Stuff You Should Know - 2022 Holiday Spectacular!

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Another year comes to a close here at SYSK, which means our annual Holiday Spectacular is at hand. So light a fire, pour up a comforting beverage and gather the family for some good cheer!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Music Hey and welcome to the Holiday Cast. I'm Josh and Chuck is here and Jerry's here with a million elves surrounding us and making us kind of nervous because they're just looking at us and not saying anything. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the holiday episode. The last recording of the year for us.

It's great. And I'm so excited about that and you and I love our jobs. But it doesn't matter how much you love your job, vacation is better. Yeah, some vacay is better. Yeah, agreed. And this is going to be our longest Christmas break yet and we're both super excited to do that,

but we're even more excited to share with you another set of... It's getting thin, but another set of great stories for Christmas. I disagree. I feel reinvigorated. Really? I think we hit rock bottom two years ago. Okay. And we've been coming back ever since then.

I feel great about this one. Did you really look at two years ago? Was it bad? No, no, I just remember it. It was not great. Yeah, I don't know. I need to be invigorated by you then because every year I keep thinking, oh boy, that's a lot of years to be doing six to eight Christmas stories.

How many are out there? There's plenty, man. We'll never run out. Come over here. I'll invigorate you right now. Okay. All right. Thank you.

How many, how many, how many? Okay, we're going to start out with your pick. Yes. This is actually from a listener named Alexandra Stock or Stoke. I'm not sure. I bet it's Stock. She wrote in for several years with a bunch of really good ideas, but she really, really was pushing for the chestnut one.

And I understand why now because it's a really interesting story. The story behind why chestnuts used to be basically like the symbol of Christmas in America. For a couple of hundred years until it just suddenly stopped being that way. And let's talk about that. Yeah. And big thanks to USA Today for a great article from Kate Morgan. I wonder if that's the same Kate Morgan that writes for How Stuff Works. Oh, I don't know.

That's a great question. I bet it is. At any rate, if you've ever heard the Christmas song, not a Christmas song, but the Christmas song from crooner Nat King Cole, you might not even know that was the title of what's more commonly referred to as chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Yeah. This was recorded in 1946.

It was a very big hit. One of the biggest Christmas songs of all times. And I guess it sort of acted like everyone around was in America was sitting around roasting chestnuts. But I've never seen a chestnut nor roasted or tasted one. And that's because by that point, there were no chestnut trees in the United States anymore. No. Very sadly, a blight started to spread, I think, starting in 1904. And within 40 years, almost every single American chestnut tree was dead.

And how many were there? There were a lot of them. At one point, half of the trees in the forests on the east coast from Maine to Alabama, as far west over to Kentucky and Ohio, were chestnuts. Half of the trees in that stretch were chestnuts. And I think there were as many as four billion of them. So that's a lot of chestnut trees. And that's a lot of chestnuts.

And that's a lot of roasting because people used to eat these things. The chestnuts themselves were small. They're about acorn size. And they had a very obviously nutty flavor, but very sweet. And carrot-like is what I've seen when you just eat them out of the shell. Yeah. But then you roast them up a little bit. Things got even nuttier.

And they got a little sweeter as things often happen when they roast. And it was like a American and especially a Christmas staple where on street corners and cities all over the United States and the eastern seaboard, there were chestnut roasters serving up bags and bags of this stuff. Yeah, Kate Morgan puts it really, really great. She says, for more than a century, it was the smell of Christmas in America. Ooh, nice. I even wrote gosh after that in my notes.

But it's sad. I mean, think about that. There was this amazing tradition that dated back easily to the 18th century, if not even a little earlier, in North America. Once Europeans came over and discovered chestnuts, that I'm quite sure the indigenous peoples were well aware of for long before that. Of course. And they said, hey, these are pretty amazing.

And they made it not just part of Christmas, but you could find chestnuts in dishes in America throughout the year. But something about roasting chestnuts at Christmas time was very Christmassy. And it's like you said, Chuck, we're bereft. Those of us alive today who were born after the mid-40s have never tasted a chestnut the way that it's supposed to taste in America. Because the stuff we got now, it's not holding up. No, they're importing chestnuts.

