Cold War Santa with Sarah Archer

Speaker 1 Imagine if 17 on fire levitating eyeballs appeared in front of you and were like, don't, don't freak out.

Speaker 1 Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we love to investigate the mystery that is Santa. And so, of course, this week we are joined by Sarah Archer, our Santa correspondent.

Speaker 1 We did a Santa episode last year, which I would love for you to listen to. We had a great time.
And this time, we are talking about a particular moment in Santa history.

Speaker 1 We are talking about the Cold War Santa and how the 1950s and the post-war era in the United States transformed what we make of Christmas and what Christmas has made of us.

Speaker 1 We've had many great past Sarah Archer episodes, including one on Martha Stewart and one of my favorites titled The Trad Wife Rises.

Speaker 1 And of course, when we are talking about Santa, we're talking about so much else. And I love getting into the back rooms where all of these ideas connect.

Speaker 1 And somehow a lot of these ideas involve women doing more work, which I also find interesting. Also, As you may or may not know, I have an exciting new show out with CBC Podcasts.

Speaker 1 It's called The Devil You Know. It's about the satanic panic.
If you've been listening to me talk about the satanic panic for the past

Speaker 1 seven years, then this is a place where we get to interview people, learn about the nooks and crannies of North America, how this flourished and why, and get into some of the questions that we just have not been able to explore in this show.

Speaker 1 But I would love for you to join us over there, and we will be putting out new episodes for the next couple weeks, as well as bonus episodes.

Speaker 1 And you can find The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts, of course.

Speaker 1 We also have a very fun bonus episode coming for you soon. It is a little survivalism QA with our survival correspondent, Blair Braverman.

Speaker 1 And more little bonus surprises are also coming over on Patreon. So we hope you join us over there or on Apple Plus subscriptions.
Thank you so much for being with us.

Speaker 1 Thank you for continuing on into the wintertime if that's what's happening to you too right now. And here's your episode.

Speaker 1 Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where once again the holidays are happening to us.

Speaker 1 And with me today is Sarah Archer, who is, dare I say it, our Christmas correspondent.

Speaker 1 And you are here with us today to talk about, and I was reflecting on this this morning. There are some phrases you can only say in an Oprah voice.
And this is one of them. Cold War Santa.

Speaker 2 It is perfect. It needs to be said in an Oprah voice.
And it needs to be like arms extended,

Speaker 2 hair tossing from side to side. Yeah.
And we deliberately put Santa Claus on pause, an unintentional rhyme,

Speaker 2 at the end of the last episode.

Speaker 1 Santa Claus on pause sounds like a Disney movie.

Speaker 2 Santa Claus on Pause. It doesn't

Speaker 2 from the 80s.

Speaker 1 It's about Santa Claus dying and being reincarnated as a corgi who's voiced by Bo Bridges.

Speaker 2 Can we make that happen? Is there a way that we could make that happen by December?

Speaker 1 I'm sure with AI we could, but please don't. We need the water.

Speaker 1 Someday your great-grandchildren will fight to the death over a teaspoon of water and we're throwing it away, generating little videos of hot blondes doing God knows what they

Speaker 2 I know, obviously. It's only

Speaker 1 and not even myself. I know.

Speaker 1 But yeah, so you're right. We put a pin in Santa.
Tell us about that. What was our episode? What's the prequel to this episode?

Speaker 2 So that's what I was actually going to ask you to reflect on what your impression was. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's the hustler to this episode's the color of money?

Speaker 2 Exactly. That we had, that we left, you know, we went, we sort of tour through history from the ancient world to kind of the Gilded Age in the United States.

Speaker 2 But I wanted to kind of get your, your sort of overall impression of kind of who and what Santa was, sort of what is Christmas for in this era?

Speaker 2 The era when we left off, you know what I mean? And kind of who was he?

Speaker 2 What was he getting up to?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll try. I'm going to, the interesting thing about making a podcast, I think, and maybe you...

Speaker 1 experienced this as well is that to me like i'm focused so much as we're making the show on the conversation we're having in the present moment that it feels like my brain makes fewer memories because I'm so focused on what's going on right now.

Speaker 1 And then I guess like release everything I've just learned to make room for the next thing. A hundred percent.

Speaker 2 It feels like.

Speaker 1 And so if I listen back to an episode, I often am like, wow, that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 Or I'll say, I'll make an observation.

Speaker 1 I'll be like, oh, that's pretty good, you know, because I don't remember thinking that, which is unfortunate because some of my best revelations I have forgotten about.

Speaker 2 But luckily, they were recorded in audio format and we have notes.

Speaker 1 Well, exactly, which is why Nixon had the right idea.

Speaker 2 Exactly. About so many things.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Well, certainly about cottage cheese. I mean, let's be honest, Nixon.

Speaker 2 Yes, and grapefruit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Nixon was the OG cottage cheese influencer, girly pop, I must say. Girly pops.
Yeah. Nixon ate like a girly pop.
It must be said.

Speaker 2 That's what was going on with him.

Speaker 1 When he was in law school, this is true. He was surviving on candy bars.

Speaker 2 Was he really? Just like a girly pop. Whoa.

Speaker 2 Nuts, nougat, a little chocolate.

Speaker 1 I think Milky Way, I want to say.

Speaker 2 Milky Way. Okay, so no nuts.
All right. All right.

Speaker 1 But I can't, look, I wouldn't, I'm not, I wouldn't testify to it under oath, Sarah.

Speaker 1 I like all candy bars, but I would never take one from a baby.

Speaker 2 People need to know if their podcast host is a crook.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you do a good Nixon. I don't know if I've ever heard your Nixon before.

Speaker 1 Look, I'm not saying I'm great at it, but I do take some pride in my my no i take i take pride pride would some people say too much that's

Speaker 1 they would that's okay but i take pride in my nixon impression and my ethel merman impression as i think you know

Speaker 2 i think yes i think i do know that have i done that one for you yeah i i think you have yeah you're supposed to say no like no do it again do it do it for the first time

Speaker 1 Is there a song or perhaps a Christmas song you'd like to hear in the style of Ethel Mermon?

Speaker 2 Oh my God, can you do Santa Baby?

Speaker 1 Okay, yes.

Speaker 1 Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree

Speaker 1 for me.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 She's got larynge. She's got a cold.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but she's supposed to. Yes.
Always.

Speaker 1 But I love her so much. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 That's really, I, I, now that you've done it, I think that might have been the first time I heard it, which is really exciting.

Speaker 1 Well, anyway.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the role of Santa, as we talked about it and Christmas, I think was not so different actually from an episode I did with Kelsey Weber Smith a while ago on the show about the history of Halloween, which is this idea that it started off as something that was kind of like by and for the people and became sort of co-opted and commodified and set in place as a certain type of much more

Speaker 1 controllable and less chaotic behavior where, you know, in kind of our originating Christmas traditions, we have, you know, what, like the wasailing, I guess, as a verb.

Speaker 2 Exactly, wasailing.

Speaker 1 Tell us about wassailing.

Speaker 2 Right, which initially.

Speaker 1 Or wassailing.

Speaker 2 Wasailing, yes.

Speaker 2 Like, which I think nowadays, if you're familiar with the word wassail and wasailing, your association probably with it is like people in bonnets and kind of going from house to house and, you know, kind of when it's snowing, which it never does on Christmas, but it's this kind of Victorian,

Speaker 2 you know, very cozy image.

Speaker 1 Have you heard the fact, Joy, that I probably mentioned in this previous episode that Dickens grew up during an unusually snowy sort of like weather period in England, and that's why he wrote about so much snowy Christmas stuff, partly.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Maybe.
Which might be true. I actually don't know whether that's true or not, but I believe it.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, and then to us in America today, Christmas is like Dickens, although we don't bother reading him because his books are too long. Right.

Speaker 1 But the idea of snow as essential to Christmas feels like derived partly from his particular childhood, which is so interesting.

Speaker 2 But it's like an unattainable goal because we can't control it and it never happens.

Speaker 1 Right. And because interestingly, in places where it snows a lot, it seems to mostly do it in like November and March.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 So it's like Valentine's Day or like Arbor Day. I don't know what, you know, what holidays are there.
Well, I guess sometimes it's Easter.

Speaker 2 But we had kind of gone back in time to Saint Nicholas, who was a real person

Speaker 2 who existed in the ancient world, third century, what we now call Turkey.

Speaker 2 He was associated with charitable acts toward a group of young women's sisters who he helped prevent from having to become prostitutes. And that was what he was famous for.

Speaker 2 So that was Santa Claus in the ancient world.

Speaker 2 He's associated then, he gets kind of grafted onto European celebrations like Yule and the sort of figure of Father Christmas, who's kind of associated in a general way with all these different kinds of folkloric traditions throughout Europe.

Speaker 2 So the fact that Santa Claus has a lot of different names, like he'll sort of be referred to as St.

Speaker 2 Nick, Chris Kringle, Santa, Santa Claus, is a kind of a fossil record of the fact that he's sort of was woven together from these different traditions. Right.

Speaker 1 Just like the word bimbo.

Speaker 2 Which is equally etymologically fascinating. Exactly.
Yes.

Speaker 2 There was this group of prominent New Yorkers, which included our three guys who we talked about: merchant John Pintard, the writer Washington Irving, and poet and real estate heir Clement Clark Moore, who wrote A Visit from St.

Speaker 2 Nicholas.

Speaker 2 And their works collectively in kind of thinking about this figure of Santa Claus and how Christmas could be celebrated helped transform Christmas from kind of a rowdy holiday that happened outdoors where a lot of like sort of youths would be like knocking on your door demanding alcohol and kind of like harassing.

Speaker 2 It was youths, Sarah. It was youths on the street.
They wanted everybody inside. They said like they wanted everybody indoors.

Speaker 2 They wanted, you know, like play with a toy, be inside, have a nice feast, do something, be a pain in the neck, but do it inside and don't, you know, terrorize the community.

Speaker 2 And this is the moment when Christmas pivots from being kind of this basically holiday, sort of festival for grown-ups to being very child-focused and kind of self-consciously so.

Speaker 1 Interesting. So it goes, it starts off as maybe something a little bit more like Mardi Gras.

Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. It starts off, especially in New York City.
Right.

Speaker 1 Or St. Patrick's Day.
Where it's a day for like normal working people to cut loose.

Speaker 2 To cut loose, to have a cocktail, be kind of like rousting about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, puke in the street, perhaps.

Speaker 2 Puke in the street.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Once or twice a year.

Speaker 1 Better there than indoors.

Speaker 2 And so that poem, which you read for us, as I recall, in the voice of Rod Serling, as Baby Jesus attended, A Visit from St.

Speaker 2 Nicholas, basically sets the scene for the way that we envision Santa Claus now.

Speaker 1 Right. Although, as we discussed, as I remember now, he's like a tiny little guy.

Speaker 2 He's a tiny little guy.

Speaker 2 So this is why we're going to look at your fancy Cold War Christmas document because there are some nice images in this kind of transitional period of Santa from the Gilded Age, actually.

Speaker 2 The first one is from Harper's Weekly. Incredible.
And describe what we're seeing. He's like,

Speaker 2 I would say not elfin.

Speaker 1 No, he's got a nice red Mac on, I would say, or like a big sort of red one-piece cloak with a nice pointed hood.

Speaker 1 Actually, he's kind of dressed like a cardinal, isn't he? Yep. Yeah.
And he's got like big kind of knuckly hands and a big, and a, and a big bushy beard.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 And he's tall.

Speaker 1 And he's tall, clearly, based on kind of how he is in relation to the tree he's next to, I think, assuming it's a full-size tree.

