197: No Such Thing As Eurovision For Christmas Trees

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Up the Creek in Greenwich, London.

My name is Dan Shriver and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones but this time with our four favorite Christmas facts because it's our Christmas special and we're uh yep thank you

and in no particular order here we go starting with my fact my fact this week is that as well as getting a visit from Santa Claus at Christmas Icelanders also get a visit from the spoon licker

the the door sniffer

and the sausage swiper

yeah so these they do have santa there but they also have and this is what Wikipedia says, they're called Yule Lads.

They're like lads.

Lads, lads, lads, lads, lads, lads, lads.

Yeah, lads, lads, lads.

Also, sausage wiper.

Lads, lads, lads, that's that.

And I think the reason Wikipedia calls them that is because that's what they are called.

Yeah.

Right?

Oh, okay.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

I mean, I know you've fallen for fake Wikipedia facts a lot in the past,

but this is real.

I just thought that was cool, casual lingo.

I was like, yeah, I'm cool with you, Wiki.

So, yeah, they're called the Yule Lads.

And there's 13 of them in total.

Spoon Licker liquor is one.

He licks bowls.

No, he licks spoons.

But there is a bowl liquor.

There is actually a bowl liquor.

Yeah, I misread my note there.

And then covered it up like it was a joke.

There's the sausage swiper who licks spoons.

And then there.

So does the sausage swiper swipe sausages, does he?

Yeah, so he hides in the rafters of your house.

And while you go and check for your spoons, someone's lick the spoons.

You quickly head into the kitchen.

He lowers himself, I think, Tom Cruise style from Mention Impossible, gets your sausages and then gets pulled back up to the roof.

And then you come back in and go, ah, the spoons, now the sausages, what's going on?

Wow.

We've had three.

What are the other ten like?

There's a guy who

harasses sheep.

Hello.

What's his, they all have very expressive names, don't they?

Yeah, his one's not so...

Sheepcoat Clod is his name.

Yeah.

there's meat hook.

They were all thieves, basically, aren't they?

In Iceland, you just have to accept that people will come and steal all your stuff.

There's Pot Scraper, there's door.

The doorway sniffer is not someone who likes doorways, it's just someone who's smelling beyond the doorway to try and steal your food later.

But there used to be way more of them, so there used to be more than 80 Yule lads,

which is a lot to descend upon you.

And the ones that were, you know, kiboshed about mid-century were

Falder Fakir, which is skirt sweeper.

He got the shop,

and Littly Punga, which is small testicles.

What did he do?

He just went around flattering people.

Those are bigger than mine.

I've got small ones, so it's, yeah.

So

do these guys bring you anything, or do they just take things away?

They take things, well, they used to take things away, and back in the day day in 1746 the stories became so scary that they actually banned them from telling them to children because they brought them into such a sort of Stephen King-esque territory of fear that they said this is too much.

It was the Danish wasn't it who did that and not only that they banned using any stories to scare children.

Yeah.

And it was because of these guys

it wasn't only because of them.

So have you heard of Iceland's famous Christmas child-eating cat

who prowls around the country eating children on Christmas Day?

And the terrible thing is, so you know, if you're naughty or nice, you'll get presents or you get a lump of coal.

The child has no control over whether it's eaten or not.

The only thing that controls whether the child is eaten or not is whether the child got any new clothes for Christmas from its parents.

And if your parents didn't give you some socks, you're going to be eaten.

There is a slight thing with that: with if you've done all of your chores by Christmas Day, then they're supposed to give you some clothes.

But they could not.

It just,

I'm saying that really.

That would be a pretty harsh bit of parenting.

Just saying it, yeah.

It's insult to injury, isn't it?

A, you're not getting a new t-shirt, and B, you're about to be eaten by a giant cat.

Yeah, it was a big cat, though, wasn't it?

It was like the size of a house.

And it belonged to a troll, right?

So it was like in Katie Hopper.

This is all still ice

satire.

We don't do that, James.

We welcome all people in our podcast.

We honestly do not.

She is not invited to anything that would.

