses were circling him. The sleet came down harder, the blood came down harder. The wind blew in every direction, causing thunderous booms from all sides, lightning left horizontal streaks across the sky, vertical clashes in the heavens. The god grinned, and he lifted the boy up and took him away into the night to the heavens, leaving only stillness and carnage behind. The smell of iron, and the hope of a better year to come.
SPEAKER_01:That was amazing.
SPEAKER_00:That was thank you. Really cool. Yeah. The way you wrote that, girl, gave me so much to work with. I love your writing style. I'm going to get that book that you suggested to me earlier because, like I said, it's just full of juice for me. It's just so much fun to read your writing. That's it. How come you don't write more poetry?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. I it I I don't know. It actually I was struggling with writing. I had to do a bunch of writing stuff this week, and it was like I was putting it off and putting it off because I felt so uninspired, and I just it just sort of started to come out this way, and I was like, ah, this is easy.
SPEAKER_03:This is this is like oh, this is easy as she brushes the dust off her shoulders.
SPEAKER_01:Sometimes it's just like you have to figure out what method works for the thing you're doing. And this was a new uh experiment, but I'm so glad that you liked it.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, it's certainly working.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. I had fun. I had a lot of fun too. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. But Miranda, you are an impassioned vocal artist. That was it always gives me chills to hear you do anything. So thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you guys. Thank you guys so much. It's just playing for me. Like when you give me something this good, it's just I can just play with it, you know?
SPEAKER_01:Ah, so fun. We're a good team then.
SPEAKER_00:I feel that. Yeah, that's true. That's helly true. Happy you, y'all. Um, steal from the rich. I cannot drive that point home enough. Uh, yeah, that's it. Burn that log, clean your house, donate to those less fortunate than you. Be nice. For Christ's sakes, be nice.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, be nice. Pet the boars.
SPEAKER_03:But before you just rob them blind, ask just ask for stuff first. Because that is tradition.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_03:You never know, they might want to join the festivities too.
SPEAKER_01:Just carol outside their house until they have no other option.
SPEAKER_03:That is what I mean.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Get drunk, sing outside their houses, offer them liquor, you know, give them a little boo, get them a little boozed up, a little, you know, a little more open-hearted.
SPEAKER_03:And uh and if they're not being responsive, just take the bottle of booze, stuff a rag in the top, light it, and just throw it at their house.
SPEAKER_00:This is called a Christmas cocktail. And so in case anybody wanted to know.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. Well, thank you guys so much for listening. I I don't know, I think we all had so much fun researching this, and there's stuff that is so mind-blowing about these connections and the history, and like why, like everyone thinks, you know, what we celebrate today is so standard and it's really new in some cases and also totally bullshit in others, right? And so it's fun to get to like the root and the cause behind all this stuff. So thank you guys again. You can follow us at the Lunatics Project on Instagram. You can follow Miranda at alien. And until next time, stay safe. Have a wonderful holiday if you celebrate. I remember how mind-blowing that research felt to me at the time when we first put it together. Not to mention all of the research that Miranda did and brought to the episode on her side too. I think it was an episode that really solidified my love for understanding the history of things that we do and celebrate today. So this felt kind of like a turning point for me when we had that conversation with Miranda in 2020. Now we're gonna jump ahead to December 12th, 2021. This episode builds on a lot of the history that we talked about with Miranda and connects it to modern-day holiday horror movies. Plus, we end up talking a lot about really great Christmas horror movies in general, even if they're not rooted in much history. This is episode 92. What this episode is really focusing on is the connection between this time of the year and horror, because it's a lot more robust than just films like Black Christmas, right? We can trace ghost stories and dark stories and almost like a Sowin Halloween type feeling around this time of year back to pagan times that predate, you know, Christianity.
SPEAKER_03:I did not expect that.
SPEAKER_01:So for today's sources, we have a Smithsonian magazine article by Kate Eshner, a BBC article by Clemency Burton Hill, a Paris Review article by Colin Fleming, and an article from VictorianWeb.com, and Wikipedia and IMDB. And so let me just uh set you up here, everybody. So we are gonna talk about history in this episode a little bit, but we're also gonna spend a lot of time talking about really cool holiday horror films, like Christmas specific, right? So I I you're gonna end this episode with lots of watch inspiration, lots of dark holiday films that you can go watch and kind of kick off the holiday season, right? Or not kick off, but you know what I mean. So you might remember if you have listened to the Yule episode, a big theme of that episode is what the living conditions were for early pagans.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you gotta sacrifice the kids so that the they get the rain for the corn.
SPEAKER_01:The winter time, this time of year, uh-huh, was the darkest, the coldest, the hardest to survive. Yes. So Christmas, winter solstice, not Christmas yet, winter solstice was really about we are through, right? It's the shortest day of the year. We're through that now, right? We're getting every day now, we're getting closer and closer to the return of the sun. So it was really about a celebration and a calling for the sun to return. So at this time, the in the way where we talk about Halloween, Halloween and Salwin, and we say, Oh, the veil is thin, right? Yes. That's very similar to how pagans felt about Yule. The the veil is thin because people are way more likely to die. They feel a lot less sure of their survival. Yes, they feel a lot more connected to the dead because of that, right?
SPEAKER_03:I know I do.
SPEAKER_01:So because of all of that, there is sort of this focus on the calling of spirits, right? Or connecting with the dead. And again, very similar to Sao Win. So what you said was right. There were human sacrifices, there was all kind of brutal stuff that happened back then. We don't need to rehash what we've already covered, but I just want to sort of set the stage for the very, very early roots of this time of year.
SPEAKER_03:Right. These things actually had practical meanings.
SPEAKER_01:Right. It was about, you know, a response to nature, really. You know. The interesting thing is that this history of winter solstice has a lot to do with the long-standing tradition of telling ghost or dark stories around Christmas time.
SPEAKER_03:But this is pre-Christmas.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, around this time of year. Right.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:You can trace the connection between the inevitable death that surrounds harsh winters and exposed climates with horror.
SPEAKER_03:What wasn't there something in in the uh Yule episode about like that's when the spirits come back to you, or like it's the spirits of your love loved ones are around or something?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:It's almost like in Coco, where it's this time of year, the veil thins and the ideas that you hope your ancestors are coming to visit you, right? Because they have this kind of like portal to at this time.
SPEAKER_03:Right. So there's ghosts everywhere so you tell scary stories.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's right. So that's the setup, right? We're gonna get into the history of kind of more modern times. But I sure we already covered you all in this other episode. We're not gonna spend too much time. Yep. The only other thing that I want to talk about, which is related to the history of holiday horror, but we're not gonna focus on in this episode is Krampus.
SPEAKER_03:Right, because that's coming in Krampus part two.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So we did Sorry, spoilers. We did do a Krampus episode. It's like the fifth episode or eighth episode we ever did. I don't recommend going back and listening to it.
SPEAKER_03:Abby was just blackout drunk the entire time.
SPEAKER_01:It was really early on in our podcasting, but Krampus is definitely something that we'll cover in the future in a more robust and researched way. But we're not gonna do that today.
SPEAKER_03:Did we have Krampus Stories back then?
SPEAKER_01:I yeah, I had a Krampus story that I wrote.
SPEAKER_03:That's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_01:I think it was a pretty good story, actually.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think it was. Did it make scariest stories?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_03:It will.
SPEAKER_01:Scary stories part two. I wasn't aware of the ban on Christmas, but it lends some interesting history to the evolution of our modern holiday celebrations.
SPEAKER_03:Is this when Christians were persecuted back in Rome?
SPEAKER_01:More modern than that. Oh by the late 1700s and early 1800s, Christmas had become an almost antiquated holiday, especially thanks to Oliver Cromwell, who had made it his mission to cleanse England of quote decadent excess.
SPEAKER_03:Oliver Cromwell? Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Walter Cronkite.
SPEAKER_03:That is who I was thinking of.
SPEAKER_01:Oliver Cromwell's issue, right, with Christmas celebrations was, of course, centered on the fact that they were largely focused on feasting and drinking, that Cromwell even banned the singing of Christmas carols because it was like joyous and raucous and it represented everything that his Puritan mind hated.
SPEAKER_03:Right, it should be pious because everything has to be pious.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. During the Industrial Revolution, most people still had to work on Christmas, which meant that there were longer hours and harder days. But this wasn't how it always was. Since the Middle Ages, Christmas has been celebrated in a similar fashion to how Christians celebrate today, even to a greater extent. Celebrations would start with the 25th of December and last until the 12th night on the 5th of January.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:These celebrations included lots of drinking, eating, decorating homes with mistletoe and holly, Christmas ale, local plays, and lots of visits to your local pub. But to Cromwell and other Puritans, all of this joyous merriment was a threat to their piety.
SPEAKER_03:Everything is. Dare we reference Sloughfoot?
SPEAKER_01:Please do. We love Sloufoot in this house.
SPEAKER_03:We do. Um, and Sloughfoot, the novel by Brom.
SPEAKER_01:Braum, Alan's favorite author of all time.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, uh how's it coming by the way?
SPEAKER_01:I'm I'm I'm flying through. I'm on chapter four. Wow. I've been reading it for six weeks.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. So this is all about Puritan society.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And how the slightest enjoyment of life outside the church is a sin, basically, because it distracts you from conformity.
SPEAKER_01:It's tough. Can you imagine living in those Puritan times when you have a short enough life as it is, your short your lifespan is so much shorter, uh-huh. And you don't enjoy it or have any fun or do anything.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, also how they didn't actually have an official church, which is interesting. They would just use the town hall because the idea of going to a special place to pray was blasphemy. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Because it should be with you at all times.
SPEAKER_01:And nothing is in the pretty house.
SPEAKER_03:Nothing is special. Can't be. Because that's bad. Okay, but getting back on track, I don't I don't want to talk about Sloughfoot and Puritans.
SPEAKER_01:But go listen to Sloughfoot or any of Brahm's work. We we've had lots of fun with what we've well listened to or read.
SPEAKER_03:We listen to audiobooks a lot, but we love his we love Sloughfoot and we love his Krampus novel.
SPEAKER_01:And Lost Gods.
SPEAKER_03:It's I mean it's we do. I'm just saying these are the two very topical for this time of year.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the Puritans saw these celebrations as a sin. It represented the pagan roots of the holiday and not the current state of the church, and the devout and solemn worship that was all the rage at the time. Quoting from the BBC article, nowhere, they argued, had God called upon mankind to celebrate Christ's nativity in such fashion. In 1644, an act of Parliament effectively banned the festival, and in June 1647, the Long Parliament passed an ordinance confirming the abolition of the Feast of Christmas. So it wasn't just taboo. It was literally banned by the government of England.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, but we also have to make I mean I I know it's obvious at this point, but the government and the Puritan church are kind of one of the same.
SPEAKER_01:Sure.
SPEAKER_03:I assume that to be the case.
SPEAKER_01:I think, I mean, obviously it passed, so enough people were in agreement with it.
SPEAKER_03:Because like we're we're what year at this point?
SPEAKER_01:1640.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah, it's the same.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:That's the whole thing during the founding of America. We need a separation between church and state because it causes so many problems. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Though even with these rules, people still found ways to celebrate in private or underground gatherings.
SPEAKER_02:Oh.
SPEAKER_01:In 1660, the monarchy was re-established, and the rulings of parliament from 1642 to 1660 were deemed null and void. And because these celebrations never really ceased, their traditions continued, and they were again allowed to be done publicly. But again, with the rise of new manufacturing processes, Christmas became less important. Christmas celebrations were yet again revived during the Victorian era. At this time, Christmas trees were introduced or reintroduced, if you will, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert inspired England by bringing evergreens into their home. There was also a resurgence in Christmas carols and other holiday traditions that had been cast aside, either from Cromwell's influence or because of the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Work Day. So the singing of carols, but also the feasting, the celebration, the drinking, Christmas parties, all of that starts to come back into fashion.
SPEAKER_03:This I think this was wasn't this the time when uh Mariah Carey first dropped her single.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my god, yes.
SPEAKER_03:That's that's how it started.
SPEAKER_01:She's hundreds of years old.
SPEAKER_03:And the monarchy loved it.
SPEAKER_01:But monarch, butterfly, are we all connected?
SPEAKER_03:Sorry, what?
SPEAKER_01:Butterfly is not only a hit song, but a hit album by Mariah Carey. From 1997, the year of our lord.
SPEAKER_03:So you're not mention you're not referencing the monarch?
SPEAKER_01:What is that? From superhero?
SPEAKER_03:Supervillain? From Venture Brothers.
SPEAKER_01:He looks pretty fun. What's Venture Brothers?
SPEAKER_03:Talk about blasphemy. That's a gr oh you'd love this show. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:What would Oliver Cromwell think of Supervilla? What's it called? Supervillains? Venture Brothers?
SPEAKER_03:Venture Brothers is the name of the show. The monarch is a supervillain in that show.
SPEAKER_01:What differentiates a villain and a supervillain?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, just look at him. Because he has a suit, he's got a super, he's got an underground lair, he's got henchmen.