Speaker 2 Exactly. He's kind of next to what looks like it's probably a pine tree, and that's kind of, he's kind of towering over.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 He looks like an old human man with a crinkly, smiley face and a big white beard and white hair, which is very familiar to what we know now. Although he's less stylized.

Speaker 1 Santa, I think, eventually begins to look like a drunk, you know, because he's a little bit too rosy at times.

Speaker 2 It's a little bit, yes. Well, actually, we're going to get to that because he's the next one, if you scroll down, is

Speaker 2 from the turn of the century, about a decade or two later. And this, to me, this is kind of like classic Ur Santa, like what he's wearing.
Yes.

Speaker 1 This is like Coca-Cola Santa because he's got like a velvet coat with a white fur trim and white fur cuffs actually it looks like he's got white gloves on which is interesting but it is cold out there you know when you're working with snow when you're getting into all those chimneys and a wavy very well-conditioned white beard and white hair and the traditional i think um red velvet Santa cap with the white fur trim.

Speaker 1 And he's got a sack full of toys, of course,

Speaker 1 including a little toy drum, which I think you see a lot, I assume, because we like to talk about the little drummer boy, although I don't know when that showed up.

Speaker 2 Or because drums look kind of cool.

Speaker 2 And I think you're getting at something that's actually like really key to the way that he's portrayed in this era, which is that he becomes, as we talked about Stephen Nissenbaum's wonderful book, The Battle for Christmas, which traces Santa's evolution kind of throughout the 19th century, and the way in which he becomes almost a figure.

Speaker 2 I think it's possible to make the case that he's a figure of the arts and crafts movement in a way, because he's depicted very often, and we're going to look at this image again, as a carpenter in a workshop using old-fashioned tools to make increasingly technologically complicated toys.

Speaker 2 And he's doing this really at the height of the Industrial Revolution, right? It's kind of a Victorian iteration of a medieval scene. And it's happening at the time when

Speaker 2 I mean, it is so weird to even contemplate the United States as not not a consumer society because none of us have any living memory of that.

Speaker 2 But there was a time when this idea, even like there was an op-ed ran in a New Hampshire newspaper in the 1830s called Think Before You Buy that was all about, Nissenbaum quotes this in his book, about, you know, are we, are we spoiling these kids?

Speaker 2 Is it, you know, conspicuous consumption? Is it just, you know, is it sensible? Does it, you know, what is this all for?

Speaker 2 So one of the key things to note kind of before diving in is that Santa's scene, his mise-en-scene, his workshop, his outfit, what he does, the fact that he's sort of toys get to you as a small child magically and not at a cash register and not from a big department store and not like flown in or shipped in on a big, you know, shipping container.

Speaker 2 He kind of... craftwashes the whole consumer process that makes Christmas possible.

Speaker 2 And what's interesting and what we're going to look at today is three different Christmas visual extravaganzas, if you want to call them, one movie and two cartoons,

Speaker 2 both of which have quite a lot of anti-consumerist sentiment built in, even as they kind of revel in the splendor of it all.

Speaker 2 So it's the other thing is that you may have heard, Sarah, that we're, that there is a war on Christmas.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes, I have heard about that.

Speaker 2 Which I guess we should say from the outset is A, not true, but B, if it were true, it is kind of fighting a battle battle against an assertion that isn't real, which is that there was a time before, you know, sometime maybe in the 19th century, maybe in the Middle Ages, maybe, you know, some other kind of glittering candlelit time that is very pretty and bucolic when Christmas was about the spirit of, you know, goodwill towards men and charity and, you know, being warm and cozy and having fun with your kids.

Speaker 2 And it wasn't about buying stuff and it wasn't about consumption. And in fact, there is no version of that holiday that ever existed.

Speaker 2 Like when it became child focused is when it became retail focused. So those two things have never existed separately.

Speaker 2 And, but it is, it's easier to be nostalgic about something that never was because you can't recreate it.

Speaker 1 Right. And also because it's like if you were nostalgic for the actual past, you would have to let in all the stuff about it that was more complicated.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 1 By definition, nostalgia is like a selective emotion.

Speaker 2 And you'd have to start becoming charitable yourself in the present day, which like, God forbid.

Speaker 2 So there's so the Gilden Age is when a lot of our

Speaker 2 customs gel in America. It's in 1870, it becomes a federal holiday.
Lewis Prang markets the first commercially available Christmas cards in 1875. That is roughly the time, exactly, right?

Speaker 2 The sort of like alternative crayon brand.

Speaker 2 Right? Isn't it? Aren't they kind of there like Brock's candy?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the ones that like,

Speaker 1 oh, mom got me prangs.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's all right. It's, it's like, it's, uh, it's

Speaker 2 Santa.

Speaker 1 Until you can get a real crane.

Speaker 2 You can get your real with a built-in sharpener. Yeah.
And this is also the moment when we start to have Santa present in department stores.

Speaker 2 So instead of, so there's this funny structure of kind of exactly. Like instead of sort of like

Speaker 2 hiding the commercialness of it, Santa as a persona gets kind of woven together with the process almost as though you're going to see the wizard. You know, you're going to see this

Speaker 2 magical man who's in the fancy place. And it's kind of like confession.

Speaker 1 It is completely insane, by the way, to have to have children pose annually for a meet and greet with Santa, which I would never do as a kid.

Speaker 1 I think I was one of the many kids who absolutely melted down totally, which makes sense because aside from the whole stranger danger element of it, meeting Santa is like meeting God based on the level of his pre, like it's kind of more important when you're a kid because presents are a lot more real to you than like damn nation or whatever.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. yeah.
And yeah, as we talked about it last time, the Santas should be smaller. They should be approximately the size of Zelda Rubenstein and they should talk very quietly.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's such a good idea. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They should be like, hello.

Speaker 2 Because essentially, I mean, in a strange way, it's like there has certain things in common with going to confession, if that you sort of go to a special place. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 And you see a man in a red robe, in, you know, bishop's red, and you tell him your heart's desires and whether you were good or bad.

Speaker 2 And he takes notes. And then, you know, I guess instead of, you know, having to say 800 Hail Marys, you might get a fire engine.

Speaker 2 It's, you know, sort of like a different outcome, but it's like there is something

Speaker 2 strangely ritualistic about how all of that transpires. And it's, you know, it's also, it's like a guy in a beard.
It's sort of, I can see why kids melt down. I think it's a pretty normal reaction.

Speaker 1 Yes, beards are very scary. Even if you know someone who has a beard as a kid, it's, it's, uh, it can be stressful.

Speaker 2 If you scroll down, you will see a Santa in a different ensemble.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Describe to us what we're seeing.

Speaker 1 All right. So in my best, a League of Their Own Newsreel voice, the text here says, Santa Claus has gone to war.
Your gift, plenty of weapons, the inland way for USA.

Speaker 1 And you captioned this wartime propaganda poster from the Office of War Information, 1941. And Santa is wearing, you know, a nice kind of a fatigue coat.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I don't know any of the correct terminology, but

Speaker 1 he's he's coined up. He's got a helmet on.
His beard has been shorn to

Speaker 2 like regulation.

Speaker 1 And he, and we also are seeing the face of drunky Santa because his cheeks are

Speaker 1 very, truly as red as two cherries.

Speaker 2 And so the timing of this is interesting because one of the funny things that I discovered when I was researching Mid-Century Christmas is that there are people who think, and I don't think we can blame anybody for this because it actually kind of makes sense, that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus, like just block stock and barrel, like the Coca-Cola Company.

Speaker 2 What they did invent was a very recognizable depiction of Santa.

Speaker 1 And a copyrightable one?

Speaker 2 I think because it was designed by an artist named Haddon Sun Blum, who lived in Michigan. And he was, you can Google him.
He's a really cool guy. He often is shown wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Speaker 2 And he is the guy who sort of put, you know, pen to paper and created Coca-Cola Santa and did so in a way that what he wanted to try to do was not make it look like a guy dressed up, but make it look like a real guy, kind of make it look like a kind of cozy, older, kind of grandfatherly, you know, rosy-cheeked guy.

Speaker 1 Which is interesting because the outfit has become so ritualized. At this point, it feels like seeing somebody wearing like a conductor uniform or something or like an airline pilot.

Speaker 1 It's like not a person, it's an identity.

Speaker 2 Exactly. It's his work outfit.
Yeah. Like Busy Town.
Like he's like the guy in Busy Town who brings everybody Prezi's.

Speaker 1 Is he influenced at all by the ghost of Christmas present in Charles Dickens's? Oh, absolutely. Christmas Carol.
Okay. Because he's wearing velvet and ermine, maybe.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that's interesting about that is that you'll sometimes see that figure, the sort of ghost of Christmas present, wearing green.

Speaker 2 And sometimes before the 16th century, bishops wore green. So you'll sometimes see the reason Sancho wears red is because he's he's wearing bishop's clothes.

Speaker 2 But sometimes you'll, it'll kind of toggle back and forth. So, but Coca-Cola Santa is sort of the regularized Santa image that we end up inheriting kind of in the late 1930s and 40s.

Speaker 2 And this is right around the time that the United States enters World War II. And the celebration of Christmas then becomes kind of DIY and ad hoc.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of rationing of not just like the food is what a lot of people remember, you know, coffee.

Speaker 1 Let's all have a World War II Christmas. Let's have a warmer.

Speaker 2 No more rough water Christmas. We're going to have a ration Christmas.
Yeah. No meat, no dairy.

Speaker 1 We're going to drink chicory and

Speaker 2 tell tales. Exactly.
We're going to like, we're going to sit around the radio. We're going to stare at it.
And we're going to have faux coffee with faux sugar.

Speaker 2 But basically everything that you kind of think to do around the holidays is curtailed.

Speaker 2 Rubber and metal are both in short supply. Gasoline, anything, nylon,

Speaker 2 long-distance phone calls are restricted.

Speaker 1 I think it's easy for me to forget today. Sorry to interject.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I think it's easy for me to forget today because I'm often a little bit like startled when I'm reminded of it that like Americans, in a way that I think would be very divisive today, obviously, during World War II, you know, not everybody, not unilaterally, you know, and a lot more Americans were isolationists than we've like chosen to remember or been educated about typically during this time period.

Speaker 1 But really, in like, as I learned from my Molly books,

Speaker 1 Americans, to a great degree, believed that it was their patriotic duty to endure personal deprivation in order to help the war effort.

Speaker 2 That is also,

Speaker 2 we'll get to this, but that's something that is then becomes taken up by advertisers, like that, that impulse that you're describing.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Which is interesting because in a way it sort of like becomes folded into capitalism, the sort of like identity of, yeah help being the kind of person who's helping the war effort exactly because if you scroll down past santa at war you will find two print ads for hoover vacuum cleaners

Speaker 2 and the first one you'll see is not advertising a vacuum cleaner what is it advertising sarah marshall it says give her a war bond and you give her the best and that's a pair of

Speaker 1 sexy lady hands with pretty red nail polish opening up a beautiful war bond.

Speaker 2 With a red ribbon.

Speaker 1 And then let's read the copy here. For 35 years at Christmastime, it has been, give her a Hoover and you give her the best.
Today, few Hoover cleaners are available.

Speaker 1 The Hoover Company is not making electric cleaners now. It is making materials of war.
This Christmas, a war bond is just about the finest present we can think of. Someday, there will be a victory.

Speaker 1 Someday, those war bonds will turn into U.S. currency.
Now, let them stand for the money you're you're saving for the things you can't buy.

Speaker 1 The money you'll have when the good day, capital letters, comes to pay for new electric cleaners and automobiles and refrigerators and stoves.

Speaker 1 Then again, we'll say when Christmas rolls round, give her a Hoover and you give her the best.

Speaker 2 It beats as it sweeps, as it cleans.