I'd like to publicly state, Katie Hopkins, fuck you.

That's

that satire?

Was that

satire?

My satirical show is not going down well.

Hey, Trump, fuck you.

Hey, Farage, fuck you.

Hi.

Catch you next week on Saturdays today.

What were we talking about?

Yeah, so these

Yule lads, their mother is called Grula.

She's been married three times, but she killed all of her husbands because they bored her.

Wow.

My wife is in the audience, and I'd just like to say that's not the right way to behave.

And she is the mother of the Yule lads?

No, she's just my wife.

And

she is half ogre, half troll, and I am referring here to Gruula.

And their cat is Christmas cat.

The family cat is Christmas cat.

And the cat brings, oh, the Yule lads sometimes grabbed children and brought them back to be turned into stew.

But this is all just to deter children from misbehaving.

It's not anything worse than what we do, which is Santa won't bring you presents if you're bad.

Shall we talk about Father Christmas?

Yeah, sure.

Because you know, he is leaking.

Sorry?

Wow.

His bones, Father Christmas Christmas has bones, so this is St.

Nicholas, and he has some relics, and it's kind of debatable which relics are his, but it's generally accepted that he has some in Italy, and they leak.

It's a clear liquid that is called sort of manna by the priests who guard the tomb, and it can sell for a good amount of money.

Oh, can it?

Surprising.

Wow.

But I think it's because he's in this place called Bari in Italy, which is a harbour town.

So it's below sea level, in fact.

So the harbour water tends to seep into where he's entombed.

And then every year they have this festival where

a holy fish has come in.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like the great story of Jesus.

He makes fish out of

Santa.

There's a place where, I think it's South America.

Yeah, it's parts of Latin America.

Baby, the bottom...

Hang on.

The models of baby Jesus are dressed up like Father Christmas.

Yeah, there's this weird synergy between Jesus and Father Christmas.

Really?

Yeah.

I can't find it in my nets in the song.

I am panicking like crazy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm seeing the words magic helicopter.

Yeah, well,

no.

Yeah.

So basically,

you get presents from the baby Jesus.

You don't get them from Father Christmas.

So that's why they've kind of dressed up the two traditions together.

But people ask children, how exactly does that work?

How are you getting presents from this baby?

And they variously explained, A, that he has a magic helicopter, or B, that he just hasn't, he owns all the toy shops, he's just a massive toy magnate and he can afford to give them

to children.

Do you know the reason he exists, though, is because it's too difficult for Jesus on his own to deliver all those presents.

So, um, what?

So,

so St.

Nicholas was

like a common thing.

Everyone knew about St.

Nicholas until about the 1500s.

Um, And then the Reformation came in, and Protestantism came in, and they said Jesus is the only thing.

And then it was established that there should be a festival where Jesus brings everyone presents on Christmas Day, on the day of his birth.

And then it was established that a tiny newborn baby can't handle all these presents and all this present giving.

And so Father Christmas initially was the sidekick to Jesus.

This was like

post-Reformation was the first time he became his co-deliverer of gifts because it was like, well, he's a tiny baby.

He can't actually carry all these presents.

So

St.

Nicholas joined him.

What?

But a tiny baby could fit down a chimney much more easily than a massive man.

So that was why Father Christmas brought Jesus.

It was a symbiotic relationship.

But so are there actual historical stories of the two of them like Batman Robin style just travelling?

I refer you to the word historical in that sentence.

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All right, shall we move on to our second factor?

Okay, it is time for our second fact of the show, and that is Anna.

Yep, my fact this week is that an ancient Greek form of contraception was a suppository made of frankincense, myrrh, and blister beetles.

So blister beetles are these things that secrete something called cantharidin, which I probably mispronounce, but it's this poison.

And the reason they secrete it is because they give it to their their the male gives it to the female during mating as a gift, as like a mating gift, but during sex, which is a bit weird.

And then it's to cover her eggs with it, and that stops predators from you know getting hold of it.

But it's actually very poisonous, so a tenth of a milligram can blister your skin really badly.

But this was a very common medicine, so it was used as a contraception.