SPEAKER_01:Or is henchmen larva?
SPEAKER_03:What no. I mean, no, they're they're caterpillars? They're other butterfly people.
SPEAKER_01:Oh. Okay. A Christmas carol is arguably the most famous Christmas story of all time. It's also arguably the most famous ghost story of all time.
SPEAKER_03:I would believe that.
SPEAKER_01:And it's no mistake that it's both. Is my is the whole crux of my hypothesis here, okay?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, please uh state your state your hypothesis.
SPEAKER_01:Holiday and horror are connected organically.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Case and point.
SPEAKER_03:During this podcast episode, you will set out to explore that point and prove your thesis.
SPEAKER_01:To you, the judge and jury. Thank you for your time. You're welcome. Wearing my best suit. Though Dickens was born into a middle class family in 1812, his father was taken to a debtor's prison by the time he was only twelve years old. Dickens was forced to sell his beloved collection of books as a way to bring money into the family. He also had to drop out of school as a young kid and start work at a rat and Infested shoe blacking factory. Do you know what that is?
SPEAKER_03:No.
SPEAKER_01:Shoe polish. It was a shoe polish factory. They made shoe polish.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, so they made the polish to go on shoes. They don't turn shoes black.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but it was called a shoe blacking factory.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. Okay, so it's a shoe polish factory.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Got it.
SPEAKER_01:Dickens became a fairly prolific author, right? Years later, right? He he grows up, becomes a fairly prolific author.
SPEAKER_03:He was famous during his lifetime, wasn't he?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And many biographers attribute his creative drive to the hard life he experienced in his early life. A Christmas Carol was not his first story about the holiday. In 1835, his story Christmas Festivities was published, and it was later republished a year later with the name A Christmas Dinner. The story of the goblins who stole a sexton was published in 1836 as well. What? Which some believe to be an earlier version of a Christmas carol.
SPEAKER_03:I've never heard of this.
SPEAKER_01:That's right, folks. We're talking about goblins. No, that it's just it's funny because it's called The Story of the Goblin Who Stole a Sexton.
SPEAKER_03:Here she goes again. Good start talking about Hellier.
SPEAKER_01:There's also a strong connection here between several things.
SPEAKER_03:Hold on.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:What's a sextant? I thought sextant was like a piece of astronomy equipment.
SPEAKER_01:I thought it was a part of a car. Oh, that's a piston.
SPEAKER_03:That's a piston, yeah. Yeah, a s uh I so Oh, I'm thinking of a sextant.
SPEAKER_01:What's that?
SPEAKER_03:So you said sextant. I'm thinking of a sextant. So a sextant is a thing that would uh determine angles, and so you could put it between the horizon like you you eyeball it and you put one end on the horizon and the other end at your bit of a str of your uh your celestial body.
SPEAKER_01:Sure.
SPEAKER_03:And you could like determine your position or the position of where the thing you make measurements, and like that's how you make maps and stuff.
SPEAKER_01:So that's a sextant. Yes. And a sextant is somebody who works at a church, formerly a gravedigger, could be a bell ringer. They look after the church in the graveyard.
SPEAKER_03:And the bell.
SPEAKER_01:And the bell. Okay, so ready? This is my this is sort of like the crux of my my uh my hypothesis here. Okay. This is where everyone's gonna be proved wrong.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, everyone, including yourself. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:So there's a strong connection here between several things. A perfect storm, if you will, that helped create a Christmas carol. I'm gonna boil it down for you in three points. Point number one. Dickens firsthand experienced the atrocious labor conditions as a child and saw it around him as an adult. Because of the Industrial Revolution, right? Because he was forced to work in a factory, that was rat infested, poor working conditions, he was a kid. That's point one.
SPEAKER_03:And whose fault was that?
SPEAKER_01:His father's for dying.
SPEAKER_03:Just asking for clarity. Thank you. Continue.
SPEAKER_01:Part two. Point two. There's a historic reason why we as humans tell scary or ghost stories around Christmas. Again, echoing my earlier points, because it's the harshest time of the year for Western climates, the hardest to survive, the time when we saw the most death and things were most uncertain, a time when pagan populations felt most connected to the dead, most unsure if they would survive. And we've talked many a time on this podcast about the connection between hard times and horror. Point number three, there is a resurgence of holiday celebrations after a few hundred years of either a ban on Christmas or a focus on factory work. These were the social conditions that contributed to Dickens' interest in the topic. Right? So we what we what we are left with is both arguably the most famous ghost story and the most famous Christmas story of all time.
SPEAKER_03:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01:Case in point, drop my mic. I've won. Give me my scholarship money.
SPEAKER_03:I won't argue with you there. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:It was also fairly well known that Dickens had a soft spot for the holiday, and he admired work from other authors about Christmas. So it's kind of like a favorite topic of his.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, was there a lot of other works before him?
SPEAKER_01:Just like not holiday horror, but just Christmas stories in general.
SPEAKER_03:I see.
SPEAKER_01:So in October of 1843, Dickens started to write a Christmas carol. He finished writing it in six weeks, finishing up the last pages in early December of 1843. Famously, he originally composed much of the story in his head while he took long walks at night, up to 15 and 20 miles a night.
SPEAKER_03:Wow. That's a lot for shitty shoes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Dickens' sister-in-law wrote how he quote wept and laughed and wept again and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in composition. End quote.
SPEAKER_03:Wasn't this guy like cranking out like a book a month for a while?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, he wrote this in six weeks.
SPEAKER_03:Oh yeah, so basically.
SPEAKER_01:He's a he's a good old Stephen King, you know?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Do you want to do you wanna recap the plot of us for us?
SPEAKER_03:Of a Christmas carol? Yep.
SPEAKER_01:Do you want me to?
SPEAKER_03:I have only seen the Muppet version.
SPEAKER_01:I've tried to.
SPEAKER_03:So maybe you should do this one.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. I was I actually played the ghost of Christmas Pass in second grade, so I'm in a unique position to recap the plot.
SPEAKER_03:We have an expert.
SPEAKER_01:It's a pretty stress I ever owned. R.I.P. Okay. So we have Bob Cratchit, who's our main character, right? Bob has a wife. He has kids, including Tiny Tim, and he is he's got a mean old boss named Ebenezer Scrooge.
SPEAKER_03:Sure does.
SPEAKER_01:Ebenezer had been business partners with Jacob Marley in life. Jacob passed away. And ever since then, Ebenezer Scrooge has just been a real bah humbug. You know what I'm saying? Oh yeah. A real jerk. So Bob Cratchit trying to provide for his family, trying to get time off of work. It's the holidays. He wants to cook a Christmas goose. He wants to be home with the kids. He's gotta pay for Tiny Tim's medical bills. And Scrooge is just being a jerk. Not giving him money, not giving him time off, just good old-fashioned jerk. So it's the night of Christmas Eve. Scrooge is alone. He lives alone in his big old manor house and he falls asleep. And he's visited by three ghosts. The ghost of Christmas past, the ghost of Christmas future, and the ghost of Christmas present.
SPEAKER_03:In that order.
SPEAKER_01:I think so. And they really open up his eyes, if you will. They show him what has been, they show like the hardships, what what had the wonderful past he's had. They've shown him the future, how he'll die alone and terrible and be alone forever. And then present and tiny Tim and Tiny Tim needs help. So he a miracle, right? He's changed. And the next day he goes over and he has Christmas dinner with the goose with the Cratchits.
SPEAKER_03:We said who's the main character of a Christmas carol, but the main character is Scrooge.
SPEAKER_01:I meant who's the protagonist.
SPEAKER_03:Which is Scrooge.
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_03:He is the protagonist. He's also the he's also the villain.
SPEAKER_01:Tiny Tim is the protagonist.
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely not.
SPEAKER_01:You can't Scrooge is the anti-hero.
SPEAKER_03:He's an anti-hero, yeah. He's a reform. I don't know. How do you describe it? It's it's kind of breaking some tropes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's what happens when you go on 20 miles a night and you just think and think and think.
SPEAKER_03:I think he's a good writer, though.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. If you want a better version than that, watch a mup at Christmas Carol.
SPEAKER_03:It's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:You can watch a mupp at Christmas Carol. You can also are one of our great friend podcasts, the Fido podcast. Not only every year does John do live streaming. So actually, right now we're kind of in the middle of it. Every Thursday, he live streams one of the staves of a Christmas Carol, which is what they call chapters.
SPEAKER_02:Oh.
SPEAKER_01:But also he has, you know, recorded it verbally on the on his podcast as well. So you can flip back into the old episodes. So go listen to John, our good friend John at the Fido podcast, read A Christmas Carol to you in his beautiful reading voice. A Christmas Carol was originally published on December 19th with the title A Christmas Carol in Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
SPEAKER_03:Was it in prose?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Prose is just writing. Oh again, I've said this before on the podcast.
SPEAKER_03:I know, but it's confusing, and I've only seen the Muppets, so give me a break.
SPEAKER_01:Prose is any most regular short stories are prose. It's like not poetry. It's writing. Whatever there's a better word to say it, but so despite a somewhat expensive price of five shillings each. Five shillings? Uh-huh. Pretty pricey. The 6,000 original first edition copies sold quickly. More editions were printed and sold over the next year. And legal battles over the copyright issues sprang up, but Dickens won them.
SPEAKER_03:Well, yeah, he wrote the damn thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. He was 31 years old at the time of publication.
SPEAKER_03:That's a it's a good age.
SPEAKER_01:Though Christmas Carol remains the most popular, there are many other Victorian ghost stories to note. Let's highlight a few.
SPEAKER_02:Please do.
SPEAKER_01:And and maybe I'm not gonna give any uh spoilers here, but you may hear one or two of these next week in a companion episode to this one. One that comes up again and again is the kit bag by Algernon Blackwood from 1908. It first appeared in an issue of Paul Mall magazine. There's a bit of a legal setup here in talking about plot with the main characters being involved with a trial, but the real ghosts come in when the main character is given a kit bag and faces a spooky night alone. What is a kit bag? I think it's kind of like a like a knapsack, like a drop kit. You know? Like a drop kit is like a men's like toiletry bag that you would take on vacation.
SPEAKER_03:A dop kit.
SPEAKER_01:A drop kit.
SPEAKER_03:Is it a dop kit? My father's always said drop kit.
SPEAKER_01:Have I been saying it wrong my whole life?
SPEAKER_03:Maybe I've been hearing it wrong my whole life.
SPEAKER_01:I guess we'll never know.
SPEAKER_03:Like a toiletries bag.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But no, it's like a whole thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It has a little handle.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, Dopkit. D-O-P-P.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I just googled drop kit and I see like a little it looks like it's for cars.
SPEAKER_03:Drop kit?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm getting like lots of Silverado drop kit.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah, to like drop your ride for lower for better uh aerodynamics.
SPEAKER_01:I guess I just somehow my brain kerfuffled that.
SPEAKER_03:That's a street racing thing.
SPEAKER_01:So you you won that round.
SPEAKER_03:It's the opposite of a lift kit.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_03:Uh?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so DOP DOPP. All another name for a toiletry bag.
SPEAKER_01:Alright. I'm glad we cleared that up.
SPEAKER_03:Oh yeah, we sure did.
SPEAKER_01:No stone left unturned.
SPEAKER_03:Not here.
SPEAKER_01:So back to the plot of a kit bag, which we didn't look up what that was, but assuming it's a DOP kit.
SPEAKER_03:Kit bag? Mm-hmm. It's just two very common words. A kit bag is a long, narrow bag, usually made of canvas, in which soldiers or sailors keep their clothing and personal possessions.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, okay, like a little duffel bag.
SPEAKER_03:It's a duffel bag, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Good. Okay, glad we looked that up too. So the main character is given a kit bag, he faces a spooky night alone, and of course it all takes place on the days leading up to Christmas. There's also a story called SME from 1913, written by A. M. Barage Barrage, quoting from the Paris Review because their description gives me chills. At this party, we're playing a form of hide and seek, in which the seeker advances upon the hider and says, It's me, which uttered quickly and breathlessly enough becomes SME. Smee. It's Christmas Eve. This is a big old rambling house. But one tiny problem. There's an extra player who does not number among the guests.
SPEAKER_03:Who is it?
SPEAKER_01:I think there's only one way to find out. Read the story.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I extra I extrapolated your meaning.
SPEAKER_01:Sorry. There is also Between the Lights from 1912, written by E. F. Benson. This one has the feel of more of an HP Lovecraft creature feature, if you will.
SPEAKER_03:Interesting.
SPEAKER_01:The host has some visions from a previous Christmas where demonic beasts ruined his holiday.
SPEAKER_03:Molly. That sounds like a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. They're really cool. Like they're these Victorian era.
SPEAKER_03:Have you read that one?
SPEAKER_01:Not that one.