Speaker 1 The Hoover Company, North Canton, Ohio.

Speaker 2 Incredible. It's very nice.
Incredible, right? It's because they're advertising delayed gratification, which is so interesting because that's not something that we typically find.

Speaker 2 And this was essentially women's magazines and home magazines jumped on this idea that there were kind of workarounds to be had for, you know, you could do things like shave bar soap or use powdered look soap to make convincing fake snow.

Speaker 2 Or, you know, you could sort of use like natural things like shells and pine cones could be sort of fashioned into ornaments and decor.

Speaker 2 And what's interesting is that after the war, all the big companies that make stuff like DuPont and Reynolds and Alcoa and 3M continue to sort of advertise and promote this idea that you can kind of DIY make your own stuff.

Speaker 2 Only now you're using like tinfoil, cellophane, plastic, et cetera. But at the time,

Speaker 2 it is...

Speaker 2 I don't know if you're aware of this, but I was not aware of this until I started doing this research. Most of the really good Christmas stuff historically came from Germany.

Speaker 2 So all like your ornaments, toys, like really good children's toys. Yeah.
Yeah. So not only are we rationing, you know, things like meat, dairy, you know, sugar, coffee, all that stuff.

Speaker 1 Because where do all the nutcrackers come from?

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Where does the Freudian ballet come from? It has, it has got to be Germany.

Speaker 1 The Nutcracker is one of the weirdest

Speaker 1 is a part of annual holiday American life. It's just amazing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's incredible that it just kind of goes uncommented on. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It is so Freudian you're having a dream about a nutcracker and rats and they're doing, they're battling over you. That is actually the most Freudian thing imagined.

Speaker 1 I'm so glad that Freud never had the chance to analyze Clara. I know.

Speaker 2 Poor Clara in Clara's case.

Speaker 1 Well, I think it all worked out for her because she probably just got to wake up and eat fun kuken or something.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And so there's this like interesting moment where every company, it's weird to think again, sort of like thinking about the U.S.
as not being a consumer society.

Speaker 2 It's also kind of weird to think about the fact that there didn't used to be a military-industrial complex the way we have. We sort of are permanently,

Speaker 2 there are all these big companies, gigantic, you know, Raytheon and Boeing and Northrop Grunham, that are constantly producing things and have government contracts and, you know, sell things to armies overseas, but are massive, huge industrial concerns.

Speaker 2 That didn't really exist when the U.S. entered World War II.
And so the reason that all these companies like Hoover were sort of making things quote-unquote materials for war is because they had to.

Speaker 2 Like there just wasn't an existing infrastructure in place for that to happen.

Speaker 1 Oh, interesting. So basically the government was like, hey, vacuum guys, you are going to make our technology now.
You can't do vacuums anymore. You're busy.

Speaker 2 And it happened to people too.

Speaker 2 This is actually the reason that my family lives on the East Coast is because my grandfather, who was a metallurgical engineer, had been working on alloys that were used mostly to make skyscrapers more flexible and stronger, like the metal that was used in skyscrapers.

Speaker 1 Like that giant tower in Central Park, whatever, that's going to collapse and kill everyone, apparently. Could have used him.

Speaker 2 Apparently. They didn't ask him because

Speaker 2 he is

Speaker 2 in metallurgical heaven, so he was not available to be asked, but I think that was the first problem.

Speaker 2 But they basically people like him who were sort of working on practical industrial problems were sort of like, okay, you're going to go work at this lab on the East Coast that's doing World War II related metallurgy stuff and kind of figuring out, you know, how can we apply what you've learned to airplane propellers or, you know, some part of a machine that we need to refine.

Speaker 2 And so Then after the war ends, this infrastructure is still there.

Speaker 2 And that part of what we think of as the kind of consumer boom that took place, quote unquote, after the war, like everybody's buying fridges and sofas and TVs, They are. And there is

Speaker 2 Ronald Reagan

Speaker 2 is encouraging everyone to do so. And they say, yes, Ronald Reagan.
But it's also because the capacity is there. So there's this, it isn't just that people are kind of starving to shop.

Speaker 1 If you build it, they will come.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So what we are going to do, I think, is we should look, let's take a peek at a clip from Miracle on 34th Street.

Speaker 3 Yes, I understand that. But there must be something you want for Christmas.
Something you haven't even told your mother about, eh? Oh, come on now.

Speaker 3 Why don't you give me a chance?

Speaker 1 Oh, it's Natalie Woods.

Speaker 2 It's Natalie Wood. Well.

Speaker 1 Little rushing child.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which nobody knew.

Speaker 1 Santa has his beard at ward led.

Speaker 2 Well, it's only 1947.

Speaker 4 That's what I want for Christmas.

Speaker 3 You mean a doll's house like this?

Speaker 4 No, a real house.

Speaker 4 If you're really Santa Claus, you can get it for me. And if you can't, you're only a nice man with a white beard, like mother said.

Speaker 3 Now, wait a minute, Susie. Just because every child can't get his wish, that doesn't mean there isn't a Santa Claus.

Speaker 4 That's what I thought you'd say.

Speaker 1 Susie is

Speaker 1 early representation of women with autism.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. Susie is incredible.
Yeah, Susie and her mom are both like. So from your knowledge of the movie generally, put this clip in context for us.

Speaker 2 What are we seeing?

Speaker 1 So I haven't seen it for a long time, but the premise basically is that this guy turns up and works at, is it Macy's as a Santa?

Speaker 2 It's Macy's, yes. It's because it's the parade.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay. And he, but he's like basically definitely actually Santa.

Speaker 1 And it's, I think, like a busy woman. Who is she played by Maureen O'Hara?

Speaker 2 Maureen O'Hara, who plays Mrs. Walker, who's a successful career woman and single mom living on Central Park West.

Speaker 1 Yes, one of those career girls, you know.

Speaker 2 Yes, one of those in 1947.

Speaker 1 And she's got a cynical little girl who's great. And also there's a remake from the 90s with Mara Wilson, which I also grew up with.

Speaker 2 Which is fabulous.

Speaker 1 And these are both wonderful. And the remake is faithful in a really good way.
And it's basically, I think, just this idea of like,

Speaker 1 I really have always loved it and found it very sweet. And it's like Santa basically, I don't know, enchanting the child within of all these kind of cynical Madison Avenue type people.

Speaker 1 And it's, it's very, I mean, and there's a lot of kind of movies like this. I also,

Speaker 1 this is revealing me as like a boomer, basically. I've always been very fond of the Bing Crosby as singing priest movies.

Speaker 2 Oh, sure, of course.

Speaker 1 The Bells of St. Mary's and Going My Way and like two very scary institutions, objectively, Bing Crosby and the Catholic Church.

Speaker 2 Both equally terrifying.

Speaker 1 And also, you know, the bishop's wife and then, of course, the preacher's wife,

Speaker 1 where this kind of theme of like Christmas movies about like just kind of a little bit of like random Christmas magic showing up and just kind of encouraging people to be a lot nicer to each other and then also happening to buy stuff as well, you know?

Speaker 2 Along the way. Yeah.
And so what I find super interesting here is that, so we're in 1947, which means that probably this movie was being made at sort of the end of the war. Right.

Speaker 1 Or certainly being conceived of. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it is a moment when,

Speaker 2 you know, so here's this career woman who's living on her own and is famously sort of teaching her daughter to be very skeptical and not to believe in magic.

Speaker 2 And she and Maureen O'Hara's character kind of takes the same view that, you know, in the same breath, kind of Santa isn't real. And, you know, first husbands leave you.

Speaker 2 And you can't believe in fairy tales because then you'll just end up a single mom and you have all this stuff on your shoulders and the world isn't like that.

Speaker 2 And then Santa and his kind of sidekick, the neighbor, Mr. Gailey.
Right.

Speaker 1 The movie is like, you can trust men and Santa.

Speaker 2 You can trust men. You have to just have no plan.
And then a man will come along and make things materially easier for you in some, you know, undisclosed fashion.

Speaker 2 And so what's interesting about the way consumerism is being posited here is that there's a kind of, are you familiar with the idea of the citizen consumer?

Speaker 1 I don't know. Tell me.
Probably not.

Speaker 2 I am a huge fan.

Speaker 2 This is historian Lizabeth Cohn's phrase to describe the kind of American shopper from kind of the Depression onward who is being tasked with a kind of patriotism that goes hand in hand with shopping.

Speaker 1 And so the idea that the Depression is, you know, basically use it up

Speaker 1 to wear it out for the country. Use it up, all that stuff.
Yeah. And for yourself, because you don't have any money.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And in the era that follows the war, if you're spending on things like domesticity, you know, curating and kind of furnishing the life of a nuclear family, which is literally what Santa Claus does in this movie.

Speaker 2 He basically like steers them in the direction of a house. They get married.

Speaker 1 He moves them out of the suburbs to beautiful Stepford, Connecticut.

Speaker 2 Beautiful Stepford, Connecticut, where nothing weird happens. That that kind of spending.

Speaker 1 Certainly not at that new plan.

Speaker 2 Not at the new plan.

Speaker 2 Nobody's talking about that.

Speaker 2 That that kind of spending is good. It's not frivolous.
You're not just, you know, kind of like buying luxury goods for no good reason and sort of, you know, just kind of enjoying yourself.

Speaker 2 You're investing in the future and you're spending money on all the things you need to have a household that also happens to more or less trap women at home. Yes.

Speaker 2 That you, you know, you don't have any shared resources. You don't have neighbors down the hall.

Speaker 1 Surrounded by appliances.

Speaker 2 Exactly. You don't have a neighbor who can watch your kid for 10 minutes.
You have a dishwasher.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that all of this is being presented as

Speaker 2 good and patriotic, and that it's a form of sort of patriotic spending.

Speaker 1 Right. Interesting.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then this is the moment where we meet Santa baby for the first time, who is kind of,

Speaker 2 I don't know, an appliance pimp for wives. Like he's kind of like, the lyrics are actually are really funny and they're mostly about luxury goods, but it's also she wants a car.

Speaker 2 And so there's this idea that you're kind of, Santa Claus is less a grandfatherly sort of quasi archbishop slash World War II.

Speaker 1 Santa's in the sugar.

Speaker 2 Santa, exactly. Santa is kind of

Speaker 1 like he would be interested in your OnlyFans like although interestingly he is Santa baby and not Santa dancing exactly yeah right so we're kind of we're seducing him but there's a lot of there's a lot of baby men with a lot of money so yeah and so that basically you know if you know you want a fur coat a car you gotta put out Santa right and not just yeah exactly not just carrots for the for the reindeer it's also so interesting to be living and I know we've you know we talked about the trad wife too in another episode that I really love doing with you but this idea of like

Speaker 1 so many many women, either sincerely or for engagement, one of the two, I mean, they both work.

Speaker 1 So many women we're seeing today kind of in this cultural movement that I think is, you know, part of a bunch of other bigger ones are saying, you know, I do everything for my husband and he pays for us to exist.

Speaker 1 And it's like, yeah, that was basically the promise of post-World War II America and really like of the Industrial Revolution that like women would, that men would be paid enough to support a family and therefore could have all of their needs and functions as a human being supported by a woman?

Speaker 1 And then we invented the Sunday paper so they could ignore their families on Sundays.

Speaker 2 And a pipe to go with it. Exactly.

Speaker 2 And then we invented TVA to make sure that they could absolutely, fully ignore.

Speaker 1 But yes, I mean, basically, that so that their children could be taught by puppets.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And that what's interesting is that we're looking at two moments that are, I kind of think of Christmas almost as being like

Speaker 2 the arena in which, at various times in history, we as Americans are kind of wrestling with our relationship with buying stuff and what it means.