You shove it up the bum and you don't get pregnant.

That is what traditionally happens when you shove it up the bum.

That Blister Beetle stuff is called Spanish Fly, I think.

And it was an aphrodisiac as well.

Yeah.

And I think I've written down Casanova and Marquis Dessard.

I can't remember which one it was, but one of them used it as

an aphrodisiac.

Marquis Dessard.

And that's what he got sent to prison for.

Sorry if you're using the Blister Beetles thing products or whatever.

I'm going going off memory, but I think that's right.

Yeah.

And the idea was it would make you itchy and you would put it down there and you would itch yourself and that would turn you on.

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

Just a bit of history.

And a good tip for the room.

But frankincense and meh, come on, let's talk about those.

It's Christmas.

Yeah.

Frankincense, a bit of a panacea.

People thought it kind of cured loads of different things.

In Oman, it still is a little bit.

It's been variously used as a stomach stomach soother, a cough remover, a blood thinner, cold medicine, wound cleaner, and fly repellent.

And it was really, really popular in Oman.

It was basically made them one of the most kind of rich countries in the world.

But not anymore because the Roman Catholic Church buys the cheap stuff from Somalia these days.

What is frankincense?

It's incense.

With the word frank at the front.

Is that really what it is?

Yeah, and frank kind of means honest or whatever.

It just means really good.

Really good incense.

Don't listen.

It's true.

I swear to God, that's true.

That is true.

Was the incense bit true?

All of it's true.

The frank bit as well?

Yeah.

Andy?

Dan, the reason I asked was because I dramatically under-researched on this fact.

But it is, and the word frank to mean sort of really good and honest, came from franks meaning French people as well, from the Roman times.

And in fact, in Roman times, it was so so important frankincense that Augustus Caesar sent 10,000 troops to invade the area where frankincense came from because he thought it was so important.

Right.

It's so weird.

It was so important frankincense.

And so it was medicinally thought to be so important.

And it was an incense.

And it's from tree sap, basically, isn't it?

Which is like myrrh.

They're both basically from tree sap and they're turned into incense.

But between 1000 BC and 400 AD, frankincense was the most lucrative trade in the world.

It was the most valuable thing in the world to be traded for like 1500 years.

It's amazing.

And in Oman, it's still a really big deal to the extent that they have, I think, roundabouts in Oman are quite famous, so they're quite well decorated with giant versions of stuff.

And in quite a lot of roundabouts in Oman, then they have giant frankincense dispensers, like properly huge, the size of a building, a frankincense dispenser in the center of a roundabout.

I did a little bit on gift-giving.

Okay, so because these blister beetles, they give a present to their mates during sex.

And so I looked up...

And also gold frankincense and there were gifts given to the baby Jesus.

There are so many links to the females.

But so you've heard of these spiders that give gifts to the females.

They're called paratrachalea ornata, and they give silk-wrapped parcels full of prey.

And it's really interesting because 70% of them give rubbish gifts, which are worthless.

They're leftovers.

It's like basically giving someone an empty

selection box, exactly.

It's like just the bounty bar left in.

Exactly.

It is exactly like that.

But basically, the male spiders, they can't help themselves from eating most of the present before they give it to the female.

Better just wrap this nice.

Oh, God, it's so...

But the spiders, it's really sensible for the spiders to give a rubbish present to the female, because the females don't judge on what's inside the parcel.

By the time they open the package, they've already pressed the button to go ahead or not go ahead with the mating.

And what they judge on is how the male looks, his physical condition.

So the main thing is good body condition.

So the males who ate their gifts were cleverer because it's better to turn up looking well-fed and in good shape, but with nothing in the box, than it is to turn up with an actual meal in the box, but you look hungry.

Yeah, and you do know that's not going to fly in your own life, don't you?

In fact, the main thing, darling, is that I look good.

I read something really interesting today.

Have you guys heard the Jesus is an alien theory?

No.

No, Jesus.

No, no, hang in there.

This one's really interesting.

So the idea is that a lot of people think that Jesus is an alien.