SPEAKER_03:I want to check it out.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. It feels sort of strange to jump from Victorian ghost stories to holiday horror films, but chronologically that is how it works. One of the first holiday horror films is a little joint called The Devil Doll from 1936. It was directed by Todd Browning, though for some reason he's uncredited, and it stars Lionel Barrymore, Drew Barrymore's great uncle, for those who are interested. Set around Christmas time, an escaped convict uses tiny humans, which a scientist has figured out how to do, how to shrink them down, to get his revenge. Honestly, it sounds like a blast.
SPEAKER_03:Sounds like Honey I Shrunk the Kids, but malicious.
SPEAKER_01:From the 30s, and like it's like a sci-fi horror holiday film. It's got a 7 out of 10 on IMDB and 79% on Rotten Tomato. Currently available to rent on Prime, Voodoo, and Apple. It's from the 30s? Yes.
SPEAKER_03:It's also free public domain.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but I'm just saying, if you want to watch it.
SPEAKER_03:Oh wait, what was the cutoff for public domain?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know.
SPEAKER_03:It moves all the time. It depends on who owns this crap.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03:Regardless, all movies from this era can easily be sourced with a simple Google.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. But in case you want to watch it on, you know, most people have Prime, I feel like. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I'm just saying there's ways.
SPEAKER_01:There's ways.
SPEAKER_03:Free free legal ways.
SPEAKER_01:Where there's a will, there's a way.
SPEAKER_03:Uh a lot of these things are also on archive.org.
SPEAKER_01:Cool. That's a good tip.
SPEAKER_03:In excellent quality and again, perfectly legal. It's just a actually a wonderful service that helps preserve uh these bits of culture.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome.
SPEAKER_03:That helps preserve these uh these films that otherwise would fall into obscurity.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's awesome. And honestly, like these films are really cool. Like this film from 1936 called The Devil Doll. It's like this weird sci-fi, it's just fun. Like it's just cool. And I'm glad that we, you know, we can revisit it and talk about it. I actually think it would probably be a good idea if I transpose this to like a blog post on lunaticsproject.com with some of the films we're gonna talk about and where you can stream them. So yeah, then you can, you know, if anything sparks your interest, you don't have to take notes.
SPEAKER_03:Usually we're very good about while doing all of the research, we watch most of these movies ahead of time. Yeah. Uh so that we can like really vet them and be like, well, this is good, this is bad, this is actually important. We're not talking about this because it's bullshit. Right. And this time, we have no idea. Which is like, hey, this sounds neat. Good check it out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, to watch all the films we're gonna talk about and to read all of the ghost stories we reference would take away less time than watching the fucking Amityville movies. Very good. Yes, that is true, and probably more fun. Okay, so the what we're just highlighting a few because there's literally no way to list them all. There's I found lists online, so there is a way, but there's hundreds of them, right? Hundreds of holiday horror films from the inception of film.
SPEAKER_03:So I think it was last year we were with your family and we were looking for holiday horror movies. Yeah. And we found a number, we found a number of them, but most of them were like very fairly recent B movies and just garbage.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Uh we watched Well, we watched the Krampus movies, those are pretty good. We also watched Black Christmas, which was okay.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we'll talk about Black Christmas.
SPEAKER_03:We'll circle back to it. I know there's the remake, which neither of us have seen yet. Yeah. Which is exciting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And we what was the other movie that we watched that was like a Christmas horror story or something? Is that the name of it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. But actually, that had a lot going for it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I that's one that's sort of like I feel like people really love. Yeah, but it didn't like it wasn't, it just didn't blow me away.
SPEAKER_03:No.
SPEAKER_01:Uh I don't think it's also not really my style, which doesn't mean it's not worthy of, you know, people liking it. It's just I'm not yucking anyone's yum, you know. It just wasn't my yum.
SPEAKER_03:I don't think it's a great movie.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's fun.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, and I think it's a good point because I do think a lot like there's a difference between films, really interesting, weird holiday horror films from the 30s and like the accessibility. And so even though, like you said, you can go to websites and find them, people might not know that. And last year we, you know, sitting in my parents' house didn't have an easy way to do that, so you're kind of limited to what's on streaming. Right. But it is worth it if you can find a way to find some of these films or look them up or whatever. Again, we'll post this article or this post on our lunaticsproject.com so you can have a guide to what we've found. But I do think it they're worth investigating, and in a lot of cases, they have they're refreshing when you compare them to some of the more modern things that we have.
SPEAKER_02:For sure.
SPEAKER_01:So the next film that I want to talk about is called The Curse of the Cat People from 1944.
SPEAKER_03:Hey, we've seen that.
SPEAKER_01:We saw Cat People. This is actually a sequel.
SPEAKER_03:What?
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm. Uh it's from two years later, and it's mostly unrelated. It's directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch.
SPEAKER_03:Can I if I remember correctly, they like go into a tomb or something, and then the little women turn into cats.
SPEAKER_01:This is is mostly unrelated.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, but that's it. That is what happened, I think.
SPEAKER_01:I think I fell asleep.
SPEAKER_03:You did fall asleep. So I can't confirm. Oh yeah, and I was like, okay.
SPEAKER_01:Uh it was written by DeWitt Bowden, Bodine, and stars Simone Simon and Kent Smith.
SPEAKER_03:Her name is Simone Simon.
SPEAKER_01:Uh-huh. I love it. It's like Abigail Abby. Abby Abigail. It tells the story of a young girl who has no friends, but becomes friends with the spirit of her father's dead wife, which is pretty juicy. Dead Knight is from 1945 and is an anthology horror film. Each segment is directed by a different director and adapts stories from different writers, including H. G. Wells. One particular segment called A Christmas Party fits our theme, and it was written by Angus McPhil.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Jumping ahead to the 1970s, we start to see more modern holiday horror films. Perhaps most famously, Black Christmas from 1974.
SPEAKER_03:Which was the first slasher film ever made.
SPEAKER_01:It was one of the early slasher films. Directed by Bob Clark and written by Roy Moore. The film stars Margot Kitter, who we talked about last week in our Amityville episode, and Olivia Hoosie. It tells the story of a group of college girls living in a house together. Yeah, it was. Okay.
SPEAKER_03:Because they're they the Den mother.
SPEAKER_01:Right, but so would any college girls. What? My sister had a Den mother.
SPEAKER_03:Was she in a sorority?
SPEAKER_01:No. Hell no.
SPEAKER_03:For the record, I did go to college, but I know so little about this world.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I wasn't in Greek life at all. I couldn't tell you anything. Well, you also lived in New York City. It's a little different.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. We had no dead mothers.
SPEAKER_01:Right, so it's this group of girls who live in a house together and they're terrorized by a stalker around the holidays. The first time I saw this film was at Nighthawk Cinema in Williamsburg. It was like a midnight showing of the film.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And first of all, like right at the pinnacle moment, the projection broke. Oh. It was very traumatic. But also, it really actually like I found it at the time, especially in a theater, to be really disturbing. Like I really didn't like it. Sure. I was like, this film is over the line. Like compared to some of the stuff we watch now, it seems crazy that that was my reaction. But I was like, this film is just like really disturbing to me. Really? Yes. Because specifically, I'll tell you the part that I don't like.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:There's phone calls, right? Where the stalkers calls the women who live in the house, and the things that he says to them, I found to be just like I hated it. I hated that part. It got under my skin.
SPEAKER_03:Sure.
SPEAKER_01:And apparently those phone calls were added in post. So during filming, the actors were were reacting to strange things that the director was just saying off camera. And then they figured out what the dialogue was and added it in later.
SPEAKER_03:Oh wow. So he's just saying, like, say something as if he surprised you. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Or like, fuck you, bitch, but it wasn't the same. Like, you know, he wasn't like reading the lines. Originally, the script had murder scenes that were even more graphic, but Bob Clark petitioned to have them toned down. He thought that more tame scenes would play out better. Clark also retitled the film, which was originally supposed to be called Stop Me.
SPEAKER_03:Uh excellent move putting Christmas in the name.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I'm gonna quote uh a pretty beefy quote here from IMDB because it's fascinating to me. Quote NBC scheduled this film. We're talking about Black Christmas. NBC scheduled this film for its primetime network debut on January 28th, 1978, under the title Stranger in the House.
SPEAKER_03:Quick question.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:It debuted on TV?
SPEAKER_01:No, so it already was in it was right in theaters around Christmas, but then in January they played it on TV.
SPEAKER_03:Just checking. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Good call out. On January 15th, 1978, two female students at Florida State University were murdered by an assailant who broke into the sorority house where they lived. Three other young women in the immediate vicinity were attacked and assaulted. NBC received numerous pleas from locals to pull the movie from broadcast in light of the crimes. And after first stating that they would offer the local affiliates an alternative movie to broadcast, they decided to just pull the plug on the movie altogether. Instead, the film, Doc Savage, Man of Bronze, was shown. NBC instead ran Stranger in the House as a late movie on May 14th, my birthday, the same year. The perpetrator of the crimes at Florida State University was later identified as serial killer Ted Bundy.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, we like him.
SPEAKER_01:We don't like him.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, we don't like serial killers. Who's the eat people?
SPEAKER_01:No, this is Jeffrey Dahmer.
SPEAKER_03:That's the one we like.
SPEAKER_01:No, we don't like any of them. Why are you saying that? You can currently stream Black Christmas, the original, on Peacock, Tubi, Crackle, Voodoo, and Amazon. Christmas Evil from 1980 was written and directed by Lewis Jackson. It stars Brandon Margot and Diane Hull. Christmas Evil rivals the original Black Christmas for the most popular Christmas horror film. It tells the story of a factory toymaker who is mentally disturbed as a kid when he figures out that Santa isn't real, so as an adult, he goes on a murder spree. It's a dark comedy. Currently streaming on Hulu, Sling, and Tubi.
SPEAKER_03:What year was it from?
SPEAKER_01:1980.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:1984 was a big year for holiday horror. It gives us both Gremlins and Silent Night Deadly Night.
SPEAKER_03:We watched that.
SPEAKER_01:We did. I hadn't seen it until we watched it like last year.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's okay.
SPEAKER_01:It was directed by Joe Dante, starring Zach Gilligan and Phoebe Cates. It's currently on streaming. A lot of these are going to be on streaming right now again because of the time of year. Silent Night Deadly Night was directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., a young boy who is traumatized as a kid, has flashbacks as an adult, and embarks on a murderous holiday rampage. Silent Night Deadly Night opened the same weekend as a nightmare on Elm Street, and it briefly outgrossed the former.
SPEAKER_03:That's my favorite Johnny Depp movie.
SPEAKER_01:What a Nightmare on Elm Street? It had a budget of just over one million and brought in just over two. So that's a pretty good ROI. Ultra modern holiday horror. We're gonna fly through these, but just to give you guys some these are films that were made after 2010. So we're just gonna give you a little taste. What's brewing recently, you know?
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Do you remember the film Rare Exports from 2010? Oh yeah, that was great. It was great. That was an awesome movie. It's a Krampus film or a Krampus style film. It's a Krampus movie. Yeah. It's from uh Eastern Europe.
SPEAKER_03:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01:Or Scandinavia. It's from Scandinavia. I think it's Finland. And I loved it. We loved it. It was great.
SPEAKER_03:Krampus type movie.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It wasn't quite Krampus, but it was similar.
SPEAKER_03:Just an evil Santa Claus.
SPEAKER_01:No, it wasn't even that. It was local it was like local to Finland lore. Oh, sure, sure, sure. So it was like a little bit different.
SPEAKER_03:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:If you're gonna watch any film, I would say Rare Exports is a really strong container.
SPEAKER_03:It's a it's a just a fantastic movie.
SPEAKER_01:A Christmas horror story from 2015, which is an anthology interwoven stories that all take place on Christmas, starring William Shatner himself. It definitely has a cult following, and it's similar in vibe to me as Trick or Treat, but a little bit less successful.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I I would happily watch it again. I think I was expecting it to be something that it's not. Sure.
SPEAKER_01:That's not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:You know? Especially having really enjoyed Trick or Treat.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I would like to go back and watch Christmas horror Christmas horror story.
SPEAKER_01:I also remember it being, I think, like a little bit sexually graphic or something, and we were watching it like with my family or on the holidays.
SPEAKER_03:You know, there was something about it that I think I was like in the living room with the Christmas trees.
SPEAKER_01:Like on like I was not in the mindset for it, you know, so it also just felt like not the film for the time.
SPEAKER_03:As your mother's handing us hot chocolate. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Like, yeah, like, oh man. Maybe watch it at home. Also from 2015, we have Krampus starring Adam Scott and Tony Collette, which is a scary, funny, very Hollywoody polished film, not one of my favorites.
SPEAKER_03:Uh another movie I would like to watch again.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. That one I think you can watch at home with the family.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. It's a horror movie. It's a creature feature, basically.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. From 2016, we have a film called The Better Watch Out. From 2017, we have Anna and the Apocalypse, which I am a major fan of.
SPEAKER_03:Did we see that?
SPEAKER_01:I saw it in the movie theater. Um, it's a holiday horror zombie musical.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah, that one.