Speaker 1 I think that's absolutely true.

Speaker 2 And so, during the Gilded Age, there's a lot of self-consciousness about it. And part of the reason why there's this obsession, well, actually,

Speaker 2 let's go back to your special fancy document for a moment because now we're going to do a visual compare and contrast.

Speaker 1 Let's go back to my scroll.

Speaker 2 Your scroll, unfurl your scroll, and it should be passed underneath Earth a kit. So, we've got Santa Claus.
Honey, I know.

Speaker 2 That's a real like Samantha voice.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm always going for. Okay, yeah.
So we have Santa Claus and his works, which I think I remember looking at in our previous episode. Yeah.
From Harper's Weekly 1866,

Speaker 1 which I also love because it's like very much, you know, in line with Santa as saint.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And he's twee, and he's kind of putting his feet up by the fire and he's making notes in his little book and, you know, kind of chiseling things.

Speaker 1 Oh, and this is canonical little Santa, little Danny DeVito painting.

Speaker 2 It's little Santa.

Speaker 2 Ozma.

Speaker 2 Danny DeVito.

Speaker 2 He eats fish.

Speaker 1 And so it's Santa on top of a chair because he had to get on the chair to get the stockings down from the mantle. Yeah, because he's just a little guy.

Speaker 1 And then there's, he's like, and it's so good. I love it.
So he's like inside different circles. So one of them is the Christmas tree.
He's up on a ladder trimming a tree.

Speaker 1 There's workshop where he's making a little horse. There's Dolly's Tea Party where there's just some dollies sitting around a table having a tea.
I don't know. I guess Santa set them up.

Speaker 2 I think the idea is like he said, he probably crafted them. He made them and then kind of set them.
He sort of put them in a mise-en-scene under the tree.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's the god of the dollies.

Speaker 2 The god of the dolls.

Speaker 1 On the lookout for good children. He's like in the North Pole with like the northern lights behind him with a telescope looking for good children.

Speaker 1 And then, oh God, this is so cute.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 Which dolly will you have?

Speaker 2 And then there's some beautiful dolls lined up.

Speaker 1 Christmas Eve, where he's bursting through the night sky on his carriative reindeer. Making dollies' clothes.
A lot of emphasis on the dollies. I really like making dollies' clothes.

Speaker 2 Does that sound fun? Because it's him with his little glasses on.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And yeah, and he's sewing doll clothes.
God, Santa works hard.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 he's a craftsperson. He works tirelessly.

Speaker 1 That's so many individual garments per dolly. Interestingly, there are no elves in these pictures.

Speaker 2 He's doing it all himself. Yeah, it's very American.
It's all DIY. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because he's elf in Santa still, I guess, because it's only 18. Oh my gosh.
Oh, and I remember we talked about this before, but it's so good. Account book, record of behavior.
I know!

Speaker 1 The record of behavior. Tell us about this image.

Speaker 2 It's incredible. So it sort of positions Santa as almost a kind of like, he's like an accountant's ledger.

Speaker 2 And it's this, as though he's keeping track of who's good and who's bad in a gigantic like binder.

Speaker 1 But he's like

Speaker 1 a binder full of children, but he's still a little bit more.

Speaker 2 A binder full of children, but it's like as big as he is, which is so funny.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the book is like waist high to him just in terms of the page height as he's turning the pages. And it's probably like four times his height if you stood it up.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And he's like leaning over it trying. It's so Santa's just, I cannot express how tiny Santa is in all these depictions.
And it just makes me really happy.

Speaker 1 And then the last one, I would say chronologically, is holiday week, where he's in his rocking chair.

Speaker 2 Holiday week. He's chilling.

Speaker 1 With his dogs up in front of a fire.

Speaker 2 What a week I've had. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 Having delivered, you know, 800 million presents around the world. He's now putting his feet up because that's a lot for one little guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and he's a really little guy.

Speaker 1 Delivering full-size presents, although I guess children were also slightly smaller back then because they weren't getting adequate nutrition.

Speaker 2 That's true. They weren't getting enough niacin or whatever.
But yeah.

Speaker 2 And then we contrast with.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh. All right.
And then we have American Christmas card, mid-1950s. And the text says, boy, this is also my time to point out that Santa Claus Battles the Martians is like a pretty good movie.

Speaker 2 Oh, I know. It's pretty good.
Yeah. 1964.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 an early film of Piazzadora.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's right. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 She's a Martian child. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the text says, here comes Santa's spaceship full of cards and toys, zooming in to wish for you lots of Christmas joys. And then it's as promised, Santa and his little Jetsonian spaceship.

Speaker 1 It looks like a B-52 bomber, honestly, but it has snowflake. I mean, not at all, really.
I'm sure anyone who would look at this and be like, Sarah, no, it doesn't. But

Speaker 1 it looks like maybe like a vaguely military aircraft of the Cold War era. Yeah.
Yeah. It looks like it could like it could bomb Russia inside of like three hours is my point, I guess.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 And it's got snowflakes painted on the wings and it's got a Christmas tree painted on the on the body.

Speaker 1 And then the caption just tells you how to make your own spaceship for Santa if you cut up part of the card.

Speaker 1 And you use such exciting products, obviously, as scotch tape and rubber bands. Exactly.
And yeah, it's very different.

Speaker 1 And we don't know how big Santa is, Although, actually, no, we do because he's got presents in there with him. So if they're regular size presents, then he is probably a regular sized adult male.

Speaker 2 So he looks like person-sized. Yeah.
And so, I mean, it's almost, it's like hard to know where to begin in the differences between these two. They're about 100 years apart.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that is really key about this era is that. We've pivoted from imagining Santa in a kind of vague, candlelit, sort of cozy past.

Speaker 1 As kind of like a little sprite. As a little really hard little fairy worker.

Speaker 2 And specifically from the past to imagining him like set like a figure from science fiction or the future, which is like a complete about face.

Speaker 1 Right. Or I guess like fully in the realm of fantasy.

Speaker 2 Yes, during this kind of obsession with outer space during the Cold War. And so there's like a sort of body of Santa.

Speaker 2 Now, I find this super fascinating because this is not the Santa that I grew up with.

Speaker 2 Like I very much grew up with Victorian Santa in, you know, in the kind of 1970s and 80s version of, but there was this phase in the 50s and 60s when Christmas and Santa were positioned as almost space age Fantasias, like things that you could, you would sort of imagine together with technology.

Speaker 1 Which I guess we kind of have aspects of today, like, you know, the NORAD Santa tracker, maybe,

Speaker 2 which begins in 1955. So, right.
So there's this like, oh, my God, that's really early. It's really early.

Speaker 2 They cast the sleigh ride in a new light so that it becomes instead of this kind of story of Bethlehem or kind of him in the sleigh, it's the idea of like we can track him on radar.

Speaker 2 That, you know, begins in the mid-1950s.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Can I say something that I've been thinking about as I've been promoting my satanic panic show, which is like one of, I think, the questions that I've been thinking about is like, why Satan?

Speaker 1 You know, why?

Speaker 1 Why does Satan make the story so sticky?

Speaker 1 And I think one of the reasons is that like Satan is allegedly like, and if you're superstitious, this is like both maybe scary and maybe in a way kind of comforting to believe how available Satan is supposed to be,

Speaker 1 you know, because there are so many people in America who feel like if you even think too hard about Satan, he's going to show up and be like, good evening.

Speaker 1 You know, whereas Jesus, on the other hand, says he'll be right back and is evidently taking his sweet time.

Speaker 1 Although, according to my theory, Jesus has been reborn reborn many times and never got as far as he meant to because of how unjust society is and he keeps dying. Right.

Speaker 1 Keeps being an undocumented baby. Yeah.
That's the kind of theory that makes me think I should probably just cut to the chase and become a Quaker.

Speaker 1 But right, that like that God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are like famously elusive and are like, I'll be back. any day now, but Satan allegedly is like going to come back all the time.

Speaker 1 Like you can't even get rid of him. Right.
Which is scary, but it's nice.

Speaker 1 The idea that like someone from a supernatural religious realm or that offers you proof of your religion might actually show up.

Speaker 1 And yeah, Satan comes, or I was about to say, Satan comes once once a year.

Speaker 1 Santa, Santa comes once a year, which is very comforting for a child, you know, it's just so regular. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So we're going to take

Speaker 2 a little detour into Atomic Age design.

Speaker 2 And if you scroll past your American Christmas card spaceship,

Speaker 2 you should see a kind of tripartite panel where there's a Christmas card on one side and some wrapping paper on the other side. And in between,

Speaker 2 a clock and a chandelier. Yes.
You see? Okay.

Speaker 2 So we've talked before, I think, about streamlining and sort of during like Art Deco, which was the dominant design language of the 1930s,

Speaker 2 the machine age, the kind of the use of techniques like streamlining streamlining to give a sense of like industrial progress or sort of futurism to household objects that actually don't need to go fast, like vacuum cleaners.

Speaker 2 But there was this real push to kind of like apply the look and feel of things like skyscrapers and trains and cars to pencil sharpeners and toasters.

Speaker 2 And all, you know, designers like Raymond Lowey, Norman Belgettes, Brooke Stevens famously sort of transformed the look of household appliances, stoves, fridges, you know, anything, anything, you name it.

Speaker 1 Is this an aesthetic where the Hudsucker proxy would be a good place to be on display? Okay.

Speaker 2 Yes. Or actually, in a strange way,

Speaker 2 as is the 1989 Batman, because there's a lot of like sort of Art Deco revival happening, weirdly enough. But that's, yeah, it's, I love it.

Speaker 1 I love the Tim Burton Gotham. It's so good.
It's so good. And the giant statues of the big muscle guys.

Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. So it's kind of, imagine like you're at Rockefeller Center.

Speaker 1 Tim Burton's metropolis.

Speaker 2 You're at Tim Burton's metropolis. It's, you know, everything everything is streamlined.
There looks like a train in the 1930s.

Speaker 2 And so what this does is sort of give consumers access to a kind of a sense of the future in the form of something like a radio that looks like a skyscraper or what have you.

Speaker 2 And the next iteration of this kind of gesture in design that happens happens during the Atomic Age.

Speaker 2 And you can just sort of see what you can, I mean, describe for us what you're seeing in kind of the two objects in the middle.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So I'm seeing

Speaker 1 what I would call an atomic starburst style decoration. And I can see in the caption that it's a chandelier, but I think of that as the atomic starburst pattern.
Is that correct?

Speaker 2 It looks more or less like it's called Sputnik, but it basically looks like a kind of controlled explosion. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right. But is that like, I'm thinking of, because isn't in like mid-century decor the kind of like atomic

Speaker 1 symbol, but like the starburst.

Speaker 2 Tell us about that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So here's basically the just what you're getting at is actually a very important observation, which is that unlike every other revival movement or sort of futurist movement that came before it, the designers are tasked with using a visual language that refers back to something that people can't see.

Speaker 2 So there's this kind of the part of the reason why everything is so stylized and why what you'll find is something like on the like the Eames Hang-It-All coat rack or the marshmallow sofa by Irving Harper or the ball clock, which is also by Irving Harper because he was a freaking genius, is what looks like somebody took a model of, you know, a chlorine atom or something or molecule, deconstructed it, and then kind of used those essential parts to create a useful household object, like a clock.

Speaker 2 It does look like it. So there's kind of like there's rods, there's spheres.

Speaker 1 Well, and there's, I would say, a sense of playfulness to it, which is interesting to think about as something that was partly inspired by, you know, the tools of the greatest American death machine.

Speaker 2 Well, and that actually is addressed directly or indirectly by Disney. Are you you familiar with our friend the Adam? Have you read or seen the cartoon?