And

so, because they describe in the Bible that the star, they say, lo, the star which they saw in the east went before them till it came and stood over where the young child was and everyone's like how can a star move like that?

That's insane.

Maybe it wasn't a star.

Maybe it was a UFO.

Now

UFO comes guiding these three wise men three kings from very separate places who all of a sudden are hanging out.

How's that happen?

Were they like a king conference?

Like how one was from Persia, one was from India.

They were all over the shop and suddenly they're there on this site.

There weren't three of them.

That's not in the Bible.

Anyway, I'm telling a story here.

Okay, so

then you go, okay, the Immaculate Conception.

How did she have the child inside of her?

Well, that's very consistent, my friends, with an abduction where they bring you up and they place something inside you.

Not my theory.

You say...

The Virgin Murray was anally probed.

And that's the one time where the bum contraception would not work, Andy.

Because look what she had, a Jesus.

So.

I cannot believe you've done this to our show.

What do you mean?

This is.

Can I tell you something about Jesus?

Well, can I ask you something about Jesus?

Where was he born?

Bethlehem.

Incorrect.

Not Bethlehem.

He was born in Bethlehem.

So

it's a different Bethlehem.

There's a Bethlehem in Israel where everyone goes and they're like, this is the birthplace of Jesus.

But Israel has two Bethlehems.

And it turns out that the one that is much closer to Nazareth, where Jesus was born, is a totally different Bethlehem.

And archaeologists now are saying that actually we've got the wrong one.

So the place that everyone goes to celebrate the birth of Jesus is completely wrong.

It's somewhere there.

Yeah, they should be going to Area 51.

You know, I was trying to raise the tone, but whatever.

So, do you know what the names of the three wise men were?

Yes, Balthazar.

Balthazar.

Melchior.

And Casper.

Okay.

And according to a survey by the British Christmas Tree Growers Association.

Your sourcing is getting worse and worse.

There is only one place in the world, or at least in the UK, where there are people with those surnames that all live in that place.

And it is...

Eaton.

It's Eton, isn't it?

It's Bedfordshire.

It is Bedfordshire.

Apparently there are people with that names.

And they decided, because presumably it was a slow season for Christmas tree growing, that they'd look at all the different Christmassy names and see where people are.

There is only one Mr.

Scrooge in the whole world, and he lives in Canada.

No.

There are 16 people in England called Grinch, the surname Grinch.

Really?

And there's only one person in the whole UK called Mr.

Baubles.

All right,

let's move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that Oregon has 12 times as many Christmas trees as humans.

Yeah, so this is just a fact about how many Christmas trees there are.

You've heard the fact.

It's about

how few humans there are in Oregon.

That's true, but it's not.

It's got a reasonably healthy human population and just a shitload of Christmas trees.

But the amazing thing is how it harvests them.

So it harvests them.

You may have seen this by helicopter to weather the vanilla.

It's a magic helicopter.

It's flown by Jesus.

It's not a magic helicopter.

They get lifted up in massive bundles, and it's incredible to watch in action because they're doing a constant zigzag between

where the Christmas trees are in bundles and where they need to be loaded.

And it takes about 26 seconds to fly a few hundred yards from one to the other, and then they zip back.

And one of the pilot trainers, the helicopter pilot trainers, said it's similar to sprinting down a field, putting someone on your back, piggyback, and then dropping them off, then running back across the field, which is such an unhelpful analogy.

But in America, there's a massive shortage right now.

Of trees.

Yeah, of Christmas trees.

Right.

And this is because of the recession.

When the recession happened, it was about the amount of time ago that it takes to grow a Christmas tree.

So just under 10 years.

So now we've got a massive shortage because people's businesses went to pot and they went into other industries.

So actually, in Oregon, which is one of the main Christmas tree industries, pot growing, marijuana growing is a big industry as well.

And so a lot lot of Christmas tree farmers have gone on to marijuana instead.

So you can't get a Christmas tree.

You can get some wood.

But does that mean, like in what, 15 years' time, everyone will have pot plants?

Well, pot plants.

Yeah.

Really?

I guess so, yeah.