SPEAKER_01:It's currently on streaming. It was filmed in Glasgow, Scotland, directed by John McPhail, starring Ella Hunt. It's hilarious, scary. It's got great music, great fashion. I really love that film. That's another one I think you should watch. Like in general, if you're looking for my top films. We have the Black Christmas remake. In 2019, Black Christmas was remade, directed by Sophia Tikal. It doesn't have stellar reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, but it is currently on streaming on most of the major platforms.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, if it's half as good as the Halloween remake by Rob Zombie, it's gonna be a great movie.
SPEAKER_01:If it's half as good, wow, okay. And then finally, we have The Lodge from 2019, a psychological horror thriller film directed by Veronica Franz and Servin Phil Filia. It premiered at Sundance in 2019. It's both visually and thematically inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca from 1940.
SPEAKER_02:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01:And since it's so recent, we're not going to give anything away in terms of the plot, but you can currently stream it. And that might be a good one around this time of year, too. Cool. Looking back at the dark roots of Yule and Winter Solstice, which have evolved into modern day Christmas, the connection between holiday and horror makes a ton of sense. And again, not to mention Krampus, which to me feels like a total side quest here, you know?
SPEAKER_05:Sure.
SPEAKER_01:Like a it's not really like in the same line of evolution, it's sort of like a branch off that we'll come back to.
SPEAKER_03:Right, because Krampus isn't horror.
SPEAKER_01:Right. But it's like a little bit spooky.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, he I'm about to launch into Krampus talk. So let's we're gonna save that one for another time.
SPEAKER_01:We'll save it for next Christmas. The tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas is very romantic, and I love it. So much so that we will be returning next week with a Lunatics Library episode on this theme. Perfect for playing on Christmas Eve, too. So really kind of like uh old-timey radio, gather around kids, and we're gonna read you some old-timey holiday horror.
SPEAKER_03:So, like, you know, you're with your family, you're all sitting around, everyone is just praying that you don't have to talk, and then someone just puts on the radio, and then everyone's like, Oh, thank God.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. We also didn't dive too deeply into any of these films, right? Because we had a lot to get through.
SPEAKER_03:And we haven't seen most of them.
SPEAKER_01:But if you're interested in hearing Alan and I talk about films in a more in-depth manner, we do have a exclusive Patreon exclusive podcast really called Horror Movie Club that we produce for our patrons of this show. And I'm sure we will review some holiday films probably at some point. But we we do talk every month about horror films more in depth than this. So in this month, in December, right, 2021, we're gonna on Horror Movie Club be talking about some holiday horror, some very interesting holiday horror films. So that's a great place if you want even more from us on this topic. But thank you guys so much for listening. I know we're still a few weeks out, but if you are celebrating anything this month or this time of year, we hope that you have a wonderful celebration, time with family, if it's safe, you know, that we that you just enjoy as much as you can, that you're not living that Puritan lifestyle, hopefully. That you're, you know, you're out there enjoying life.
SPEAKER_03:Or you can if you want. No one cares.
SPEAKER_01:No one cares. But for you for you, I I hope that you have a little bit of joy in your life.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah, joy is important.
SPEAKER_01:I I I want that for everybody. And finally, we are jumping ahead to episode 148, which came out last year on December 10th, 2024. This is one of my favorite episodes, and it really focuses on the monsters and the creatures of Christmas horror globally. We had a very early Krampus episode. Please do not go back and listen to that. It was, I think, like episode five, and it's incredibly outdated and cringy, but this was kind of our Krampus Redemption episode, or we revisited it finally with, you know, the quality and the level of research that we're doing now. Do enjoy. Celebrations, feasts, and festivals around December and January date back thousands of years. And while there is a tremendous variety when it comes to the type, focus, and traditions, there are a few unifying factors. Today we're going to talk about the spooky creatures, traditions, and horror tropes from various religions, regions, and beliefs that span the globe. From the history of Yule to Krampus and Belschnickel and Bafana.
SPEAKER_03:Belschnickel.
SPEAKER_01:Today we are talking about the vast and fascinating history of holiday horror.
SPEAKER_03:I thought Belschnickel was made up for the office.
SPEAKER_01:That is incorrect.
SPEAKER_03:So Belschnickel's real?
SPEAKER_01:Correct. Wow. Before I explain all about Belschnickel to you, let us cite our sources. We used a Smithsonian magazine article by Kate Eshner, Why Do People Tell Ghost Stories on Christmas, a BBC article by Clemency Burton Hill, When Christmas Carols Were Banned, an all things interesting article by Morgan Dunn. The story of Yule, the raucous pagan celebration of winter that inspired Christmas, an article called The Legend of La Bufana by Deborah Timmish on Italiarail.com, Santa Claus Real Origins and Legends on History.com. An English Heritage article by Tom Moriarty, The History of Father Christmas, an Atlas Obscura article by Sarah Elizabeth Troop, The Monsters of Christmas, and a Smithsonian Magazine article by Colin Dickey, a plead to resurrect the Christmas tradition of telling ghost stories. To start things off, we need to go back to the most basic reason why this time of year has become what it is today.
SPEAKER_03:Consumerism.
SPEAKER_01:The biblical origins of Christmas are commonly understood, the story of the birth of Jesus, but we're not going to actually talk about that much today. Long before Christianity, ancient Germanic pagans and Vikings celebrated Yule in the winter solstice. At that time, this holiday had no religious affiliation, only the celebration of the solar event. That being said, many of the ancient traditions are still celebrated today, skinned as a Christian holiday. Yule is typically celebrated on the 21st of December, the shortest day and the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
SPEAKER_03:That's the winter solstice.
SPEAKER_01:It's the day when the pendulum swings back. Going forward, each day will be lighter for a little bit longer. It's the perfect transition between the dark and the light half of the year. And obviously, historically right, this was incredibly important to people who relied on farming and foraging and crops and solar charging. Building their own structures and homes, right? Before there was a lot of modern conveniences, the movements of the sun and the seasons and the weather were everything to them.
SPEAKER_03:I understand.
SPEAKER_01:Historically, solar celebrations can be traced back thousands of years, especially around this time and across hundreds of cultures. We've talked about some of them on this podcast, but Yule is certainly one of the most important to understanding the dark and complicated roots of festivals timed at the end of December. Similar to Salwin, which is the you know episode with Miranda Warzell, which is the uh root of what is now Halloween, but uh another pagan holiday, during Yule, the ancient Germanic people believed that magical forces and powers were stronger than usual. They also believed, similar to Halloween and Sowin, that the veil between the living and the dead was thinner. So in some cases, right, Yule had this like almost spooky, dark, spiritual vibe to it. As Christianity began to spread across Europe, Yule Tide and other pagan festivals were either adopted or stamped out entirely. We can trace the word Yule and understand it to mean something very similar to celebration or festival. I'm going to quote from Morgan Dunn's All Things Interesting article. Quote, the earliest mention of Yule is found in the work of a chronicler and prolific historian called Bede, an English monk who was instrumental in the spread of Catholic Christianity in northern England. Writing in 725 AD, Bede described the holidays of pagan Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and other Germanic groups, noting that the old pagan calendar combined the Roman months of December and January into a single period called Gaiuli. He wrote, The months of Gaiuli derive their name from the day when the sun turns back and begins to increase. In other words, this double month was built around the winter solstice, the time of year when daylight, which decreases steadily during the winter, starts to increase again. End quote. In Nordic regions, people would bring trees into their homes and decorate them with candles or orb-like objects to represent the sun.
SPEAKER_03:But why?
SPEAKER_01:Because they were worshiping the sun. Like the idea was this is we've made it through the absolute coldest, darkest time of the year. Now the sun is returning again, and we want to worship the sun so that it will come back. In a lot of these cultures, too, it was a heavy like god worship. Like Odin is very heavily worshipped around this time.
SPEAKER_03:He's not associated with trees, is he?
SPEAKER_01:No, he's associated with this time of year.
SPEAKER_03:Oh.
SPEAKER_01:He becomes essentially Father Christmas for a long time and then Santa Claus. Spoilers, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
SPEAKER_03:Some guy chewed me out on Reddit because of that.
SPEAKER_01:What? You got into a fight with someone on Reddit?
SPEAKER_03:Sure did.
SPEAKER_01:Recently this happened?
SPEAKER_03:No, this was back when I was reading Krampus.
SPEAKER_01:Oh.
SPEAKER_03:They're asking for any uh historical texts that equivocates uh Odin to with Santa.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And I full disclaimer said that this is not a historical text by any means. This is a hundred percent a work of fiction, but it does have a connection, a very strong connection, between Norse mythology and what the fuck is Santa mythology called? And then he got real, real mad because you know It wasn't a historical text. It's not a historical text. I I could not have been more clear though.
SPEAKER_01:Ancient practices of the Eulogue were even more poetic, with each spark representing a baby animal meant to be born in the spring. The idea of Christmas elves were invented in the US in the 19th century. There's nothing really historic about them. And they also don't really have any clear ties to pagan tradition or any like religious lore. However, the Nordic house sprites, or Nyssa or Nyssa, were a huge part of the Yule celebration that never made its way over to America.
SPEAKER_03:Are they related to candy elves?
SPEAKER_01:What's a candy elf?
SPEAKER_03:I don't know, but we just watched a movie about them.
SPEAKER_01:We did?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, member the organization killed all the candy elves in red snow.
SPEAKER_01:No. You weren't paying attention at all. I blocked that part out. It's not time to talk about red snow yet, Alan. The house spirits were known to come out at Yule time, and they sought offerings, mainly of porridge, to keep them happy. If they were not satisfied, they would punish the residents of the house where they dwelled with pranks and tricks. And this is something we're gonna talk a little bit later in the outline a little bit more about creatures and monsters around Christmas, and this is such a recurring theme.
SPEAKER_03:There is a movie about this exactly called There's Something in the Barn.
SPEAKER_01:Alan's done a lot of holiday horror watching. I have.
SPEAKER_03:Uh, where there is a do they call it an elf or a gnome? It's one or the other. They look like the very stereotypical like garden gnome with like the little red cap, you know? Yep. I think it's an elf though. I think that's what they call it. Takes place in Norway. You have to do all these things to there's a very, very uh rigid set of rules that you have to follow to keep your your barn it's a bar elf. Yeah, your barn elf happy.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:And then he'll do like little things and help her out around your farm. But if you don't do the things, then he'll cause all sorts of mischief. And like if you really fuck up, like you forget to leave out his Christmas porridge, then you know, he might bring out the chainsaw. That it's always fun when you're, you know, watching movies and then you go back and actually learn that it was a bit researched.
SPEAKER_01:That's the whole point of this podcast.
SPEAKER_03:Well, uh sh maybe. But you know, it's fun.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's very fun. I agree.
SPEAKER_03:So everyone check out there's something in the barn. It's great.
SPEAKER_01:In the 19th century, the Nysa developed into gift givers, and they are often portrayed to be similar to Santa in that way, bringing holiday gifts to family members. But dating back even before it was believed that Nysa brought your holiday presents, the Nordics believed that the Yule Goat would deliver them.
SPEAKER_03:The Yule Goat?
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:What does the Yule goat look like?
SPEAKER_01:So the Yule Goat would be sort of men who would dress up as this, you know, goat and walk through villages and towns and they would sing and perform skits.
SPEAKER_03:Skits.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Which, of course, we're also going to talk about a lot of different examples of this from many different cultures. But to set the scene before Christmas not even became Christian, but before really it became so commercial very, very recently, like in the last 200 years, it was a raucous, even again, even throughout Christianity, Christmas celebrations, all the way from pagan times up to the 1700s, were like incredibly raucous, drunk festivals of eating and drinking and having sex and pranking people and doing crazy shit in the street. And it gets, you know, even wilder from there in some cases. But that was really the vibe, so much so that all of our Cromwell banned Christmas celebrations in England because they were it was just like known of being this like shit show. It was just like that, it was almost like the purge. It was like when everybody just goes out and does whatever primal primitive shit that they want to do.
SPEAKER_03:And then Amazon came around.
SPEAKER_01:That's right, and everything changed.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, no one goes out anymore.
SPEAKER_01:So we're gonna talk a lot about that evolution today and a lot of other versions of what I'm saying, but I just wanted to set the scene a little.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, what what? Are you really gonna go like out to buy dish soap? No.
SPEAKER_01:You're gonna get it delivered in two days or less. So many people believe that the Yule goat is derived from either Thor, who is known for his goat-drawn chariot, or from the ancient harvest traditions. This lore is especially prominent in Sweden. And there's actually a city in Sweden that builds this, you know, very, very large goat in the town, a Yule goat every year. Since it was built in the 1960s, it's been burned down 37 times.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, Abby.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:What are the names of Thor's goats?
SPEAKER_01:Billy.
SPEAKER_03:Nope. Bobby. Nope. Joey. Close.
SPEAKER_01:And Ashley.
SPEAKER_03:It's Ashley. It's Snarler and Grinder.
SPEAKER_01:Snarler and Grinder?
SPEAKER_03:Snarler.
SPEAKER_01:Is that real?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. What do they do? What's their vibe?