Speaker 1 I've heard of it. I haven't seen it.
I feel like it's kind of like a classic footnote of the time, but tell us about that.

Speaker 2 It is a classic footnote of the time, but it just is another kind of like little cul-de-sac because this is going to be helpful in sort of understanding how we.

Speaker 1 Is this perhaps just providing a little bit of the inspiration for the animated DNA Helix in Jurassic Park?

Speaker 2 I would not be surprised.

Speaker 2 I mean, because it's basically, so one thing that is kind of interesting in this time period about the Disney worldview is that the past and the future are presented as kind of a place you can go.

Speaker 2 Like there's the tomorrow land, there's, you know, the Old West, there's sort of, you know, Main Street USA. There's kind of different places that you can pivot to.

Speaker 2 And there's this funny conflation, I think maybe in part because it comes out of the Disney sort of idea factory

Speaker 2 of ancient mythology with physics and science.

Speaker 2 And so our friendly Adam tells the story, quote unquote, of nuclear energy using the ancient folk tale that, which I believe comes from Scheherazad, it's a thousand and one nights, of the fisherman and the genie.

Speaker 2 And it's basically the idea that like nuclear energy, like we collectively are the fishermen, and the genie is nuclear power, and we have three wishes. And it's, I think, health, peace, and energy.

Speaker 2 And it was turned into a cartoon, and it's narrated by a German physicist named Heinz Haber, who's kind of of the same cohort as Werner von Braun.

Speaker 2 And he essentially becomes the voice of, you know, this is physics in the 1950s and 60s.

Speaker 2 It's like, you know, the guy with a German accent wearing a tweed jacket is going to explain to you, you know, using the language of mythology. And if you think about it, there's a lot of like...

Speaker 1 To do this experiment, you will need four paper clips and a nuclear core.

Speaker 2 And just don't worry about it. It's going to be totally fine.

Speaker 2 That the way that Americans were introduced to nuclear power is, as you say, through like the unprecedented death and destruction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Hiroshimi and Nagasaki in 1945.

Speaker 1 And this, I think, folklore may be sold to the American people that I think about a lot of like, well, we had to. Don't think about it.
We had to. Don't even think about it.
Right.

Speaker 2 It was a myth. Exactly.
And also the idea that it's kind of, it exists in the same universe as Snow White and Cinderella. It's the Disney universe of folk tales that are kind of like.

Speaker 1 At the very least, Johnny Apple seed.

Speaker 2 Right. And there, and that it's, and then he's also kind of weirdly not alone about that.
Cause think about like the things that are on TV at this time.

Speaker 2 There's like, or a little later, I dream of genie is, you know, an astronaut meets a literal genie in a, you know, Barbara Eden in a bottle. There's bewitched.

Speaker 2 And so there's this kind of, there's this conflation in a lot of different cultural properties of folklore with the high tech. Right.

Speaker 1 And it is the time of like my magic wife.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And so if you look at the visual, like this little sort of collage that's in your Christmas document, that there's the atomic aesthetic, where there's, you've got lots of like things that look like they've had a lot of caffeine, right?

Speaker 2 Like objects that look like they're just like ready to go, you know, sort of splayed out, rods and spheres happens to lend itself really naturally to the iconography of Christmas and specifically the Christmas tree.

Speaker 2 So when the time comes for an aluminum Christmas tree, which is all the rage between, you know, kind of circa 1958 and 1964.

Speaker 1 I remember this on Happy Days. I remember,

Speaker 1 do you want me to tell you the Happy Days joke about this? I remember this.

Speaker 2 Of course. Yes.

Speaker 1 I think Howard Cunningham says this, but the joke is that someone brings home an aluminum Christmas tree.

Speaker 1 And the joke is, well, we'll save a lot of money on tinsel because it's already looks like tinsel.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Exactly.
And it does. And it's essentially, this is, you know, not to get sort of too over the top in terms of talking about aluminum, but essentially, you know, aluminum.

Speaker 1 I challenge you to get too over the top about aluminum. I think we can handle it.

Speaker 2 I think we can do it. I think we can do it.
This is a hardy crowd. This is, yeah, no, we're tough.

Speaker 2 So aluminum is, it's kind of an interesting story in American design because up until the 1880s, it was more expensive than gold or silver, not because it was rare, but because it was very difficult to refine.

Speaker 2 So isn't that weird just to contemplate? And that's one of the reasons why you actually kind of don't see a lot of aluminum objects that are older older than, let's say, the 1920s and 30s.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating. Yeah.
Although, when you think about it, I guess, you know, you never, nobody ever found an aluminum nugget that I heard about.

Speaker 2 Right, because you have to sort of, there's this whole sort of electrolysis process. I think it involves like, you know, passing.

Speaker 1 While Lucky's down there panning for aluminum. Because if he finds a piece big enough, he's going to buy a new wig for his girlfriend.

Speaker 2 Run it through with the electrolyzer.

Speaker 2 And then, so these two guys form a basically two Gilded Age characters, you know, form a form a company, which is eventually known as the Aluminum Corporation of America, or Alcoa.

Speaker 2 And Alcoa has a very sweet deal with the United States government for a while.

Speaker 1 They're the ones that funded all that TV theater.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 And they and funded the forecast program where they had people like Charles and Ray Eames and Isumu Noguchi designing tables and sculptural works of art to kind of like experiment with aluminum and see what cool things we could make out of it.

Speaker 2 And one of the things, the cool things you can make out of it is an aluminum Christmas tree and you can sell millions of them for not very much money. Because once

Speaker 2 the ability to, well, and part of, just to go back for a sec, part of the reason why ALCOA is so successful is because a lot of this is, it's giving Dulles brothers, there's a lot of like, there's sort of in the category of like Cold War foreign policy in which the United States is able to extract resources from countries overseas in, you know, it's kind of not officially an empire, but it's kind of an empire.

Speaker 2 And they have a patent with the government which means that for world war one and world war ii

Speaker 2 most if not all of the aluminum that's used for the war effort comes from alcoa so they have they make out like

Speaker 2 like you know good deal like they make out like mineral tycoons which is which is which is what they are right so as a result of that one of the reasons why aluminum is so plentiful and why it becomes such a sort of crafty like you can make a decoration you know decorate your tree you can do you know make a costume you can dress make a halloween costume of a robot for your kid.

Speaker 2 You know, it's because it's so cheap. It's been, you know, it has been processed up the wazoo.
And so there's, there's tons of it. And there's a whole infrastructure.

Speaker 2 There's, you know, Pittsburgh is home to big aluminum. And it's also kind of a cool new.

Speaker 2 kitchen gadget and sort of tableware material that plays a similar role to plastic because aluminum doesn't shatter. So if you're comparing it to glass, let's say,

Speaker 2 and plastic and Tupperware is still relatively new in the 50s. Not a a ton of people had a lot of plastic at home.
But you could have something like Russell Wright's spun aluminum barware.

Speaker 2 Like looks really cool. It's very light.
It's not very expensive. You can drop it on the floor.
It'll maybe dent slightly, but you know, hopefully not, and it won't shatter.

Speaker 1 And I imagine for like kitchen tools, totally really revolutionary, too, right? For like a colander and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 It's cookie cutters, colanders, all that pots and pans, all that stuff. Yeah, food mills, anything, any tool.
Oh, God. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Cookie cutters.

Speaker 2 Cookie cutters. I mean, so there's a ton.

Speaker 2 If you are out and about antiquing, where you're going to find a crap ton of aluminum is kind of in the 30s and 40s, like that, all the sort of kitchen gadget stuff that comes from your grandma's house or your great-grandmother's house.

Speaker 2 And so the aluminum tree then takes on this almost kind of iconic status during.

Speaker 2 this time period in which like if you scroll down, you'll find there's a pink print ad from Reynolds, which is now owned by Alcoa, actually.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I'll also say that this tree looks very much like the Christmas tree I have, which is an artificial pale pink tree, which lives in the garage.

Speaker 1 And I haul it out once a year because it bums me out to cut down a tree and then put it in my living room until it becomes crispy.

Speaker 2 See, this is the thing. I mean, do we want to create more plastic in the world? No.

Speaker 2 But if you can find a used, this is my, I will die on this hill.

Speaker 2 If you can find a used aluminum Christmas tree for a reasonable price, which is, let's say, under $200 on eBay or Etsy, you should, did I just pronounce it Etsy? Etsy. Etsy.
eBay, Etsy.

Speaker 1 These are my twins, eBay and Etse.

Speaker 2 They're both very mature. They're temperamental.
They're very entrepreneurial. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You should, because you can use it over and over again. You're not, you know, you're letting trees live.
I mean, it's good to plant trees, but it's also good to not cut them down.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm not going to tell anyone not to cut down a Christmas tree. It just personally depresses me, you know?

Speaker 2 I am in the same boat. I find, and I'm also kind of allergic to the

Speaker 2 crud that exists on the.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And also, it's like, it's what I think that like, I'm sure we talked about this last time, but Christmas is interesting to me because I think it's kind of like the Olympic gymnastics competition, except it's an event where as a nuclear family, which is, of course, also what we're talking about, it's a period during which that concept was kind of cemented, arguably.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you agree with that.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, I totally agree.

Speaker 1 This idea of like the way we never were being one of the great books about it. Right.
Where like, you know, it's not that we used to live in nuclear families.

Speaker 1 It's that there came a time when we decided to all agree to pretend that we should be. And the word nuclear is interesting there because it's not like it's a double meaning.

Speaker 1 It's a total lack of danger. But so I feel like cutting down the Christmas tree and hauling it home is like a feat of strength to use some festivist language.

Speaker 1 That's like also something that families do to prove that they're like adequate as a family. And if you have fighty parents like I did, it sucks.

Speaker 2 because it's an argument. Right.

Speaker 1 Or there's like, you know, I was always happy to have a Christmas tree at the end of the day. And I love the part where you get to lie under it and look up through the branches, you know, and all

Speaker 1 the decorations are on it. But the process of getting it can be brutal.

Speaker 2 Well, and it's very, I mean, it's very old school Santa Claus, right? It's the worship of trees. It's physical labor.
It's lumberjack, lumberjackery.

Speaker 1 The worship of Victoria and Albert.

Speaker 2 Exactly the worship of Victoria and Albert.

Speaker 1 Worship of Lumberjackery, right? And also, interestingly, how like the sort of fall and winter rituals of like white girl fall, basically.

Speaker 2 Yes. Are

Speaker 1 we pretending to work in agriculture a little bit? Because I think that that's what we understand that we have some kind of a need to like be in touch with the seasons.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, and so we have pumpkin patches, which is our like stand-in for the kind of an apple picking,

Speaker 1 you know, wicker man seasonal rituals that we used to do. Now we just go to the pumpkin patch.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so the clip that we're going to watch is the Charlie Brown Christmas story, which is one of our three cultural properties that we're talking about today.

Speaker 1 Oh, good.

Speaker 2 One of the big sort of areas of conflict within it is the nature of what kind of Christmas tree to have.

Speaker 5 I don't know, Linus. I just don't know.

Speaker 5 Well, I guess we better concentrate on finding a nice Christmas tree.

Speaker 6 I suggest we try those searchlights, Charlie Brown.

Speaker 1 This is definitely a cartoon for kids who want the tiny, soft-spoken Santa.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 7 This really brings Christmas clothes to a person.

Speaker 7 Fantastic.

Speaker 1 Yep. This is what I picture when you mention aluminum Christmas trees.
Right?

Speaker 2 Pink? Perky.

Speaker 1 Although the nice thing is that in real life they don't echo.

Speaker 2 Well, that's true. Right.
Yeah, they're kind of, yeah, they're sort of tinny.