Giant pot plants that they hang baubles and tinsel off and put an angel on top of.

Wow.

Yeah.

But there is a shortage.

It's a problem.

Not a huge problem, but it's a problem.

Do you know Britain has a Eurovision for Christmas trees?

Do we?

Yeah.

It's from the British Christmas Tree Growers Association.

They have an annual Christmas Tree Grower of the Year competition, and they all compete on various metrics of height and

stuff like that.

So when you say Eurovision, sorry, is it all of Europe?

It's not all of Europe.

It's all the British Christmas tree growers.

The only thing that even makes it slightly like Eurovision...

Is we all ring up to see who wins.

It's on BBC One every year.

It's on prime time.

It's hosted by Graeme Nott.

That's right, yeah.

It's got an undercurrent of Cold War rivalry that determines the winner every year.

Is that they get to vote on each other's trees?

That's so great.

By the way, what happens to the best tree?

It's not interesting.

No,

it gets to go outside Downing Street.

Does it really?

Yeah, do you know what happens to the runner-up?

It gets

pulped.

No, the runner-up gets to go inside Downing Street.

That's amazing.

That's the better price.

Because you don't get seen by the public and stuff there.

Yeah, but you get to hear all the juicy goss.

That's true.

So you can buy half Christmas trees.

Have you seen these?

They're pretty cool.

It's basically plastic ones, but they're basically half a Christmas tree, and you lean it up against your wall.

That is so clever.

Isn't that clever?

I mean, it's awful, but it is awfully clever.

Oh, yeah.

No, no, they put them up because if you live in a small flat, let's say in London, for instance, you don't have that much space, but you still want to see the Christmas tree, then you can have it just half of the wall.

Yeah, that's great.

I mean, that's a good one.

And you can also have Argos sell upside-down Christmas trees.

So the pointy bit is at the bottom and the fat bit is at the top.

And that's if you don't have much floor space.

That's very cool.

And that used to happen in the 19th century.

Did it?

People hung it upside down from the rafters.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, because there was not much floor space.

Same reason.

But actually, the Christmas tree industry in the 2000s really hated these plastic trees.

In 2004, the National Christmas Tree Association of America launched a free online video game called Attack of the Mutant Artificial Christmas Tree.

And in it, you would throw snowballs at artificial trees that were blamed for sucking the spirit out of Christmas.

Whereas actually artificial trees have been around for almost as long as Christmas trees have been around in popular terms, right?

So feather trees were a thing from the late 19th century.

Feather trees?

Yeah, so the first artificial Christmas trees are made of goose feather and they used to kind of like sort of backcomb it so it looked like a tree, and then they would paint it.

And that was an artificial tree because they were really worried about deforestation in the 19th century, which I think is quite interesting.

And it's still an argument about what's best for the environment, like an artificial one or a real one, right?

Yeah.

I read one report, and a few of them kind of vary, but one of them says that it's better to use real ones, but not if you're going to use your artificial tree for 20 years or more.

20 years.

Basically, 20 years' worth of real trees what one plastic one is worth.

But I throw away my plastic one every year.

Do you know how the Christmas tree was made popular worldwide in the way it is today in the West?

Martin Luther or something?

I'm thinking about like commercially popular.

It was made popular by Queen Victoria,

which, so it was in 1846 when Victoria and Albert had a Christmas tree because in Germany, Christmas trees were where they celebrate Breaker Christmas, and Albert came over and he brought that over with him.

And then this image of their Christmas tree was published in like London Illustrated magazine or something.

And then it really caught on because they had this decorated tree.

And so everyone got this decorated tree.

But then it caught on in America a couple of years later because it was in something called Godie's Lady Book.

And

it's totally innocent, by the way.

But what they did was they took this picture and they popularized it in America, but they thought that Victoria's tiara and Albert's moustache were too British, so they removed them.

And this was like the early days of Photoshop, and that's how the Christmas tree got popular in America:

a moustacheless Albert.

Can I give you a story from the New York Herald in the early 20th century about a cursed Christmas tree?

Someone's allergic to cursed Christmas trees over there.