I think largely probably for the Christmas season, even though you can probably get them, I imagine, all year round. But they're mainly imported from Korea or Italy or China, apparently. And these are not the American chestnuts. They apparently do not taste like they taste. Apparently they don't taste that great at all. The way this one person that was interviewed in here described them was this is Libby O'Connell, who's a food historian,

wrote a book called The American Plate, A Culinary History in 100 Bites. But Libby describes them as sort of like a soft potato and bland and not like this crunchy thing that you would think of when you think of eating a roasted chestnut. No, and in a horrible, ironic twist, those chestnuts that we're eating today in America like schmoes come from the very same tree that was imported to Long Island

in the late 19th century that started the blight that killed off the American chestnut. You won't catch me buying those then? It's terrible. Luckily, there is a glimmer of hope. There is a group called the American Chestnut Foundation. Since 1983, they've planted at least 73,000 test trees. They've been trying really hard to crossbreed American chestnuts

with Asian chestnuts so that they'll be immune to the blight, but they'll still produce those American chestnuts. They think maybe in a decade, maybe a little longer, we will be able to experience the Christmas chestnuts like they used to have back in the days of Nat King Cole. That's right. So if you live in North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, or Pennsylvania, then your state is growing those test chestnut trees

and we all have our fingers crossed. A lot is riding on this. Yeah, yeah. That's really well put, Chuck. So shall we climb on our sleigh and hop over to the next roof? Yes, let's. And we'll have Jerry give us a little musical interlude in the meantime.

I got to tell you, the songs Jerry puts in here, it's my favorite part of this whole thing. I like us talking. It's fine. But the holiday trimming that Jerry puts on it is just magnificent. And you know what you're not going to hear? Oh, yeah. What?

Ads. Right. We wall this one in the Halloween episode off every year and say, don't come near my episode. That's right. And I think it's a great tradition if you ask me. I think it is, too. There's nothing like leaving money on the table.

All right. So you dug up some cool stuff along with Sean Flynn of Forbes magazine on some very special places all over the world that kind of have a cottage Christmas industry in one way or another and for different reasons. Yeah. There's places that say, this is Santa Claus's home. Another place is, no, this is Santa Claus's home.

Yeah. Another place is, this is Santa Claus's summer home. And, or other places are just like, we're not saying that. We're just celebrating Christmas year round. That's right. One of them is called the Rovaniemi Finland, where in Finland they know Santa Claus Yulepukki. That's in Finnish.

I've seen rare exports enough times that I'm pretty sure that's how they pronounce it. What's rare exports? It's a Finnish Christmas movie that came out five, six, seven years ago. Oh, yeah? Yes. But they envision Santa Claus as like a demon, not a friendly elf. And they have to basically capture him. And it's really interesting.

It's a great movie. Okay. I'll have to check that out. Yulepukki. Oh, wait, not in Yulepukki. That's Santa Claus. What am I saying? Yeah.

Rovaniemi. Okay. They are one of the ones that say, no, this is where Santa was born. It's the official home of Santa. We have the Santa Christmas house right over there. You can go visit it. We have a post office here where it is chock full of letters from children all over the world.

And we even have a toy factory. So we lay claim. I looked at pictures of Rovaniemi and enchanting understates that place. Agreed. It's amazing. It looks pretty sweet. So that's one place. They don't necessarily say Santa lives here now, but they say Santa was born here.

Yeah. They've got a contender over in Norway called Drewbok. And they say, oh yeah, you think Santa was born in Finland? Wrong. He was born in Norway under a rock outside of this town. Everything is more fun and disturbing than Scandinavian folk tales. It seemed like they always thought something really weird like Santa was born under a rock. A few hundred years ago.

And that rock is right over there. They also, of course, have their own post office where kids send their list. So kids are, they're sending their list to different places all over the world where I guess it depends on where your parents' allegiances lie. But I think all of these post offices like in Drewbok and Rovaniemi and the other places we'll talk about know where to forward them on to the North Pole so they get to Santa. Right. They're a mere way station.

Right. Exactly. What about Alaska? Isn't there a North Pole Alaska? There is. There's a place called the Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska. And it is supposedly Satanic's home. I think it's one of his many homes.

Sure. And it's really cute. It's pretty kitschy looking. There's a lot of strange paintings outside of it. But one of the other things that they have are light poles that are shaped like candy canes. How to have them? Yes. That stretch along roads and streets called Santa Claus Lane, St. Nicholas Drive.

There's one, I'm wondering if this is a nod to the vacation movies. Holiday Road. Oh yeah. That was Lindsay Buckingham. Was it? It may have been Fleetwood Mac, RIP Christine McVeigh, who just passed away in real time. Yeah. Very sad.

Yeah, I know. It's pretty neat to see how many people are like, this is a big deal. Yeah. Very big deal. I was very sad. Listen to it all night. No. But that's not what this is about.