Speaker 1 And there's our little Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It's got two little branches and a little top.

Speaker 7 Gee, do they still make wooden Christmas trees?

Speaker 1 It's so cute.

Speaker 5 This little green one here seems to need a home.

Speaker 7 I don't know, Charlie Brown. Remember what Lucy said? This doesn't seem to fit the modern spirit.

Speaker 6 I don't care.

Speaker 5 We'll decorate it, and it'll be just right for our play. Besides, I think it needs me.

Speaker 1 See, this is the Charlie Brown school of shopping, which I do follow, which is that you should buy things because they seem to be underdogs and you don't think anyone else will buy them, which is how I feel about single bananas.

Speaker 2 Right, exactly. But the single banana needs you to rescue it from the produce market.

Speaker 2 So this is to me, like there's part of me that is like very annoyed by the entire premise of a Charlie Brown Christmas because basically you have like a man, like a man is in a bad mood and everyone needs to kind of stand on their head and rearrange their entire existence to make it so that the man is not in a bad mood anymore and I find that very annoying.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, it is endearing because you have a group of little kids wrestling with all the same themes basically that animate a Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th Street.

Speaker 1 And can you remind us, what is the kind of overall story of this show? Because I don't remember it as well as I maybe would like to.

Speaker 2 It is wildly subversive and it's actually worth watching it again if you haven't seen it since you were a kid because it basically is Charlie Brown.

Speaker 2 It opens with Charlie Brown saying that I believe to either Linus or Lucy that he feels sad and that he feels like he should be happy because it's Christmas season, everyone's skating to Vince Geraldi's jazz music on the little pond, but he doesn't feel happy.

Speaker 2 And the dog is kind of charting up his doghouse with all this kind of like Christmas crapola that's like really tacky.

Speaker 2 And, you know, everything is so commercial.

Speaker 1 Snoopy is doing the old Clark Griswold over there.

Speaker 2 Totally. He's totally doing a Clark Griswold.

Speaker 1 And why is the carpet all wet, Todd?

Speaker 2 I don't know, Margo.

Speaker 2 That's so good.

Speaker 2 So the suggestion is made because remember, there's also psychoanalysis because Lucy has the like the psychiatrist is in.

Speaker 2 And so she says, well, why don't you, if you're sad, why don't we, you know, why don't you be in charge of the Christmas play or pageant or whatever it is?

Speaker 2 And so he's kind of becomes like the artistic director and there's a scene where they're all kind of doing like modern dance that remember that they're all doing kind of this like

Speaker 2 modern statement it's really cute yeah i gotta watch it yeah you really need to watch it again

Speaker 2 and then there's you know it's like you're going to be in charge of the tree so he picks out the tree that needs him because it's this like pathetic little kind of pine tree that has one branch and it's the only actual like tree tree in the whole lot that we can see the others are all artificial or have been spray painted i guess at best like pink spray paint which is not a thing, but pink spray painted.

Speaker 2 And Lucy is like, yeah, get a pink one. Get, you know, like the biggest one you can find.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. I have a Lucy tree.
Wow. Right.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And so he is super bummed out about this and kind of basically has a meltdown and doesn't understand why everything is so commercial.

Speaker 2 Is you know, doesn't anyone know what Christmas is all about? And I believe it's who's the one with the blankie? Is it Linus? I think it's Linus.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Linus, I remember this part.
Linus is the one who reminds them, right?

Speaker 2 He recites this verse basically from the Bible of the kind of the Annunciation of sort of, you know, the shepherds are grazing their sheep right before you saying glory to God and the Messiah.

Speaker 1 The angel Gabriel appearing

Speaker 1 with shepherds. And he says, be not afraid, afeared.

Speaker 2 Be not afraid, even though I'm biblically accurate and have 17 eyes or whatever.

Speaker 2 Don't be afraid. And, you know, that's what.

Speaker 1 Imagine if 17 on fire levitating eyeballs appeared in front of you and were like, don't, don't freak out.

Speaker 2 Don't freak out, but FYI.

Speaker 2 And so, and then he just kind of calmly delivers because that's his line in the Christmas pageant and says, well, that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Speaker 2 And do you want to know what the reaction was from the network when this was initially shared before it was broadcast with the brass?

Speaker 1 I have to assume negative because it probably seemed like a real pinko-comie kind of a thing to do, right?

Speaker 2 They did not get it. They didn't understand.
It was like, this is like, first of all, like really weirdly religious.

Speaker 1 Which is interesting because now we're trying to have less Christianity forced upon our children. Right.
But at the time, it felt subversive, I bet.

Speaker 2 Well, but it was also, on the one hand, it's like, it's like hippie-dippy Christian. So it's sort of, you know, it's like goodwill toward men.

Speaker 1 It's like Charlie Brown is one of the Jesus people or something.

Speaker 2 Paired with anti-consumerism. And they were just like, what? You know, it's super weird.
They didn't understand the music. And you know what this reminds me of?

Speaker 2 Apparently, the exact same thing happened when Prince played Kiss

Speaker 2 for executives at whatever his music, you know, Warner or Sony or whatever his music company was. People, they were panicked.
It was like, this is so minimal and stripped down. It's so weird.

Speaker 2 Like, what even is this? Hated it. So that just proves that if you are working on something and the initial reaction to that thing is not what you had hoped.

Speaker 1 Just wait five minutes.

Speaker 2 Wait five minutes. You might be in the same category as Prince and Charles Schultz and the people may, you may be creating a Stone Cold classic and not realize it.

Speaker 1 And also, you know, the commentary for The Godfather is pretty fun. And it's like, oh, I bet that's like, it's Coppola and all his glory.

Speaker 1 But it, one of the, in that vein, fascinating things about it is that like when some of the most iconic scenes were being shot, the things that you would assume people recognized at the time were great.

Speaker 1 The studio was kind of watching, I think the, you know, what Well, I don't know if they were like watching what he was shooting as he was doing it. I just, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know how movies were made.

Speaker 1 But that basically the studio was like, we think you're doing a terrible job. And it always seemed to be on the verge of being taken out of his hands.

Speaker 1 And they were, you know, they were against having the production go to Sicily for those scenes. Like all these choices that you would assume people just kind of intuited would be good.

Speaker 1 You know, they famously wanted to cast Robert Redford as Michael originally.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 You know, and these were all things that clearly today we all see as idiotic, but it's just that like the thing that we've internalized is great, like that's not because it was clear to everyone at the time.

Speaker 2 Right. Exactly.
And if we go back a little further in time, so How the Grinch Stole Christmas airs on the same network, CBS, the following year, but it's published in book form in 1957.

Speaker 2 And I thought that we could read ourselves a little

Speaker 2 excerpt or two from How the Grinch stole Christmas.

Speaker 2 How familiar are you? You had sort of, you remember aspects of Charlie Brown. Do you you remember sort of the gist of the Grinch?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember the story is that the Grinch hates Christmas. And I can't really remember what the basis of that is, to be honest, but he's against it.

Speaker 1 And he lives above Whoville on a mountain with his dog. And he decides, it's, you know, it's not just a clever title.

Speaker 1 He decides to steal Christmas and specifically to steal all the presents and Christmas foods and decorations and all the kind of like

Speaker 1 objects, I guess, or the material aspect of Christmas from the Who's down in Whoville, because then they won't like Christmas anymore. But it turns out that once,

Speaker 1 well, and then he goes to, I think, his last house where little baby Cindy Luhu lives.

Speaker 2 Cindy Lou.

Speaker 1 And they have a moment. I really kind of forget what that involves, but his little heart is touched.
But then he hears all the Who's singing down in Whoville because

Speaker 1 they're still grateful even though they don't have their stuff anymore. I forget why.
I think they're just like, they just are like that. They're like Lutherans.

Speaker 2 So I've I've selected three passages from it and I figured we could alternate.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, I would love that. Okay.

Speaker 1 Every who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot, but the Grink, who lived just north of Whoville, did not. The Gring hated Christmas the whole Christmas season.
Now please don't ask why.

Speaker 1 No one quite knows the reason. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right.
It could be perhaps that his shoes were too tight. Boy, as a kid, I remember thinking, that can't be it.

Speaker 2 That's a weak excuse.

Speaker 2 Weak sauce.

Speaker 2 So the middle part is, and then we'll get to what this reminds us of when we're, when we're done with part three, but the middle part is from his

Speaker 2 reign of terror when he's kind of going through Whoville attempting to steal Christmas.

Speaker 2 Then he slid down the chimney, a rather tight pinch. But if Santa could do it, then so could the Grinch.

Speaker 2 Then he slunk to the ice box he took the who's feast he took the who pudding he took the roast beast he cleaned out that ice box as quick as a flash why that grinch even took their last can of who hash then he stuffed all the food up the chimney with glee and now grinned the grinch i will stuff up the tree Okay, it is like, it's a fun sequence, like both in the book and the adaptation.

Speaker 1 It's fun to watch him steal all this stuff. It's very resourceful.
Okay, should I read the ending now here? Let's do it. Okay.
And we'll talk. And this is our thrilling conclusion.

Speaker 1 Every who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing without any presents at all. He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming.
It came. Somehow or other, it came just the same.

Speaker 1 It came without ribbons. It came without tags.
It came without packages, boxes, or bags. Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store.

Speaker 1 Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. So, this is like really kind of like very similar to a Christmas carol, which I also really love, which is like

Speaker 1 someone who is like a textbook killjoy is like, I hate Christmas. People only care about buying things.
And then he realizes that, no, they actually love it because they're just like good and nice.

Speaker 1 And then he's like, well, never mind. We should buy even more things.
Right.

Speaker 2 And it happens to be, it's like, if you're like me, it's a holiday where you can, if you're somebody who's sort of obsessed with paper products, you can kind of go nuts a little bit.

Speaker 2 And that there's like, you know. But I think what's also interesting is that I think he's, he has deftly.

Speaker 2 channeled a Christmas carol in the, in the person of the Grinch, but he's all, and it's a great made-up word. And Dickens was so good at making up character names.
Much like Scrooge.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Which I think was like kind of an antiquated verb of the time.
But like, it's like, yeah, Ebenezer Scrooge. It's perfect.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's perfect, perfect. But it also has the cadence of a visit from St.
Nicholas.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, it does. Oh, it's genius.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's identical. I'm not enough of a pantometer.

Speaker 1 It's like that horrible Kid Rock song that is emulating both Werewolves of London and Sweet Home, Alabama. And that is just its one terrible song.
But this is a good thing that we like.

Speaker 1 Sorry to compare Dr. Seuss to Kid Rock.
Like, I know he did some racist stuff, but he doesn't deserve to be compared to Kid Rock.

Speaker 2 But it's sort of, it echoes, I don't know if it's like letter perfect identical, but it's pretty similar. And it definitely, I kind of took me a minute to realize that that's what it was referencing.

Speaker 1 And it's right. And I never thought about it, but it's like what the American brain perceives as like the Christmas meter, the Christmas doggerl.

Speaker 2 It's Christmas meter. It's

Speaker 2 yeah, exactly. And so it's like whatever you hear.
It's the rhythm of a horse-drawn sleigh of like little reindeer hooves on your roof. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I sort of, I love the kind of the fact that this is initially published in 1957.

Speaker 2 So this is really like, we are in prime, like Santa baby, dishwasher buying, like putting a big ribbon around a toaster, like consumer frenzy.

Speaker 2 And as early as 1957, Dr. Seuss is, you know, kind of saying, like, look at all this like over-the-top commercial sort of gift-laden Christmas.
Like, you don't need all that stuff.

Speaker 2 Like, you just need to like hang out with your who's and sing a song. Maybe somebody will bring roast beasts.
Don't plan too hard.