Chopping the butt of a Christmas tree in Prospect this afternoon, William Smith, a farmhand, nearly cut off his great toe.

Angered, he threw an axe and it broke a window and struck a child

in the face, inflicting a severe cut.

Wow, can I just say you're laughing at a child?

It's a long time ago.

It's a different time.

It was a different time.

Trimming the tree later, Mrs.

William Scoville fell and broke an ankle.

Indignant over the chain of events, Howard Scoville, son of the woman, insisted on doing the rest of the work himself and while testing the candles, set the tree afire and nearly burned down the farmhouse.

Believing the tree bewitched, the father, Ambrose Scoville, threw it into the hogpen where it fell on and killed a chicken.

I find it amazing that people didn't die constantly from Christmas tree accidents because before electricity became a thing, they were all lit by candlelight, and that was 50-60 years of just being candles strapped to a tree.

And they were decorated with snow made out of cotton.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You could get in the 50s, you could get, it was called flocking, wasn't it?

You could get an attachment for your vacuum cleaner, which was like a gun to fire artificial snow from your Hoover all over the tree.

Wow.

At the candles.

Way.

Way.

That's so cool.

I know.

Isn't it good?

And you know, like you're saying, the Christmas tree with Albert and Victoria suddenly took off.

That was the same for electric Christmas lights that we all have now around our tree.

That was invented by a guy called Edward Hibbert Johnson, who was the right-hand man to Thomas Edison.

People were putting candles on their tree.

They kept burning down.

And he thought, okay,

I'm going to try and make this a thing.

And it just caught on in the next few years in America just so quickly because it was just such a beautiful thing.

And he died of an electric shock.

No way.

It says citation needed on Wikipedia next to that, but

it sounds plausible, doesn't it?

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Should we move on to the final fact of the show?

It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is the man who brought the phrase Merry Christmas to English was also the first Englishman to use the word Prosecco.

Very cool.

Was it in the same

card?

Merry Christmas!

I have invented Prosecco.

So he didn't invent it.

It was invented by some Italian people.

But he was in Italy at the time.

He was a traveler called Fiennes Morrison.

And he wrote all about Italy and lots of different different countries, actually.

And he was traveling around the time.

It was in the 16th century, late 16th century, and it was kind of dangerous to travel around the world, really, but especially in Europe.

There was a time of kind of bad religious strife.

And he would always, whenever anyone mentioned religion to him, especially around Easter, he would immediately move to another city to avoid inquiries.

When he was in Spain, he pretended to be Czech.

When he was in France, he pretended to be Polish.

When he was in the Netherlands, he pretended to be German.

When he was in Italy, he pretended to be Dutch, except when he was in Rome and he pretended to be French.

And he travelled without any funds.

He didn't have any official protection.

And so, whenever there was any problems, he adopted a deferential posture and avoided eye contact.

That's great.

That's a good way of travelling, though, isn't it?

Sounds like me on a night out.

I read something about Fiennes Morrison.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on him, and I'm quoting exactly here.

His biographer, Charles Hughes says he had a sane charity for all men except Turks and Irish priests

which is another way of saying that he was prejudiced against Turks and Irish priests.

Yeah he was.

He was a man of his time

but also no one had seen Prosecco before.

And this was it was a drink that even Pliny drank and it was also known as pukanum

and then he said it was called pukanum now called prosecco much celebrated by pliny and when we say celebrated by pliny we mean sparkling white wine presumably yeah yeah i had no idea that sparkling wine went that far back yeah yeah because with wine its default position is often sparkling we get the um we get the stuff which they've taken the bubbles out why

why

why do these people treat us like children

who doesn't want all wine to be sparkling wine children love fizzy stuff yeah why are they treating why are they treating us like grown-ups?

But Prosecco, Christmas drink at the moment, right?

The UK consumes 77 million litres of Prosecco last year.

And I worked out that's in the region of the amount of rain that falls on Wembley Stadium in a year.

Also, my favourite thing about Brexit, and it's a long list,

is

thank God I've got a favourable audience.