SPEAKER_03:Uh they pull his chariot and one has a broken leg.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:Actually, th they have kind of a tough, tough life because every night Thor slays them.
SPEAKER_01:Jesus.
SPEAKER_03:And eats them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But does not crack the bones for the marrow. Okay. He just leaves all the bones in a nice little pile.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:And then come dawn, they regenerate, put themselves back together, and then he's got new goats. Uh, and these goats can fly, which is great, because it it pulls his cherry through the sky. But then fucking Thealzi comes along and Loki tricks him into cracking open one of the bones to suck the marrow. And he's like all sorry and shit, but now is now one of the goats is a broken leg forever.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's sad.
SPEAKER_01:It's pretty sad. It's horrifying.
SPEAKER_03:Especially for the goats. Like, even with the broken leg, they're still gonna regenerate now forever and just get eaten every single day. That sucks. By their by their one guy that takes care of them.
SPEAKER_01:That's pretty shitty.
SPEAKER_03:It's pretty shitty.
SPEAKER_01:The Vikings celebrated Yule in their own way, quoting again from the all things interesting article, quote The rites, ceremonies, and festivities of Yule were rife with references to important gods of the old Norse and Germanic pantheons. Most significantly Odin, one of whose names was Jol Nir, which indicates a connection to the holiday of Joel or Yule. To ancient Vikings and Goths, the period prior to Yule tide was a time of heightened supernatural activity. Undead creatures called dragwar wandered the earth. Magic was more potent, and Odin himself led a ghostly wild hunt across the night sky. To appease restless spirits and gods alike, the Vikings held ceremonies that included sacrifices of various plants, animals, and beverages. End quote.
SPEAKER_03:What's an example of the absurd and outrageous?
SPEAKER_01:Like, I hope my hair goes pink next year.
SPEAKER_03:And everyone just kind of looks at you with blank stares and is like, you can do better.
SPEAKER_01:This oath swearing can be traced to modern day New Year's resolutions. No, I mean I think everyone was so drunk because this was such a crazy festival that they just went for it.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, let me rephrase. If you had to make an oath on the goat.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:On the board, excuse me. What would you what would your oath be?
SPEAKER_01:That's private.
SPEAKER_03:You have to do it in front of everybody.
SPEAKER_01:I would say I hope everybody has a help happy and healthy new year. There have been some claims that human sacrifice was also part of Yule celebrations. And this is actually a bit harder to confirm because many have tried to stamp out pagan festivals over the years. So they had the kind of this like unfair bad reputation, right? Like when Christianity came, they would be like, oh, this is so horrible, these traditions and violent, which wasn't always the case. So it's a bit hard to parse out totally accurately. But most, I think, historians or a lot of historians speculate that there was certainly some of that. Also, as you might have guessed, evergreen trees were a big part of Yule celebrations. Bonfires were intended to keep the darkness away until the return of light in the warmer months. Similar to what we already discussed with evergreens is the Yule log. The Yule log tradition can be traced back to what is now the UK. The Yule log is a log, of course, that has been specially chosen to be burned for Yule. The Yule logs of tradition were so big that it took several days, usually 12, for them to burn an entirety.
SPEAKER_03:No shit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Twelve days to burn a log.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So you know, it was yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Like these huge Still 12 days.
SPEAKER_01:And they kind of timed it, I think. There's there's like a 12, a recurring theme of 12 across a lot of these things.
SPEAKER_03:I feel like they've sacked entire cities in less time.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. But the purpose of burning the Yule log, do you know what it was, Alan?
SPEAKER_03:Warmth.
SPEAKER_01:To keep evil spirits and the sickness at bay.
SPEAKER_03:Wait, no, you said it was to make sparks because they're animals.
SPEAKER_01:So that was the other thing, that the sparks coming off of the Yule logs, every like sparks were good. It would be like a this sign that all these baby sheep would be born next year, right? Like the more sparks, the more baby animals would be born.
SPEAKER_03:Someone is just there just spritzing water onto it just to make sure they get nice lots of pops for those baby sheeps.
SPEAKER_01:There are a lot of connections to this tradition and the Christmas tree that decorates homes across the world to this day, including ours. Evergreen trees were brought inside homes and situated generally in the corners. They were decorated with cloth, food, and other bits and bobs.
SPEAKER_03:You wanted so badly to put the Christmas tree in the middle of the room.
SPEAKER_01:Let's take a step back. First of all, it's a fake tree. Alan won't allow us to have a real tree in our home, which is horrifying because the whole point is that we are bringing in a piece of nature and an actual living evergreen. But we have our nice little New York City fake tree. And I thought it would be nice to put it along the end of the couch. And I guess that was the stupidest thing I've ever said in my life, according to Alan.
SPEAKER_03:You can't walk, but you could not walk through, you could not get to the couch. Yes, you could. You had to shimmy between the tree and the TV to get to the couch.
SPEAKER_01:It's a n it's a very small tree.
SPEAKER_03:We have a very small apartment.
SPEAKER_01:That's true. One of my favorite Yule tide traditions was the wild hunt or the belief in the wild hunt. It's no mistake that Yule is celebrated on the longest night of the year. For the Germanic people, Yule was a time to worship the gods. Again, Odin actually translates to Yule Father. Odin was believed to lead a pack of ghostly huntsmen on black horses, bucks, and demon-like hounds with haunted red eyes, and they would race through the night sky. I mean, it's the most rock and roll thing you've ever heard of. Those who kept watch at night for this spectacle would claim to see twenty or thirty huntsmen on the prowl. In the old Germanic times, Odin's role was God of the dead, and he led the hunt across the sky on his eight-legged horse.
SPEAKER_03:Sleepneer.
SPEAKER_01:Is that the name of his horse?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's the name of his horse.
SPEAKER_01:Sleepneer?
SPEAKER_03:Sleepneer.
SPEAKER_01:Is he sleepy?
SPEAKER_03:No.
SPEAKER_01:What other pets does Odin have?
SPEAKER_03:Uh he's got his two ravens.
SPEAKER_01:What are they named?
SPEAKER_03:Hugin and Mugen.
SPEAKER_01:What else? You know a lot of Odin facts.
SPEAKER_03:I think I think it's just the ravens and the horse.
SPEAKER_01:The leader of this hunt shifts and changes over time, so it wasn't always historically Odin. Sometimes it was claimed that the devil was at the helm of the wild hunt. As Christianity was spreading across Europe, the hunt started to take an even darker spin. And I would actually argue that it was a horrifying one. It started to inspire visions of the undead and mass deaths. It's almost mind-blowing to think that this brutal hunt led by a death god is what has turned into the modern day story of Santa Claus and his friendly reindeer. Jacob Grimm repopularized the hunt in 1835 when he wrote about it in his Chronicle of German mythology. Yule was one of many pagan celebrations and traditions that fell into Christian interpretation, generally a peacekeeping tactic during the rise of Christianity, which allowed for the pagan traditions to be preserved through the lens of the Christian faith. The idea was to mitigate the violent pushback from pagans and make the slow transition into Christianity more palatable. But before we talk about some of the very rock and roll creatures and horrifying monsters that have graced holiday folklore, such as the Lacnus Monster, let's first discuss their foil, the history of Saint Nicholas. It's generally believed that Saint Nicholas hailed from what is now Turkey. His birthday is often thought to be March 15th, 270 AD, and he died on December 6th, 343 AD. And actually, just fun fact, today as we record this is December 6th.
SPEAKER_03:So Santa is officially dead?
SPEAKER_01:So, Alan, the way this works, the way history works, is that he died on December 6th, 343.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, that's bad.
SPEAKER_01:So many, many thousands of years ago.
SPEAKER_03:I don't know if everyone knows this.
SPEAKER_01:Well, hopefully people under five don't, but us adults can handle it. But this death date is very important because it's going to set the scene for a lot of other Christmas mythology that's going to follow. But for now, just remember that his feast is celebrated on his death date, December 6th. He's known as the patron saint of sailors, merchants, children, unmarried folks, toy makers, and archers, just to name a few. Saint Nick was said to have traveled throughout the land, giving away his money, apparently he was quite well off, to those in need.
SPEAKER_03:This is quite well endowed.
SPEAKER_01:He became the most popular saint in Europe. Saint Nick remained in good standing with Christians even long after the Protestant Reformation, and he was particularly well loved in Holland, which is another important detail. So there's actually this really weird piece of folklore to talk about with Saint Nicholas, and it has to do with three small children and a butcher. So the story goes that there was Sounds like a joke. It really is so bizarre. So the story starts off as a lot of these kind of allegorical stories do, right? That there's three small kids, they're playing around town, they're hanging out in a field, but they lose track of time. Then when it's nighttime, the sun's going down, they realize that they're starving and that they're lost. So as they're walking around, they come to a butcher's shop which has a light on. They knock on the door and explain to the butcher what's going on, that they're lost, that they're hungry, that they need help, and the butcher says, Come on in. But as they enter, this evil butcher takes a sharp knife. He essentially slashes the children up and he wouldn't. And he salts them up as he would a piece of meat. Seven years go by. Okay, so that happens, seven years go by.
SPEAKER_03:Are are they preserved the entire time?
SPEAKER_01:Well, just keep listening.
SPEAKER_03:That's a long time for the salted meat.
SPEAKER_01:So seven years go by, and Saint Nicholas wanders his way to this very butcher shop. And he goes right to the salting, you know, place where the children are kept and said, says, like, open it up. He puts his hand on top of the container, he prays, he says, Rise up, children, and the kids are how would he say it? Rise up, children. And the children do. They kind of become alive again, and the families are like, Thank God, our our children are alive. And so a lot of people point to that as like one of the stories of when he's the patron saint of protecting children. But there's also other versions of that folklore where he is a little bit more evil. It's it's a little bit weird. But anyway, let's just leave it there to keep it nice and cheery for now. Saint Nicholas came to America by way of New York in December of 1773, when a reporter wrote an article on the Dutch tradition of honoring Saint Nicholas on December 6th. Right? So again, December 6th is his feast day, the day of his death. Santa pulls part of his identity from both the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas and the pagan god Odin. To honor Saint Nick after his death in 343 AD, an annual day of gift giving to children was instated. Again, because he is, you know, the patron saint of children. Originally, the 6th of December, the day he died, which was later moved to December 25th after the Protestant Revolution, and Saint Nick was renamed Santa Claus. You can see the canvas that the pagan tradition of Odin presented, and that the Christian traditions were painted on top of to create the modern story that we know today. The Dutch would call Saint Nicholas Sinterclaus, which is what led to us calling him Santa Claus. Santa Claus. Quoting from the History.com article on Santa Claus, quote, in 1804, John Pintard, a member of the New York Historical Society, distributed woodcuts of Saint Nicholas at the Society's annual meeting. The background of the engraving contains now familiar Santa images, including stockings filled with toys and fruit hung over a fireplace.
SPEAKER_03:Fruit?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Why?
SPEAKER_01:Get it roasty toasty.
SPEAKER_03:Who roasts fruit?
SPEAKER_01:You do. You can't eat fruit raw.
SPEAKER_03:I also don't eat fruit roasted. You roast it like on a spit.
SPEAKER_01:We'll have to obtain the woodcuts and we'll confirm. In 1809, Washington Irving helped to popularize the Sinterclaus stories when he referred to St. Nicholas as the patron saint of New York in his book, The History of New York. As his prominence grew, Sinterclaus was described as everything from a rascal with a blue three-cornered hat, red waistcoat, and yellow stockings, to a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a huge pair of Flemish trunk hose. End quote.
SPEAKER_03:What is that what does trunk hose look like?
SPEAKER_01:They're pants.
SPEAKER_03:They're pants.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Just pants.
SPEAKER_01:They're Flemish pants.
SPEAKER_03:Flemish pants.
SPEAKER_01:They're very elaborate.
SPEAKER_03:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:And of course, we all know Washington Irving from his story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, he's famous.
SPEAKER_01:Irving's reference to Santo as part of a movement to shift the core of Christmas celebrations. Again, hold the phone.
SPEAKER_03:I didn't so just quick Washington Irving side sidebar here. Okay. I didn't realize until this Halloween that Sleepy Hollow was not called Sleepy Hollow until like the mid-90s.
SPEAKER_01:The town.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Is that crazy? It was like a fictional place. And then they named it where he was inspired by.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love that.
SPEAKER_03:I did that just into the mid-90s. Imagine renaming a town based off a story from the 1800s. That's kind of crazy.
SPEAKER_01:It's very fun.
SPEAKER_03:It is fun. It seems like it's a fun town.
SPEAKER_01:Life is short and you can't take anything too seriously. Irving's reference to Santa was part of a movement to shift the core of Christmas celebrations away from riotous debauchery, often including home invasion, premarital sex, public sexual deviancy, and more. Again, what I was referring to earlier. Most of this comes from traditions around these holiday celebrations. So let's talk about this tradition a little bit more, right? Of being totally debaucherous. A lot of this happened under the umbrella of a waysailing, a term that is going to come up a few times in this episode.