Speaker 2 But it's kind of, I think it's, it's kind of remarkably subversive for the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It also makes me think of a Christmas story, which is why, you know, speaking

Speaker 1 it took a while to become beloved. That's certainly one.
It's like the wet-hot American summer of Christmas movies.

Speaker 2 Do you know that I actually, I have to confess, I don't like it.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not in rotation for me.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's not in rotation for me.
That's a, that's a more diplomatic way of putting it.

Speaker 1 What is in your rotation out of curiosity? I've said a lot of mine already.

Speaker 2 Well, so for Christmas, in terms of like stuff to watch, I pretty much always watch Miracle on 34th Street. Like that's sort of probably like my all time.

Speaker 2 And because it takes place in the neighborhood where I grew up. Right.
And it's sort of, it's where the parade begins. And it's really, it's, so it's, it's very, that's very cozy for me.

Speaker 2 Um, I super love

Speaker 2 vintage, like I'm kind of a call the midwife person, which is weird, but they always have a Christmas special.

Speaker 2 And it's this bizarre kind of retrofuturism where they all, the, the Christmas specials all take place in like 1965 because that's when the show is set.

Speaker 2 But so it's as though you're watching a rerun from something that's 60 years old, but it was just made like a few years ago by the BBC.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 So I'm a huge fan of that. I'm also a huge fan of like certain Christmas music.

Speaker 2 Like it's, it becomes, you know, it's as Karen Tongson famously said in that documentary, it's Karen Carpenter season, you know, once you hit Thanksgiving. What is Karen Carpenter?

Speaker 2 It's Karen Carpenter season. So there's the, you know, there's Merry Christmas, darling.

Speaker 1 And also, I mean, I feel like one of the things about Christmas as we're talking about it that I feel like is so tricky is that it's like, you can't really engage with it in the kind of classic sense or as it feels like you're being urged to do without having too many feelings.

Speaker 1 It's almost like an invitation to too many feelings because it's like, it's about family and it's about how much money you have and it's about getting the right toys for your kids and it's about whatever the like latest craze is as we get more into you know the cabbage patch era and beyond and it certainly I would imagine too in mid-century.

Speaker 2 But one of the reasons why I think people collect this stuff is because, I mean, as you say, there's part of it is like that emotional, Christmas triggers that part of your brain that's like childhood, parents, emotions, toys, cookies, et cetera.

Speaker 1 All of your trauma, potentially.

Speaker 2 Like your happiest memories, when you were sad, when you were scared, like all the things that you feel at that age, some people more than others.

Speaker 2 But then it's also, you know, people, grown adults collect toys and collect Christmas ornaments and collect. And I've interviewed lots of them.

Speaker 2 They, you know, I interviewed people from my book who were like, you know, the world's greatest expert on like aluminum Christmas trees, you know, vintage.

Speaker 1 Fantastic.

Speaker 2 And it's kind of incredible, but you also have to think, it's like part of it is that collecting impulse, I think, is sort of chasing something that is forever receding further and further into the past.

Speaker 2 Man. And that part of the reason why grown-ups collect stuff, especially things from their childhood.

Speaker 1 Back like boats against the tide.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 It's this, you know, you're kind of, you can never recreate it, but you can kind of glimpse, you can listen to the music, you know, you can can listen to Earth a Kit, you can watch Charlie Brown, you can kind of glimpse echoes of this time and place when like a lot of people who are probably not around anymore were still around.

Speaker 2 And there is actually a scene in the movie Scrooge that I think, do you remember this when it's David Johansson from what is it, like the New York dolls? Right.

Speaker 1 Buster Poindexter, yeah.

Speaker 2 Buster Poindexter, he's driving a cab and he's, he's like, oh, you know, who was like a total crybaby? Was Genghis Khan or whoever. It was like somebody was like in the back of his cab who was like.

Speaker 1 Is David Cohanson the ghost of Christmas past in the scenario?

Speaker 2 I think he's the ghost of Christmas because he takes Frank back to his house when he gets meat for Christmas.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And then, and he's crying because it's like, I don't understand. And his dad's like, well, that's 40 pounds of veal.
What do you want? You know, where are you a millionaire?

Speaker 2 And it sort of captures that feeling of like. The toughest, most cynical dude you've ever met.

Speaker 2 Like if you turn the key or the dial just right and remind them of something, you know, the Christmas when they were five years old and their dad yelled at their mom or something.

Speaker 1 Right. And that Christmas is maybe actually like a tool to get at the hearts of like horrible old men.

Speaker 2 It's a portal. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because one of the things I love about a Christmas Carol is that Scrooge is only transported back to his boyhood for like five or ten minutes before he starts crying.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like kind of, he does not take that long to be worked on, honestly. He folds pretty fast.

Speaker 2 And honestly, like, I think the last time I saw it, I think I cried during that scene.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, I mean, it's intense, right?

Speaker 1 Right. It's like the most intense possible emotions.
And also, it's about Jesus, incidentally, and Christianity, which is like kind of also an emotional area for a lot of Americans.

Speaker 1 There's just a lot.

Speaker 1 I feel like it's fair to say academically that there's just a heck of a lot going on.

Speaker 2 There's an extreme amount going on.

Speaker 1 But I fear I've derailed us at some point.

Speaker 2 I think we're actually right on schedule. We covered like most of the larger themes that we were going to get to.

Speaker 2 You know, we've arrived somewhere in the mid-1960s and we're probably poised perhaps, I don't know, maybe for a part three one day.

Speaker 1 I think so, the Santa trilogy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we can, we can sort of tackle the 1980s, perhaps, or the 90s.

Speaker 1 Well, tell me about kind of who is Cold War Santa spiritually and when does he exit the scene?

Speaker 2 Or does does he just become part of the broader santa that we now live with that's a great question and i so i i remember there was a super interesting conversation over on i want to say blue sky uh about

Speaker 2 how do you date the cold war or how do you date mid-century

Speaker 1 how do you date mid-century in terms of design yeah because it's obviously not literal or else it would be for like one day

Speaker 2 exactly it would just be like certain decades so my rubric for this is roughly that it's the end of World War II to the oil embargo in the 1970s, because that is the end of kind of unfettered,

Speaker 2 with some dips, kind of this, a streak of unfettered prosperity and consumption

Speaker 2 in which the rest of the world was in tatters because it was the end of World War II. So there's, you know, Europe is in ruins.

Speaker 1 And so the American dollar is so strong that it's like, it's a little too strong, maybe. Scary strong.

Speaker 2 It's a little too strong.

Speaker 2 People are, you know, buying stuff like there's there's no tomorrow, consuming, nesting, white flighting out to the suburbs, buying aluminum trees, you know, watching TV, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And then when the oil embargo happens, suddenly, like, we can't afford things again.

Speaker 1 Right. Now we're back to the American version of bicycle thieves.

Speaker 2 Exactly. We're back to sort of 1930s, like, oh, I can't afford it.
I don't know. And so I tend to think that also the heyday of the aluminum Christmas tree was pretty short.

Speaker 2 It was like sort of mid to late 50s through mid 60s. And then after that, then it's the hippie movement and free love and things like this.

Speaker 2 The space age starts to seem like really dorky by comparison. It had seems to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 Well, it's also like the thing that your parents' generation bought into that then in a fairly direct way led toward the war that you are now, you know, being drafted into potentially.

Speaker 2 That basically like the dream of the early 60s then decays into this, you know, Vietnam and assassinations.

Speaker 1 And so we've, you know, have kind of innocently or intentionally naively bought into the military industrial complex and now it must continue continue to perpetuate itself.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the United States under Nixon is still involved in the Vietnam War, despite being past the point of knowing that it's basically mathematically unwinnable.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah, that has basically been acknowledged as per the tapes.

Speaker 1 What are your opinions about the Christmas aesthetics of today?

Speaker 1 Or kind of the, you know, the recent past and looking ahead?

Speaker 2 Like most curmudgeons, I'm having a hard time with today. And I'll tell you why.
Well, yes, today's a little hard. for a number of reasons

Speaker 2 one of the things that drives me baddie

Speaker 2 is the kind of ai generated like printed wine mom

Speaker 2 font

Speaker 2 home decor objects like if like when you go into like an airbnb and it has like friends gather here and like wine mom but i think what what grosses me out is to think about

Speaker 2 how much of this you know that there's you're aware even though we're neither of us are on twitter anymore but you're aware that twitter is now a cesspool of like official federal government accounts basically

Speaker 1 why I left. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's, yeah, it's not great. It's posting essentially like kind of Nazi propaganda, for lack of a more

Speaker 1 well, that's nice. And also, you know, we're having basically like fascist human processing and concentration camp building facilities built in all of our backyards right now.

Speaker 1 And it's all really happening. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's really happening and it's happening self-consciously.

Speaker 2 And one of the ways that you you know it's self-conscious is because, let's say, you know, the Department of Homeland Security Twitter account will post an AI-generated kind of fantasia that is riffing off of either like a Soviet or a Nazi poster of like protect, that's like protect the fatherland.

Speaker 2 So it's not in German, but it'll say. So why? I know.
I mean, it's a good, it's a really good point. Why are they doing that? I know.

Speaker 1 Why do so many people want to be Nazis? That's really, that's what I want to know.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I think that it is a giant fuck you from an unhappy person is in a general way.
I think that's part of it.

Speaker 1 I hope he gets visited by a biblically accurate angel.

Speaker 2 Angel being

Speaker 2 repeatedly.

Speaker 2 Just scares the crap out of these people.

Speaker 2 And, but then also, it's like a lot, you know, if you look at the trolls behind the accounts, it's like, are any of them, do any of them actually look like this?

Speaker 2 I mean, probably not, because most people don't.

Speaker 2 I mean, but it's just kind of that like, I think that realizing and seeing that that has become, and I'm not on Twitter, but I follow people on Blue Sky who post this stuff just as a way of like documenting it.

Speaker 2 And so I just, I'm aware that it's happening. This is going to sound extremely dorky because it is extremely dorky, but to kind of take

Speaker 2 propaganda from World War II and position it as though it's sort of pro, like you're defending the homeland, you're defending the borders, like using essentially like, just makes me want to vomit.

Speaker 2 Like it just is so,

Speaker 2 you know, if you, I mean, and it's not for all the obvious reasons it's i'm not different from anybody else i mean i'm not having any reaction that anybody else wouldn't have but just that it's

Speaker 1 well actually you are because apparently a lot of people are pro the very thing i guess that's true the very thing i'm talking about

Speaker 2 but there are a lot of us who are feeling equally ill right now yeah like if if your family was here during world war ii if they were somewhere scarier than here during world war ii if your ancestors fought or like mine did engineering you know just what it took and how close it came to completely knuckling under to fascism the first time.

Speaker 2 And now to be kind of like fucking around with it.

Speaker 1 And how to embrace it enthusiastically.

Speaker 2 And to do so in the service of tormenting all of these wonderful people who want to move here, who we want to have live here because they're great.

Speaker 2 And even if they weren't great, we would want them here because it's America. And, but I think most of them are great.
And it just makes me really sad.

Speaker 2 So that's my very inarticulate rant about anti-immigration.

Speaker 1 I was kind of asking you more about like the idea of a Ralph Lauren Christmas being this

Speaker 1 year, but I think what you said is a lot more relevant, and mine was like a brain-dead question.

Speaker 2 Well, actually, I mean, the Ralph Lauren Christmas is actually kind of a fascinating additional cul-de-sac because.

Speaker 1 Yeah, talk about that for a second. Let's have one last cul-de-sac.

Speaker 2 It's an echo of the Reagan era.

Speaker 1 Yeah, God, it is. Oh, it's right out of the Preppy Handbook, isn't it?