Okay,

so no, but is that champagne can be sold by the pint again?

So there's always been this weird dichotomy, which is that

wine can only be sold in metric and beer can only be sold in imperial.

But Paul Roger always used to sell champagne by the pint.

It was a bottle that was a size of a pint rather than a pint glass.

Yes, Churchill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A bottle that was size of a pint.

And Churchill loved Paul Roger that was served in pints.

He said it was perfect for lunch.

And actually,

he actually had Paul Roger, the champagne manufacturers, deliver him a pint of champagne at 11 a.m.

every morning because he was so such a fan of it.

And now, Paul Roger have explicitly said maybe one of the advantages of leaving the EU is that we'll be able to sell champagne by the pint again.

And they're already preparing to sell champagne by the pint.

So if you want to be optimistic about the future,

this is it.

Was that one of the battle buses we didn't see?

Did you know one of the first battles of the First World War was called the Champagne Offensive?

No.

Yeah.

So it was when the German armies were moving west through the Champagne region, and lots of people at the time fled underground to the wine cellars.

But basically, they learned their lesson in the Champagne region because when the German army arrived again in 1940, there were false walls built in the wine cellars to conceal the really good stuff.

And supposedly, some houses, like Bollinger, mislabeled their their really good bottles poison.

They did it.

It was a real front of the Second World War that we haven't acknowledged so far.

I think there's a book called Wine and War, I think, which has first-hand accounts of winemakers in France who fought the Nazis by withholding their best wine, and they're so proud of it.

So it's so sweet.

So

it's in the Champagne region, and there's one winemaker who bragged about the fact that he watered down his champagne before giving it to the Nazis.

And or he would bottle his worst wines.

This is in the Champagne region.

He would bottle his worst wines and say, This is the special couve for the Wehrmacht.

And there was one guy who said that we got orders from the Nazis to deliver them lots of wine, and they made the foolish mistake of not saying which vintage wine they would prefer.

And so we sent them a thousand bottles of our 1939, which was absolute rubbish.

And that absolutely taught them.

I have a fact about wishing people a Merry Christmas.

Okay.

So this was an experiment that happened in 1974, sociological.

Two sociologists called Philip Kunz and Michael Walcott, they posted nearly 600 Christmas cards to people they didn't know.

They got the addresses out of the phone book and they sent some high status cards, which were very lavish and fancy, and some were low status, which were just plain white cards with Merry Christmas written in a red red Sharpie on the front.

And they were either signed from Dr.

and Mrs.

Philip Kuhns or from Philip and Joyce Kunds.

And they included a return address saying where you can send them back to.

So they were definitely for people they hadn't met.

And

over 20% of people sent a signed card back with varying degrees of detail.

Some said Merry Christmas, some sent pictures of their families to people they had never met.

Some sent letters of several pages saying what had been going on with them for the last few years.

I know.

But six people wrote back and directly asked, How do I know you?

Which is incredibly ballsy to me.

I wouldn't have the courage to do that.

When was that?

74.

You can't imagine it would happen today, could you?

Do you think?

If you got a random Christmas card through the post, guys, would you respond to it?

Well, a few liars, but most people say

my parents, they keep getting a card addressed to the Kajanaris, and we've no idea who they are, but it arrives like clockwork every year.

Every year.

And the family has grown.

It's added several members in this time.

And they never include the return address.

And they keep saying, we'd love to see you in the new year.

Please, please get in touch.

And we don't know who they are.

So, Wendy, John, if you're listening.

We need to wrap up, guys.

Anything before we do?

Some stuff on wine or fizzy wine or whatever.

In 2015, Scotland made its first homegrown wine, and it was described as undrinkable by experts.

The guy who produced it said, it has potential.

It doesn't smell fresh.

But I enjoyed it in a bizarre, masochistic way.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy?

At Andrew Hunter M.

James?

At James Harkin.

And Anna?

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasofish.com.

It's got all of our previous episodes, got a link to our book.

We usually give one away at the end of this show, but

so what we're going to do tonight is take one away.

Thank you so much for being here, guys.

That was really fun.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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