SPEAKER_03:What was the term?
SPEAKER_01:Wasseling?
SPEAKER_03:Wasseling?
SPEAKER_01:Wasling, waysiling?
SPEAKER_03:Waysailing or wasling.
SPEAKER_01:Probably wasseling. Wassing mostly means house visiting, like caroling, if you will, kind of.
SPEAKER_03:So there I was, wasling.
SPEAKER_01:Peasants would bring a wassail bowl, offer a drink to the homeowner in exchange for gifts and food. So kind of if you're wassailing or wasling. Wassling. Wassling, you're walking around with your wassle bowl and you're, you know, offering little sips and drips of liquor and whatever to homeowners. You're going house by house. But in some cases, right, there was kind of like this topsy turvy day celebrated around this time. I think especially in ancient Rome. And peasants would go into the rich, you know, the homes of the rich and rob them and take their it was like this backwards day.
SPEAKER_03:Fuck yeah, eat the rich.
SPEAKER_01:Like the purge a bit, but only against the rich.
SPEAKER_03:You gotta watch the purge. You got a lot of false assumptions.
SPEAKER_01:Who knew what a Christmas movie it would turn out to be? Ancient Rome was known for a similar festival. One week before the winter solstice, Romans would celebrate Saturnalia, named for the god Saturn, with celebrations of food and drink. It's described as quote, a wild and delirious time in a pagan origins documentary on YouTube, a time meant to turn the social order on its head. It would it right, so the idea was that it was celebrating the disorder of the universe.
SPEAKER_03:Heck yeah.
SPEAKER_01:The more wealthy Romans had far more serious celebrations. They would worship Mithra, known as the god of the unconquerable sun. We talk about some of this on the Yule episode that we had a few years ago, I think in 2021. But it to me, this is like one of the most poignant parts of kind of understanding the very complicated history of this holiday. The birthday of Mithra, December 25th, was the holiest day of the year. So the birthday, right, of this unconquerable son, God, was December 25th.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:We know Jesus was born in the spring, but this is the exact We know? Yes. And this is kind of the exact idea that, okay, Christianity was spreading across Europe. There was an existing force and you know, layer of people who believed in these pagan holidays and traditions, one of them being worshiping the god Mithra on December 25th. So instead of saying, okay, you now worship Jesus in the spring, they kind of very slowly reskin these holidays and festivals so that it's an easier pill to swallow, right? And there's less resistance to it. So Mithra was believed to have been born out of a rock and onto a field, and shepherds had come to worship him. There's tons of ties here between this and the biblical origins of Jesus. At first, the resurrection of Jesus was actually much more important than his birthday, right? And that's what happens, I think, around Easter. Actually, I'm probably not the person to provide any information on Jesus' timelines, but I'm trying. I think there's a book about it. So we just looked it up, and actually, there's not a clear Jesus birthday in the Bible. There's some historical texts that lead us to believe that it was in the spring. And sort of because it was open-ended and because there was this existing massive holy holiday, you know, here we are. But fast forwarding a bit, by the 1820s, it became common to buy Christmas gifts for your loved ones around the holidays. And by the 1840s, some of those advertisements included imagery of Santa Claus. And the imagery of Santa Claus that we know today largely comes from Coca-Cola.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, screw them.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I do love a Coca Cola.
SPEAKER_03:Ah, who doesn't? Another fun soda fact. So while we were seeing the hit movie Werewolves, uh, we were at a theater that only had Pepsi products. So naturally, I ordered a Dr. Pepper.
SPEAKER_01:Because down with Pepsi, really.
SPEAKER_03:And did you know that Dr. Pepper is independently owned by the Dr. Pepper Corporation? I did not. And it's bottled by Pepsi, but it's half-owned by Coke. So it's they're really just this total chaos free agent that they normally associate with Pepsi, but you could find it anywhere.
SPEAKER_01:So we got root beer.
SPEAKER_03:We did get root beer.
SPEAKER_01:In 1822, twas the night before Christmas, a poem by Clement Clark Moore was released.
SPEAKER_03:That's song with a mouse, right?
SPEAKER_01:That's right. The poem gave Santa his supernatural power, right? Where he flies to each children child's house at night, he gets down their chimney somehow. Like the poem really, I guess, creates the rules of Santa Claus as we know them today. I'm gonna quote again from the History.com article, quote, in 1881, political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew on Moore's poem to create the first likeness that matches our modern image of Santa Claus. His cartoon, which appeared in Harper's Weekly, depicted Santa as a rotund, cheerful man with a full white beard, holding a sack laden with toys for lucky children. It is Nast who gave Santa his bright red suit trimmed with white fur, North Pole Workshop, Elves and his wife, Mrs. Claus, end quote.
SPEAKER_03:He gave him his wife? Times were different.
SPEAKER_01:This evolution of Santa Claus runs parallel in some ways with the English folklore of Father Christmas. From the 1500s up until the 19th century, Father Christmas was a symbol and not a supernatural mythical entity, meaning he was sort of like an allegorical figure and not so much something that people really believed in.
SPEAKER_03:And and what exactly did Father Christmas do?
SPEAKER_01:Good question, Alan. His main role was to bring cheer to parties and not bring gifts to kids. Wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So he was like a hype man.
SPEAKER_01:Again, this was before Christmas as we know it today, right? This was when Christmas was like, let's get drunk. So a lot of what we're about to talk about now, which is a few different versions of kind of like these Father Christmas type beings, the idea was like that they presided over partying. This is mainly because Christmas celebrations up until this point were focused on adults and not families, you know, kids and gift giving and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, those suck.
SPEAKER_01:A historic York tradition around this time was called Yule ridings. It entailed a man dressed up as Yule, as a personified.
SPEAKER_03:What would that look like?
SPEAKER_01:Carrying meat and cakes through town and throwing nuts into the crowd and at onlookers. Get you nuts! I'm picturing it as like the last ghost in a Christmas, a Christmas carol, you know? Just like a kind of like a jolly man in like a robe who looks like a hunter kind of.
SPEAKER_03:Just I just imagine, like, you know, sometimes he's, you know, throwing peanuts, sometimes it's like, you know, walnuts, and every so often he sees someone he hates. Yeah. He throws coconuts.
SPEAKER_01:In 1572, this tradition was banned because it caused too much drama and was too quote rude and barbaric. Yeah, he's chucking coconuts. We should also mention the Lords of Misrule.
SPEAKER_03:Wait, why does that sound so familiar?
SPEAKER_01:Because we have a body wash in our shower called that from Lush.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:That's it.
SPEAKER_01:Or known in Scotland as an abbot of unreason. So this was an official who was appointed during Christmastide to rule over the feast of fools. Generally, this appointment was given to a peasant, and the results were quite debaucherous, right? So this is somewhat similar to what we just talked about for ancient Rome, where the peasants were given this power, they would invade the homes of the rich. It's kind of the same idea, right? You always make the Lord of misrule who kind of gets to be in charge for a day, king for a day, is a peasant typically. These traditions and similar ones of festivals around January 1st date back thousands of years. So the Feast of Fools is more aligned with January 1st. But again, all of this shit is so close together on the calendar, it all has kind of shifted and combined into Christmas as we know it today.
SPEAKER_03:January 1st is the Feast of Fools. That's right. It's kind of fun. How do we celebrate?
SPEAKER_01:So we celebrate by partaking in like role reversal, right?
SPEAKER_03:Oh, a little role play.
SPEAKER_01:We can elect a quote unquote mock leader. We can dress up in costumes. We can um exchange funny parodies of religious ceremonies.
SPEAKER_03:Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_01:Um, we could dance, we could sing, we could get, we could take part in like some lighthearted, very, very vanilla mischief. Such as I think that's for us to decide. But really, what we want to do is embrace the spirit of temporary chaos.
SPEAKER_03:Temporary chaos.
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Should we start celebrating? I actually think this is quite funny.
SPEAKER_03:It does sound pretty fun. Uh I we really gotta flesh this out though. I really need some clarification on you know what is light mischief.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think we're not gonna hurt anyone. We're not gonna kill anyone. Right. But it's like maybe we'll toilet paper somebody's bac bathroom.
SPEAKER_03:Toilet paper someone's bathroom?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Or like we don't have yards here.
SPEAKER_03:Who the hell toilet someone that just looks like someone got a little out of control.
SPEAKER_01:No. Okay, but we'll like flip everyone's furniture upside down.
SPEAKER_03:Wow. I was thinking like peanut butter on a door handle. Is that too much?
SPEAKER_01:No, that's okay. I mean, it depends on the person.
SPEAKER_03:It's fucking dogs love it.
SPEAKER_01:Unless that dog has a peanut allergy.
SPEAKER_03:Does that happen with dogs? I have no idea. It's fucking dumb.
SPEAKER_01:What we do know is that on January 1st, in the year 400, of our Lord, a bishop in modern day Turkey preached against the feast of Calends. So I side note here, Calends refers to the first day of the month in the Roman calendar, and it's where we get the term calendar from.
SPEAKER_03:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. But anyway, the bishop took issue with the feast. His sermon talked about the mock king from antiquity and the tradition of the feast which included children visiting different houses and exchanging gifts for rewards. Quoting from his sermon, quote, This festival teaches even the little children, artless and simple, to be greedy and accustoms them to go from house to house and to offer novel gifts, fruits covered with silver tinsel. For these they receive, in return, gifts double their value, and thus tender minds of the young begin to be impressed with that which is commercial and sordid. And then jumping ahead in the quote a little bit, we celebrate the birth of Christ, since at this time God manifested himself in the flesh. We celebrate the Feast of Lights, Epiphany, since by the forgiveness of our sins, we are led forth from the dark prison of our former life into a life of light and uprightness.
SPEAKER_03:Please go on.
SPEAKER_01:This one is from the sixteen hundreds in Tudor England. John Stowe wrote this in his Survey of London from 1603. Again, this is about the feasts of misrule. Quote, in the feast of Christmas, there was in the king's house, wheresoever he was lodged, a lord of misrule, or master of fairy disports. And the like had ye in the house sorry, this is in like old English, so bear with me. And the like had ye in the house of every nobleman of honor or good worship. And the like had ye were his spiritual or temporal, amongst the which the mayor of London, in either of the sheriffs had their several lords of misrule, ever contending without quarrel or offense, who should make the rarest pastimes to delight the beholders. These lords, beginning their rule on Alholan Eve, which is pointed out to be Halloween, continued the same till the morrow after the feast of purification, commonly called Candlemass Day, in all which space there were fine and subtle distinguishes, masks and mummies, with playing at cards for counters, nails and points in every house, more for pastimes than for gain, end quote. The custom was banned in England in the seventeenth century.
SPEAKER_02:Why?
SPEAKER_01:Because it was too chaotic.
SPEAKER_02:Sounds fun.
SPEAKER_01:And in the nineteenth century there was a shift to more of a religious form of worship. We talk about this tradition a bit in our History of Yule episode from 2022, I guess, which really goes into the pre-Christian pagan celebrations in a deeper way. I would suggest listening to both episode 52 and 92 for more on some of these topics. But let's talk about a creature who has become a figurehead for Christmas horror. Rudolph. Traditionally, across Austria's Alpine folklore and some parts of Germany, Krampus was said to visit children on the night of December 5th, the day before the feast of St. Nicholas. While well behaved children will be rewarded with gifts and treats from Saint Nick, Krampus was known to punish bad children. Again, get ready for this theme to recur over and over again.
SPEAKER_03:We had a whole Krampus episode, right?
SPEAKER_01:We did, but it was like episode five. It was horrifying.
SPEAKER_03:Was it over Christmas?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:That's good.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think so. Many believe Krampus dates back to pagan times. In some ways, Krampus is similar to Germany's Belschnickel, except that Belschnickel works alone without Saint Nick hovering over his shoulder. So, right, Krampus and Saint Nick are sort of like a good cop, bad cop sort of pairing. Belschnickel is a single single man on his own.
SPEAKER_03:Belschnickel is all alone.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. Krampus is believed to be inspired by other earlier creatures, mainly Perchin and Straggle. Percha is a figure that fits in the same mold as many of these other holiday creatures do. On New Year's Eve, Percha is said to roam around and punish those who have misbehaved and reward well-behaved folks. Quoting from the Atlas Obscura article, quote, Her punishment of choice involves slashing open your stomach so she may violently rip out your intestines, which are then replaced by straw rocks and garbage. It sucks. The tradition of having goose for Christmas is sometimes linked to witches like Percha, who is often depicted as having a goose foot, along with the belief that goose fat enabled witches to fly.
SPEAKER_03:Is that true?