Speaker 2 It's the Preppy Handbook. So, because Ralph Lauren became, sort of came into prominence around the same time as like John Hughes' movies and Ronald Reagan's second presidential term.

Speaker 2 And the world that Ralph Lauren depicts, which is this kind of like

Speaker 2 Western ranch slash like New England country estate slash, it's kind of a, it's like a non-place that has sort of.

Speaker 1 I would say that the classic 80s Ralph Lauren looks are like you're cosplaying. Maybe not a character on Dynasty because they were just like dripping in jewels and stuff.

Speaker 1 Like that was pretty over the top and I would say not preppy really.

Speaker 1 But like a horsey, like horsey plaid Yes, you're cosplaying like a beautiful girl from a horsey family You're like the like during the school you're a girlfriend of one of the guys in Mystic Pizza.

Speaker 1 Exactly. You know, and and you're so beautiful, but your family's got secrets.

Speaker 2 There's there's a lot going on at home, as they say.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and you're wearing a plaid a lot of the time and you've got the LL Bean

Speaker 1 boat tote or whatever it's called.

Speaker 2 Oh, the pullover. Yeah, exactly.
The boat tote with the little

Speaker 2 monogram. That, you know, that is depicting an extremely white racial landscape of 1980s America.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, and I think in the 80s we were talking about wasps explicitly a lot more.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 I don't mean to cast aspersion on Ralph, but not, well, I mean, personally, but not for this reason, maybe, I guess. But like, not for this reason.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this idea that like, you know, Ralph Lauren, I think real name Lipschitz is like

Speaker 1 as an outsider. And I remember I did an episode on kind of prep dum with Avery Truffleman a while ago.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It took an outsider to synthesize the sort of aspirational wasp aesthetic for just like not normal necessarily, because this is clothing and stuff is still a symbol of upward mobility, but for someone who is like trying to learn and perform this aesthetic rather than just living in.

Speaker 2 Because if you're doing it naturally, you don't realize you're doing it.

Speaker 1 Right. And it's like, and it's very much the aesthetic of like white white generational wealth.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which of course goes hand in hand with racial oppression in America because that's just where a lot of families have made their money.

Speaker 2 That's where it came from. Exactly.
It was aluminum. It was, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 So I think, yeah, I mean, I don't want to, you know, Ralph has a kind of like 19th century Santa Claus appearance nowadays. So I think

Speaker 2 he's 80 Santa Claus. So I don't, I don't want to cast aspersions, but I think I am a firm believer that store and mall Santas should reflect the communities they serve.

Speaker 1 And they should also be smaller. And maybe we need more women and non-binary Santas so we can get a smaller Santa.
Just like get that Santa nice and small kind of go.

Speaker 1 Because have you ever experienced like Mickey Mouse at Disneyland or Disney World?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, as a child.

Speaker 1 Because Mickey Mouse is like five feet tall, right? Imagine if Mickey Mouse were played by someone the size of Gaston. It would not feel good.

Speaker 2 I know. It would be so weird.

Speaker 2 Whereas, I mean, didn't we talk previously about the idea of either John Waters or or Fran Leibowitz being Santa? Yes. And I think either of those are great choices.

Speaker 2 I think, but there's infinitely good Bo and Yang. I mean, there's incredible choices out there.

Speaker 1 You can have whatever Santa you want. Yeah.
Yeah. And also, as you famously have observed, Santa Claus is a mom.

Speaker 2 Yes, he's your mom. He's totally your mom.

Speaker 1 Well, okay, so maybe my last question is, because yeah, I feel like just kind of on TikTok, this is going around this idea of like, the thing to do this year is a Ralph Lauren Christmas.

Speaker 1 And of course, really the thing to do every year is to throw out all your stuff and get new stuff because that's what they want you to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 To me, a Ralph Lauren Christmas is also basically like the entire aesthetic of the Macalester household and

Speaker 2 the movies.

Speaker 1 And those people, except Kevin, kind of Kevin too, are assholes. And so we don't, you know, we don't need to emulate that.
I feel like my Christmas aesthetic is definitely like...

Speaker 1 a little bit atomic aged as evidenced by my Christmas tree. Totally.
But also my Christmas aesthetic is, I am tired and whatever I bother with is great.

Speaker 1 And I think that that's the aesthetic for 2025 that I believe in personally.

Speaker 2 Exhaustion. And also, being like, what I have found is actually.

Speaker 1 You're lucky I did this much. You're welcome.

Speaker 2 I baked, and there's, there's like a tree. We have, I think we've maybe talked about this last year, but basically my various passions in domestic life are at loggerheads with one another.

Speaker 2 Because on the one hand, I have a miniature aluminum Christmas tree, which has been in storage for quite some years because I also have cats. And cats and Christmas are a fraught combination.

Speaker 2 So I have to be really careful in kind of the edit of like what I, you know, what gets put out,

Speaker 2 what will they leave alone. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a reason I have a Christmas tree, but not ornaments on it.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Because the cats use it as a climbing wall.
So part of that, I mean, so we're kind of Christmas minimalists a little bit.

Speaker 2 And partially because my husband is Jewish and he's not, neither of us are religious, but we're just kind of like generally festive is the vibe, like a Tommy Cage festive, festivus for for

Speaker 2 all of us.

Speaker 1 Why don't you just need more lights up? Cause it's dark all the time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you need more lights. And then, you know, you are tempted to dress up the cats, but then resist doing that.
And, you know, make special food, have some.

Speaker 2 I actually got these really cool battery-powered illuminated trees from the MoMA gift shop, which are, I highly recommend if you're, if you want to put something out that you need to only put batteries in and then turn on and then you're done decorating, incredible.

Speaker 2 Like 10 out of 10. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and my advice this year as i think it was last time is

Speaker 1 let's try to the best of our ability to stop treating christmas and the winter holidays as an event that we're being judged on even if there are people who are actively judging us let's try to ignore it and just like do less have a better time truly do less have a better time because people

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 1 people don't care and if they do care it's weird and they're caring about the wrong thing and just yeah yeah because you know what i think too is that like and this is like a real big part of our culture right now, is the anxiety about knowing that the technologies in our lives that were sold to us as a means of entertainment and productivity are now robbing us of all the waking hours they can possibly get.

Speaker 1 And I know,

Speaker 1 get us to keep them running while we're asleep as well. Right.

Speaker 1 And that our time is really precious in a way that I think that we're more and more becoming conscious of as that we're feeling it, you know, being sucked away from us by corporations and industries that make money by taking our time from us.

Speaker 2 And taking our attention. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The whole attention economy of today.
And so I think that at Christmas, like we're, you know, we're all thinking about spending money and that's a very difficult area because people

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 trying to get by with less. And, you know, for a lot of people, certainly in the United States than

Speaker 1 in a long time or in recent years, potentially. And things have just been getting, you know, have been tough for a long time for various reasons.

Speaker 1 So I feel like this is really a time to try and celebrate and share the joys that come with just like, with, you know, with spending money on things that we enjoy and on kind of like treating the people that we care about, if that makes us happy and is possible for us, but not thinking of this stuff as obligatory and not thinking of there being a minimum of stuff that you have to, to buy or to display in order to be doing it right.

Speaker 1 Because whatever we choose to do is the right thing for us.

Speaker 1 And also to think about like the time that we spend is very precious and to not take part in things just because we feel like that's the baseline that we've been trained to do, regardless of whether we really have the capacity for that.

Speaker 1 I feel like Christmas is a little bit of a Grinchy take, but to me, Christmas is a great time for enforcing boundaries and saying no and also spending time on your own, if that's what makes you feel safer.

Speaker 1 I will always say that.

Speaker 1 Christmas is also a time when abusive people

Speaker 1 use the holidays as an excuse to get you to do what they want you to.

Speaker 2 Oh, God, I know.

Speaker 1 You can ignore that. It's okay.
Santa doesn't care. Santa's on his spaceship.

Speaker 2 Well, I think that is one of the things that I really love and try to remember always about.

Speaker 2 I think it's a useful thing if your personal relationship with Christmas is fraught, which I think honestly, like most people's kind of is to some extent.

Speaker 1 Because I mean, just look at it.

Speaker 2 Just look at it. Look at it.
All of this stuff is made up. Like we treat it as though it's like, oh, it's a federal holiday.
It's from God. It's, you know, it's like just this this unstoppable force.

Speaker 2 All of it is invented and cultivated and shifted and changed and tweaked over time by people. And you can do that too if you want to.
You don't have to do. You're a people.
You're a people also.

Speaker 2 You can be a Grinch temporarily if you feel like it.

Speaker 1 You can invent your own Christmas tradition randomly out of nowhere because if there's one eternal Christmas tradition, it's making stuff up and pretending we've always done it.

Speaker 2 And pretending that it comes from the Middle Ages. That's the only cave.
Yeah, that's all you have to do.

Speaker 1 So do whatever you want. Say it's from the Middle Ages.

Speaker 2 And to all a good night.

Speaker 1 Sarah Archer, you're so great.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, Sarah Marshall, likewise.

Speaker 1 We're going to put this out around Thanksgiving, actually, because like the Christmas tree, we want to give it extra time to stay out and become desiccated.

Speaker 2 I love that.

Speaker 1 Where can people find your work? And have you written any fun books that people might like to buy or get from the library this Christmas season?

Speaker 2 That is a great, well, all three. So my books are Mid-Century Christmas, which is seasonally appropriate and it makes a great gift for like your mom.

Speaker 1 Which is really both the things we've been talking about. It's like the book version of this podcast episode.

Speaker 2 It is the book version of this podcast, exactly.

Speaker 2 And the Mid-Century Kitchen, which touches on many sort of overlapping themes of Cold War domesticity, and Catland, which is about cat culture in Japan from the view of people in the West who consume it very avidly.

Speaker 2 So all of those three, depending on who's on your list, if you've got a kitchen gadget person or a cat person or a Christmas person, these might all be the same person. It could be.

Speaker 1 Could be me, but I already have your books, so get them for someone else. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Could you already have them and you can, and thank you so much. And you can find me on Blue Sky and on Instagram at Starcher Eyes.

Speaker 2 And I usually post links on both of those places to whatever my latest piece is out in the world. I've been doing a fair amount of writing for Architectural Digest lately, which is super fun.

Speaker 2 And yeah, so I would love to hear from you if you're out there and want to talk about Christmas stuff. Yay.
Or cats or whatever.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much for your work and the things that you write and also for joining us.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's such a pleasure.

Speaker 1 And thank you for being just the most fun person to talk about material culture and ephemera and why my kitchen looks the way it does.

Speaker 2 Anytime, truly anytime.

Speaker 1 Also, this is a hard time to feel like you're doing enough. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And maybe it might help to remember my theory that cats are ancient aliens and someday the larger family members who brought them to our shores will come back and we'll be judged on the way we've taken care of them.

Speaker 2 So when things are feeling difficult, just

Speaker 2 take good care of your cats.

Speaker 1 Find a cat to pet or not pet if that's what it wants.

Speaker 2 Do what it wants. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then you'll have done something

Speaker 1 good and that'll make it easier to do your next thing.

Speaker 2 All right, a lot of good advice.

Speaker 2 Excellent advice all around. Merry Christmas, Sarah Barshall.
Merry Christmas.

Speaker 1 And that was our episode.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 1 If you can find Sarah's books in the show notes, they will make a great gift, especially perhaps to your mom. I know my mom liked hers.
Thank you to Miranda Zippler for editing and producing.

Speaker 1 Don't forget we have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus. Check out The Devil When You Know from CBC Podcasts.
Check out A Sunset.

Speaker 1 They happen at 4.15 now, so they're a little bit easier to catch. We will see you next time.