No. This is about Santa Claus's towns around the world. It's about Snowman Lane in North Pole, Alaska. Yeah. So North Pole, Alaska, another place that says, this is where Santa lives. There's a place in Indiana called Santa Claus, Indiana. And they say, no, no, this is where Santa Claus lives. I can understand the distinction here because Indiana is much further south than Alaska

or Norway or Finland. Yeah. So this is possibly Santa Claus' summer home, one of his summer homes. Yeah. This seems like the KOA campground of kitschy Santa places. Yeah. For sure. And they have a Lake Rudolph there with a campground.

And they pour it on pretty thick there in Indiana with a light show that tells the story of Rudolph and his travails. And they have a Santa's Candy Castle. Yes. It's, you know, they've made it, I'm glad you included links to these places. You should go look them up. It's pretty fun to look at. Santa's Candy Castle was sponsored by the Curtis Candy Corporation who make Butterfinger

and Baby Ruth. And they opened this place in 1935 to really kind of give Santa Claus, Indiana a boost. Of course. There's also a Santa Claus Museum that would be worth visiting. I'd love to go visit that someday. Yeah. You get in the Christmas spirit, right? Yeah.

Another thing that will get you in the Christmas spirit in July even is the 81 foot wide star over Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. That's right. That's on South Mountain. It was built in 1937. And apparently in 1937, it was a real sort of sign of hope during the Great Depression. Right. And I believe that the city itself was founded on Christmas Eve there in Bethlehem in 1741.

So I'm sure, I mean, that's why they got the name, right? Yeah, for sure. And they make no claim whatsoever on Santa Claus having a home there, having been born there. They're just fans, really big fans, you know? And then finally, I guess Santa has his beach condo because who wouldn't if he were Santa and you could just, you know, he basically prints money every year, you know? Sure.

This is, where exactly is this in Florida? This is inland kind of along the St. John's River. So rather beach, he would have like, this is his airboat swamp getaway. Okay. Give me a north or a south, though. Is it south? South of what? South Florida, is it south of Gainesville?

It's east of Gainesville. It's due east of Orlando. Okay. So I got you. I got you. So right there in the center of the state, sort of. Yeah. Pretty much the center right.

Florida is very misleading because it takes as long to drive to Miami from Atlanta as it does to drive to New York, which seems hard to believe, but it's true. But to drive from like Orlando to Tampa, it takes an hour and a half basically. It's crazy. You can get to so many places in Florida in two or three hours, it's just nuts. Right. But from tip to top to bottom, it's a long way. Yes.

Agreed. But Christmas, Florida used to be Fort Christmas because it was a fort. It was an army stockade. It was built in 1837 and they said, hey, I guess we got this place with this name and we got a post office that kids are going to want that post mark once again from Christmas stamped onto their letter. So that seems to be the main industry now. Yeah.

Is there a post office? It's true. And they keep it decorated year round to really attract people. And it works. Yeah, I love it. For sure. So there's some places you can visit if you were like, I really want to feel closer to Santa this year and I feel like doing some traveling.

This is a great list for you, everybody. All right. And now we are going to talk about the two worst Christmas songs in history. Oh my. You might be right though now that I think about it. I hadn't considered that, but I think you're right. I mean, there are certainly some annoying like pop rock versions of Christmas songs, but it does not get much worse.

When Grandma got run over by a reindeer and all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, I will say this. Grandma got run over by a reindeer is so infuriatingly catchy, it's been stuck in my head all day and I didn't listen to it. Oh, wow. That's hilarious. Just from reading it and doing this research, I've been walking around bashing my head against the wall all day.

It is catchy. It's what people in the corporate world would call sticky. It's very sticky. And it's actually way older than I thought. I think of that song as firmly in the mid-80s, but apparently it was written all the way back in 1977 by a songwriter from Dallas named Randy Brooks. And depending on who you ask, either his grandmother left him out of her will or he, no, I don't either.

I think it was a joke by whoever said it. And then the likelier one that I think Randy Brooks says is that he was just thinking about those country songs as he put it, where they drag you into love with the character and then kill them off in the third verse and how he was kind of sick of that kind of songwriting and he wanted to kind of make light of it. So he started thinking about grandma being killed off and even worse, what about grandma dying at Christmas and he started wondering exactly how would grandma die at Christmas and it hit him like a flash.

Yeah, it strikes me that Brooks may have been sort of trying to get on the coattails of like Ray Stevens, who was a country sort of, he made, he wrote some serious songs, but he was kind of known for novelty and joke songs. He was like the American Yacob Smyrna. Yeah, sort of. He definitely looked like him, not to think about it. But it was sort of a thing back then in country music where you could write some songs that were humorous and they could end up being big hits.