SPEAKER_01:It is true. In many places, such as Switzerland, Percha rides with a throng of demon-like helpers, known as Straggle, who love to partake in the feast of offerings left out for them on Christmas by people hoping for Percha's blessings of wealth and health in the new year. In some places, Straggle get to dole out the punishment themselves, and aren't terribly discerning as they rob all bad children and tear them into pieces in the air. End quote. So again, this is somewhat similar to this idea of Santa and his reindeer and leaving out treats for kind of the accompanying, you know, horde.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I understand, but it sounds way more fun.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I agree. We can certainly celebrate anything we want in our household. Quoting from John J. Honigman's 1975 observations of celebrations in Styria. Quote The St. Nicholas Festival we are describing incorporates cultural elements widely distributed in Europe. Saint Nicholas himself became popular in Germany around the 11th century. The feast dedicated to this patron of children is only one winter occasion in which children are objects of special attention. Martinmus, the Feast of the Holy Innocence, and New Year's Day. Massed devils acting boisterously and making nuisances of themselves are known in Germany since at least the 16th century, while animal masked devils combining dreadful comic antics appeared in medieval church plays. A large literature, much of it by European folklorists, bears on these subjects. Austrians in the community we have studied are quite aware of heathen elements being blended with Christian elements in the St. Nicholas customs and in other traditional winter ceremonies. They believe Krampus derives from a pagan supernatural who was assimilated to the Christian devil, end quote. Belschnickel is similar to Krampus in some ways. He hails from a region of Germany in the southwest along the Rhine River. Belschnickel is often depicted as a man who wears furs and a mask. Similar to Krampus, he is also depicted as having a long tongue, a very creepy detail.
SPEAKER_03:What kind so he has a mask and a long tongue?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Can you describe the mask then?
SPEAKER_01:So the idea is that he, I think underneath his mask, looks like a man and he wants to make himself scarier to children.
SPEAKER_03:So he looks like a dude with a really long tongue. But he puts on some kind of spooky mask.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so there's tons of different kinds of variations. Some in some is described as a wooden mask bearing a friendly visage.
SPEAKER_03:I'm googling Belschnickel. I don't know, Abby. Belschnickel just kind of looks like a like a drifter, you know? Like he looks like very rip van winkley.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, exactly. But he sometimes wears a mask to freak people out. And I think that can kind of depend on region to region or year to year.
SPEAKER_03:I understand.
SPEAKER_01:So similar to Krampus, he walks around with a switch in order to punish poorly behaved children. So some believe that Belschnickel is based on Farmhand Rupert, which is an even older story from Germanic folklore. Farmhand Rupert is an associate of St. Nicholas. Rupert dates back to the 17th century in written texts. And he was an incredibly popular figure locally, but isn't broadly known outside of the region. And you kind of get that where you have all these different versions and they're very like hyper-localized, but generally have very similar characteristics. Across the Holy Roman Empire and its surrounding regions, the companions of Saint Nicholas were known to accompany Saint Nick and acted as foils to him, generally meant to punish poorly behaved children, while Saint Nick rewards well-behaved children with presents. And we can see how this, you know, is one of those parent parenting tools that is very easy and helpful. Firmhand Rupert generally wears a white robe, again a mask, and a flax wig. Sometimes he is depicted as walking with a limp from a childhood injury. In Italy, La Bufana, who with shout out to my friend Allie who introduced me to La Bufana, why does that sound so familiar? Is a folklore witch. I don't know. She delivers gifts to children on Epiphany night, the night of January 5th.
SPEAKER_03:Epiphany night? That's kind of fun.
SPEAKER_01:She is depicted as a grandmotherly type woman, sometimes again described as a witch. Some sources describe her as filling up stockings with small gifts and trinkets. Not only does she fill socks with toys and gifts as they hang above the fire, but she also tends to clean up a bit before she leaves. So she's she's generally very helpful.
SPEAKER_03:That's great.
SPEAKER_01:But let's talk a little bit about the feast of Epiphany because I didn't know much or anything about it before researching this.
SPEAKER_03:Same.
SPEAKER_01:So this is a feast that celebrates the visit of the Magi or the wise men to the baby Jesus. Or in some cases, it's the celebration of the baptism of Jesus. It happens on January 6th, traditionally.
SPEAKER_03:When was LBJ baptized?
SPEAKER_01:Little baby Jesus? Yeah. Well, I don't know the answer to that. But it's just a feast commemorating that. It can also be known as Three Kings Day. The night before Epiphany Eve is also known as Twelfth Night. Again, another reference to this Twelve. Celebrations can be marked with winter swimming, I guess doing like a polar plunge, removing Christmas decorations, eating Three Kings cake, or chalking the door.
SPEAKER_03:What is Three Kings cake?
SPEAKER_01:I actually only know what King's Cake is, which is a New Orleans tradition. I don't know what's going on.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I've had King's Cake.
SPEAKER_01:King's Cake is where they have the little figure of the baby in it and then Whoever gets that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Like what what is it?
SPEAKER_01:It's a thing.
SPEAKER_03:What if you get it, what happens?
SPEAKER_01:Whoever finds the baby Jesus figuring is blessed.
SPEAKER_03:Oh.
SPEAKER_01:And they are supposed to, I guess, take the figure to the nearest church on Candlemass Day. So I guess it is kind of related to this. Interesting that it has prevailed in New Orleans of all places.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I I think it is just the same thing, just different terms.
SPEAKER_01:And the other thing that they traditionally do is chalk the door, which um What's that? Just blessing the home.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, this is well.
SPEAKER_01:Something on the door that is like a blessing for the house.
SPEAKER_03:Big old pentagram.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, exactly. Bafana is similar in some ways to Babushka, who hails from Russia and parts of Eastern Europe. These witchy figures are often to believe to have been derived from Mother Holly, which I had never heard of. Mother Holly is known for her huge teeth. She's also believed to be the kind of thing that causes snow by shaking out her feather pillows and bedding, and that's the thing that causes snow.
SPEAKER_03:It's disgusting.
SPEAKER_01:Alright, I have another one for you. Another kind of monster Christmas creature that I'm really excited to discuss.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, hit me. Let me guess. Okay. It's Germanic.
SPEAKER_01:No. What? Celtic and British.
SPEAKER_03:Oh.
SPEAKER_01:Mary Lude, the Christmas zombie horse is a folk custom from Wales.
SPEAKER_03:Mary Lude, the Christmas zombie horse. Just making sure I get that right. That's right. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:In Celtic and British folklore, white horses were believed to be able to travel to the underworld, suggesting that the white color of this horse isn't arbitrary. Quoting from a Wales.com article on the history of this folklore, quote, the origins of Mary's name are, like the horse herself, deeply mysterious. One Welsh translation of it, Grey Mare, connects it to the heritage of pale horses in Celtic and British mythology, many of whom can cross over to the underworld. The other translation for Mary Lude is Grey Mary. Some scholars have linked her to a legend connected to the Nativity story, a pregnant horse sent out of the stables when Mary arrived to have Jesus. She spent dark days roaming the land, trying to find somewhere new to have a foal. Many Mary fans believe the character to have come from pre-Christian pagan origins, however. This is impossible to prove, but there's definitely something timeless and terrifying about her.
SPEAKER_03:And in case you aren't familiar with a hobby horse pole, just look up hobby horsing because it's a whole sport.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's hilarious.
SPEAKER_03:Also, the pictures of the Christmas zombie horse are amazing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, she's very cool.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. It's kind of weird.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It's wild. The puppet is taken around the town along with other similar figurines, like a jester sometimes. This usually happens between Christmas Day and 12th night. Mary is dressed up in lights and colorful seasonal decorations. Each time she and her entourage arrive at a house, traditional songs are sung and a battle of wits takes place. Mary and her entourage try to gain entry to the home by exchanging rhyming insults with the residents. If Mary wins, the house is thought to have good luck for the year to come. So you want to let her win. A rap battle, if you will. A Welsh Christmas Day rap battle of wits.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. But you gotta let them win.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, if you let her win, then you have good luck.
SPEAKER_03:But is it obvious like can you just let me know? I don't know the nuance of it. You know?
SPEAKER_01:I imagine it's more fun to put up a little bit of a fight.
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely, but then what if you put up too good of a fight?
SPEAKER_01:I know.
SPEAKER_03:Shit. Shit.
SPEAKER_01:There are also a few Scandinavian monsters to mention. Gorilla hails from Iceland and truly scares me to my core.
SPEAKER_03:Gorilla?
SPEAKER_01:G-R-Y-L-A.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. Not a gorilla. Not like the big prime ape.
SPEAKER_01:No, I'll tell you about her. She is a giant angry troll who is always starving for children. On Christmas, she is known to come down from her mountainous home and hunt for children to eat, especially poorly behaved ones. Once she finds them, she throws them in a sack, brings them to the mountain, boils them, and turns them into a stew. Her sons, thirteen of them, are known as the Yule Lads. Yule lads. They're just a bunch of Yule lads.
SPEAKER_03:And I assume they're trolls as well.
SPEAKER_01:They are described as similar to Snow White's dwarves. The Yule lads each have a special defining characteristic. Quoting from the Atlas Obscure article quote Most of them are depicted as mischievous pranksters and petty criminals. Icelandic children are visited each night on the 13 days leading up to Christmas by a different Yule lad. Including such charmers as Sheepcoat Clog, a peg-legged sheep fancier.
SPEAKER_03:Sheepclo Sheepco So what?
SPEAKER_01:You heard me. Gully Hawk, who hides out in ditches and gullies and waits for an opportune moment to run into the cowshed and lick the foam off the milk in the milking bucket. Fuck. Stubby, whose name denotes his stature as he is unusually short. Spoon licker, a licker and thief of spoons.
SPEAKER_03:You fucking spoon licker.
SPEAKER_01:Pot scraper, who is a petty thief of leftovers.
SPEAKER_03:These all sound like slurs.
SPEAKER_01:Bowl licker, who hides under your bed and waits for you to absentmindedly put down your bowl so he can steal it and yes, lick it. Why are you why do you have a bowl in bed? Door slammer, that's you, who slams doors all night. Skeer gobbler, who eats skier yogurt, sausage swiper, who steals sausage, window peeper, who watches you from the windows, doorway sniffer.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, you've just every one of these, with very few exceptions, has described a normal dog.
SPEAKER_01:Doorway sniffer, who uses his incredibly large nose to sniff through doors to find bread. Meat hook, who always brings a hook along with him so that he can steal meat, and candle stealer, who follows children around so he can steal their candles, leaving them in the dark. End quote. Wow. That's like one of my favorite bits of new information in this episode. The Yule Lads. I think we should celebrate them leading up to Christmas this year. Thirteen days of the Yule Lads.
SPEAKER_03:It's kind of fun.
SPEAKER_01:Except we don't have any um cows to like eat the froth of.
SPEAKER_03:Well, that's the whole point.
SPEAKER_01:If we did, then we have to be wary. I see.
SPEAKER_03:Hold on. He licked the froth.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Why why is that bad? Because it's not his froth. I don't know. I think maybe the top is the froth. Did they turn it into like cream or something?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, if you let it sit, cream is on cream rises to the top.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so he's probably eating the cream.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. I remember this was just like some like old school grandparent shit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Where, you know, whoever got up, I remember my grandfather saying, you know, he grew up with five siblings. And, you know, whoever got up early to bring in the milk because you had this milk delivery guy, right? They could pop it open and they could just drink the cream off the top, and then everyone else in the family would be really mad because the cream was gone.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Uh and it was just like what, skim milk at that point?
SPEAKER_01:No. Then it's just like I guess I don't know how milk works. Just regular milk.
SPEAKER_03:No, I th well it's skim. So whole milk is just when it's been homogenized. So that's when the cream and the skim has like become milk, I think.
SPEAKER_01:They even it out.
SPEAKER_03:I don't know. I don't, you know, I'm not really up on my milk facts. Yeah. It's I mean, I I have a degree in milcology, um, but it's from the University of Phoenix.
SPEAKER_01:And we also have to mention the Yule Cat, the known pet of Gorilla and her Yule lads. The Yule Cat doesn't care if you've been naughty or nice, it will only refrain from eating you if you offer it a new piece of clothing each Christmas.
SPEAKER_03:It's amazing. New sweaters.
SPEAKER_01:So those are the new Christmas friends that we've met this year and we're excited to celebrate. But there's also a Victorian era tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve, which is my favorite thing to remind people of every holiday season.
SPEAKER_03:You say so, but then we just keep coming back to a Christmas carol. And it's like, what else is there to say?
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's talk about it. This is not random at all.
SPEAKER_03:Sounds pretty random.
SPEAKER_01:The folk tradition dates back hundreds of years across Europe. But because the Puritans were opposed to it, it didn't come to America in a meaningful way. So this was a big deal, right? This was a big part of this time of year across Europe and and it just never really made it over here. There are even references to this tradition in the works of Shakespeare in The Winter's Tale, when Mamlus claims he is the perfect winter story to tell of spirits and goblins. Even one of my favorite ghost stories of all time, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, frames the story using Christmas Eve.
SPEAKER_03:Does it?
SPEAKER_01:So the story starts, right? The frame of the story is literally a group of men who are telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve.
SPEAKER_03:And they're telling the story of the turn of the screw?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:And and so the turn of the screw is like famously an ambiguous story, right? It's always the story people point to when we look back at the trope, this ghost story trope of is the person delusional or is it paranormal?
SPEAKER_03:It's the unreliable narrator.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And one of the reasons why people will argue that it is actually, you know, paranormal is because it's being told as a ghost story.
SPEAKER_03:I gotcha. But the the story itself has nothing to do with Christmas.
SPEAKER_01:Just the frame.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Quoting from the Smithsonian magazine article by Colin Dickey, quote, at the same time that the tradition of Christmas ghosts had begun to ossify, losing the initial spiritual charge that drove its popularity, a new tradition was being imported from across the Atlantic, carried by the huge wave of Scottish and Irish immigrants coming to America, Halloween. The holiday as we know it is an odd hybrid of Celtic and Catholic traditions. It borrows heavily from the ancient pagan holiday, Salwyn, which celebrates the end of harvest season and the onset of winter. As with numerous other pagan holidays, Salwyn was in time merged with the Catholic festival of All Souls Day, which could also be tinged towards obsessions of the dead into Halloween, a time when the dead were revered. The boundaries between this life and the afterlife were thinnest, and when ghosts and goblins ruled the night. End quote. So, yes, Alan, I am going to talk a little bit about a Christmas carol because it is in fact the most famous Christmas story of all time and the most famous ghost story of all time.
SPEAKER_03:Do you think it's the most famous Christmas story?
SPEAKER_01:I think it's one of them.
SPEAKER_03:I would say that would be the story of the birth of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01:Sure, yeah. It actually makes a lot of sense that this story is both, though. A Christmas carol was written almost two hundred years ago, and it still endures to this day. Names like Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and Bob Cratchit still mean something to modern day folks. Which I think is quite the feat, right? It's it's rare.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, yeah, it was all but forgotten until the Muppets came around.
SPEAKER_01:The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future still remain relevant. This is partially due to remakes and retellings of a Christmas carol across mediums. For instance, the Muppets Christmas Carol from 1992, and more than 100 other renditions. And at least 20 TV shows have used the format for episodes, right? So they kind of have their own spin on the same format.
SPEAKER_03:That might be Michael Cain's best work.
SPEAKER_01:I don't disagree. Charles Dickens was born into a middle class family in 1812, and his father was taken to a debtor's prison by the time that he was 12 years old. Dickens was forced to sell his beloved collection of books as a way to bring in money for his family. And he also had to drop out of school and start work at this very rat-infested shoe blacking factory where they made shoe polish. As an adult, Dickens became a fairly prolific author. Many biographers attribute his creative drive to the hard times he experienced in his early life. A Christmas Carol was not his first story about the holiday. In 1835, his story Christmas Festivities was published, and it was republished a year later with the name A Christmas Dinner.
SPEAKER_03:So lame.
SPEAKER_01:The story of the goblins who stole a sextant was published in 1863 as well, which some believe to be an earlier version of a Christmas carol, but either way, it shows you, right, the popularity of Christmas ghost stories that he's he's writing many of them every year. In October of 1843, Dickens started to write a Christmas carol. He finished writing it in six weeks, finishing up the last pages in early December of 1843. Famously, he originally composed much of the story in his head while he took up to 20 mile walks at night. Dickens' sister-in-law wrote how he quote, wept and laughed and wept again and excited himself in the most extraordinary manner in composition, end quote. The story was originally published on December 19th with the title A Christmas Carol in Prose, being a ghost story of Christmas. Despite a somewhat expensive price of five shillings each, the 6,000 original first edition copies sold quickly. More editions were printed and sold over the next year, and legal battles over the copyright sprang up, but Dickens won them. And there's actually something to be said here about like the innovations around this time in the printing press, because up until this point, you have people who have this tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve, right? But it's all word of mouth, like the same stories, you know, your family would always tell, and that's kind of how they travel through the community and through time and generations.
SPEAKER_03:Right, because everyone's illiterate.
SPEAKER_01:And then when you get the invention of the printing press or, you know, the kind of these industrial revolution technologies, you can then make money off of this because it has this nostalgic interest, right? People want to own this thing that they've kind of grown up listening to.
SPEAKER_03:Wait a minute. You're saying somebody would commercialize nostalgia?
SPEAKER_01:You're right. That seems unlikely. So that that actually has a lot to do with kind of solidifying this practice and shifting it into something different, right? Because even before that, and then even after that, there's, you know, listening to stories on the radio because that's all people had. It was it was all very oral. Dickens was 31 years old at the time of publication. For Dickens, a Christmas carol was more than just a spooky holiday ghost story. The story is rich in social commentary, which makes sense given what we know about his life.
SPEAKER_03:That's right. It was also a giant paycheck.
SPEAKER_01:He was often reflecting on the vast delta between classes and those living in poverty. But despite all of this, Dickens was unable to convince Mark Twain of his story. Dickens came to the U.S. to read his own story to audiences. He is credited as the first writer to do this. Mark Twain had this to say, quote, there is no heart, no feeling, it is nothing but glittering frost work, end quote. Though perhaps the association between holiday cheer and horror seems out of place in modern times, it's actually perfectly aligned when we really dig into the sprawling and varied history of this time of year, from allegorical Christmas monsters meant to scare children into good behavior throughout the year, Belshnickel, to the tradition of exchanging scary stories on Christmas Eve. Generally, December and January have not only been the coldest and darkest periods of the year for Western cultures, it's also been a time of year filled with festivals and holidays, dating back to the earliest of pagans. So how does all this translate to modern day horror? There are really only a few Christmas horror movies that I can think of that really honor the folklore and tropes that they are inspired by.
SPEAKER_03:That's just because you haven't done your research.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'll let you chime in. But obviously, one that comes to mind for me is Krampus from 2015, which stars Adam Scott and Tony Collette. It's a great example of kind of in a very meta way acknowledging the history of this folklore, and you know, it's kind of the grandmother who's from the old country brings it about. Rare Exports is also a really good example of this. In this case, it brings Finnish folklore to life. And then, of course, you have Christmas horror films that simply play with a juxtaposition of horror and Christmas cheer. For instance, Anna and the Apocalypse from 2017, Gremlins from 1984, It's a Wonderful Knife from 2023, and Black Christmas from 1974. But Alan, we did watch quite a few Christmas horror movies, and you watched many.
SPEAKER_03:What was the one with the animatronic Santa?
SPEAKER_01:Christmas, Bloody Christmas?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that was cool. Yeah, that one's a good one. That's a good that's a good solid horror movie. It's a fun romp of a slasher that uses Christmas as the perfect needed horror trope of why the fuck is nobody else around. Sure. And why can't I just call for help? Because it's Christmas. No one w no one's taking you seriously. Uh in this case, you know, there's an animatronic Santa just rampaging.
SPEAKER_01:I would argue that films like that are playing with Christmas less of like a mechanic to eliminate the ability for people to help, but more so to like juxtapos like to to create like this huge delta between what this day should be and what it has turned out to be.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, absolutely. So, you know, Christmas Bloody Christmas is just a solid holiday horror movie. However, we just watched um Red Snow. And so that is a Christmas vampire movie.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:And that is the perfect example of no one's around because they're all away for Christmas, and that is why the person is left to deal with this all on their own.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, I think Better Watch Out is also like a somewhat similar version. It it's not taking people away, but like, you know, the parents are at a holiday party, and I don't know. I I it's it's that one I think particularly plays with the the Delta a bit because it's also I don't want to give anything away about it because I think it's an interesting watch, but it also I think is trying to just every step of the way surprise you.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, and it does such a good job of it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so much so that I I'm kind of uncomfortable with it. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_03:It's a great movie, don't listen to it all. Uh but I did what I never do, and I read the description of the film in the little thumbnail.
SPEAKER_01:Before you watched it.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. Yeah. And even with that, they subvert your expectations so well.
SPEAKER_01:It's good marketing.
SPEAKER_03:It was great. So high-Cause you really think you know what's gonna happen and they're it seems like a very paint by numbers, and it is not.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So that was Better Watch Out from 2016. Uh the whole reason why we decided to do this again was that I feel like in the last few years, they have just pumped out so, so many Christmas horror movies.
SPEAKER_01:A thousand percent.
SPEAKER_03:It really started in like 2015.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Maybe I mean there's there's ones from before that for sure. But starting in 2015 and then 2016 and 17 really exploded. And, you know, we did our episode, we watched a bunch of those. But then just like the last couple years, so many have come out. Like earlier we mentioned uh There's Something in the Barn. And that one is like rife with mythology and is a perfect Christmas horror movie. We also finally got around to watching Gremlins, despite the fact that it's like a staple of this topic. It's very much a horror movie that's not very scary.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's like it's like a horror movie for feature.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's a it's a it's a gentle. Yes. But it it's it's actually kind of terrifying, you know, just how quickly things get out of control. Yeah. Uh however, I will say that the mom in Gremlins is one of the I I just love when you have like smart protagonists.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, she's great.
SPEAKER_03:Everyone's like, you know, disbelieving, you know, being like, hey little guy, what are you up to? But she immediately goes into murder mode.
SPEAKER_01:My favorite moment is when she grabs a knife and then pauses and grabs a second knife. Yeah, it's it's great.
SPEAKER_03:Uh she is just we we love a smart protagonist. Yes. She in in Ripley should just go to town on the the the for the gremlin's xenomorph crossover.
SPEAKER_01:There you go. Violent night is also a pretty good, like, standard horror slasher movie. I liked that one quite a bit. I also want to call it, of course, Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas from 1993, which I know a lot of people debate when is the appropriate time of year to watch it. I argue that it's a Christmas movie. Doesn't have to be for you, but I think it just makes sense to kind of watch it once you've, you know, when you're in the middle of the holidays versus on either end of it. Hosts from 2020. I also really, really love The Lodge from 2019, which is not cheerful or, you know, I think a lot of these Christmas horror movies have this like upbeat, cheerful energy that you, you know, kind of expect around Christmas time or in a Christmas horror film. The Lodge from 2019 is not that at all. It is bleak and depressing and horrifying, but I like that there's something that's a little bit different in this list. The Curse of the Cat people from 1944, speaking of things that are a bit different. And then, of course, you have the sacrifice game from last year, which is from our friends, directed by Jen Wexler and I believe written by Sean Redlitz and Jen Wexler. We love it a lot. We think it's really, really great. And one of the Christmas horror films on this list, I think that surprises you and plays with stuff that's like a little bit different from being hyper holiday driven, which is really fun. And just in general, I enjoy snow horror, you know, like winter horror because I think there's something, you know, obviously the shining is such a great example of that. But I think there's something very isolating and universal about being snowed in, losing power, being stuck somewhere, being stuck somewhere without food or you know, access to things that can be, you know, really that can be really powerful as a mechanic to add in a horror movie.
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely. You know, when people are isolated. It's just another great mechanic for why people can't leave.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And then if you introduce something paranormal or whatever, or slasher, a villain, things get crazy.
SPEAKER_03:You know, ever in all these juxtapos juxtaposed over the like the warm, wholesome idea of Christmas, like that's horror in a nutshell. You want to take something comfortable and make it very uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, Alan, if people are gonna go out and watch one Christmas horror film after listening to this, what do you suggest?
SPEAKER_03:Ooh, um, if you're looking for something with some uh holiday cheer, I would say Christmas bloody Christmas. If you want something steeped in some good lore, some sorry, if you want something steeped in accurate lore, go for something's in the barn. If you wanna, you know, maybe learn a a thing or two.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Uh if you don't care about accurate lore and just love lore, right? Uh check out Krampus from 2015. Uh, I don't think it's a uh canonically accurate Krampus. Sure. But holy crap is he cool. Uh one of my favorite movie monsters, I'd say.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, nice.
SPEAKER_03:If you're and if you're looking for something Christmassy, but also just like a very unique movie, check out It's a Wonderful Knife. Please have watched It's a Wonderful Life beforehand because it's needed. But regardless, it's a great film.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and then the two that I would just throw in there as well would be Rare Exports from 2010, it's so good. Very, very unique. And again, it's Finnish folklore, so it's something if you haven't seen, you know, I think it'll be net new to a lot of people. It's not folklore that is, you know, very broadly understood. And the other one that I'll mention is Anna and the Apocalypse from 2017, which is so fun. It is a musical zombie Christmas movie. The music's actually really, really good. I saw it in theaters when it came out, and it's one of those films that has stuck with me. And I think it is it's a great, great, great film. Super fun to watch. It feels festive and terrifying. And if you like musicals, it's a no-brainer. Finally, if all of that wasn't enough, I want to direct you to Lunatics Library episodes 15 and 44, which both contain really special holiday horror stories. And they really honor this tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve, which I love so much. Thank you all for revisiting these episodes with me. It's a bit of a it was a bit of a time capsule to put this together, and it's been really fun to revisit the catalog and you know, listen back to how we were doing things years ago. We over here at Lunatics hope you all have a safe, warm, and cozy holiday season for those of you who celebrate any holidays and festivities. For those of you who celebrate any holidays and festivities this time of year. Stay spooky, stay safe, we'll talk to you soon.