So Brooks would apparently do some of this, apparently, did you mention the Johnny Walker thing? No, I didn't. Supposedly he was headed to bed with his guitar and quote his co-writer Johnny Walker Black and wrote this song, which, you know, if you've never, certainly that chorus will stick in your head, but I'm not going to sing it, but I don't remember any of the words. A new grandma got run over just from the chorus, but when you look at the lyrics, it is, it's very dark.

Grandma's drunk on eggnog is like leaving the party and they're like, no, don't go grandma. And she's like, I need to get my meds. And goes to get medication drunk and gets run over by Rudolph. And they say they find her dead in the snow with footprints on her forehead and claws, and Santa Claus marks on her back. That's pretty clever. What else? Um, so the family celebrates Christmas dressed in black because they're mourning and they

have like a whole conundrum in front of them. They were like, should we just open grandma's presents or should we send them back? And then the song goes over and focuses on grandpa, who's handling the whole thing really, really well. He's having a party. He's hanging out watching football on TV and drinking beer and playing cards and seems to be okay about this whole thing. Yeah.

So that's the essence of the song. Like I said, Brooks had made a name sort of, it sounds like regionally writing these Ray Stevens-esque country songs and was performing it out one night when a married duo, married at the time, just divorced a handful of years later, named Elmo and Patsy were in the audience and they were recording artists and they said, hey, can we record your song? They weren't huge stars, but I looked them up and they were, they were pretty well known at the time in that, in the country music scene. And Dr. Elmo went on to be a vet, a doctor of veterinary medicine, which I thought was

interesting. I saw that too. Yeah. So, Randy Brooks said, sure, you guys can record my song and they actually started pressing their own copies of this, I guess a single, like a 45 of grandma got run over by a reindeer. So this was, I saw, they met at a Hyatt in Lake Tahoe during a blizzard and that's where the whole thing happened. But the upshot of it is by Christmas Day, 1979, one of these singles had made its way

into the hands of a DJ in San Francisco and this DJ played it on the radio for the first time and it apparently was very polarizing from the outset. Some people called the radio station and said, don't ever play that record again. Other people said, like, where can I get a copy of that record? And year by year, it just kind of slowly started to spread around the country. And then in 1983, that was the year it just absolutely blew up. Yeah. I mean, that's why you remember it as mid-80s because in 83, it became a big, big hit, four

ish plus years after it was written and a few years after it was first recorded. So that's, it's definitely, or I guess, actually more like six years after it was written and four years after it was recorded. Yeah. Very unusual. Apparently it got a big boost because Elmo and Patsy had gone to the trouble of paying for a video to be made just in time for MTV and MTV put it in heavy rotation and it ended up being the number one song on the Billboard holiday charts for several years in a row.

And it spawned a whole bunch of stuff. It went gold, it eventually went platinum. There's toys, ugly sweaters, there's a cartoon based on it, scented candles. Randy Brooks said there was a hot chocolate mix. I couldn't find that to corroborate it. And then there's a Christmas themed podcast I found that seems to have released the most recent episode last year, but they have 29 episodes under their belt. Grandma got run over by a podcast.

As far as the two singers, they got divorced, I think the next year in 1984 or so. So maybe all that success went to their head. Yeah, that'll do it. I've seen that movie. It could happen to you. Can I read the last line? You wrote this last line, right? Yeah.

Not a bad run for a man whose co-writer is Scotch. You like that, huh? Oh, that was great. Very much tickled me. So are we going to put a musical interlude in between these two or are we going to head right over to All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth? Let's just head right over there. Big thanks.

I got most of this stuff. There's a bunch of histories of this song, but the most thorough was from the Greenville Theater in Greenville, South Carolina at GreenvilleTheater.org, and they do Christmas plays. And I think they perform this every year. It will have been ended by the time this comes out, but support local theater and support the Greenville South Carolina Theater. Yeah. It was kind of confusing at first.

I was like, what does Greenville Theater in South Carolina have to do with this? Because this whole thing took place at Smithtown Elementary in Smithtown, New York. Yeah. Long Island. Yeah. Where a man named Donald Gardner and his wife Doris Gardner were music teachers at Smithtown Elementary. And Donald Gardner was trying to come up with a song for the second graders at one point,

and he noticed that they were talking amongst themselves and kept saying, like, All I Want for Christmas is, All I Want for Christmas is, and that's kind of a phrase that they used. And then at some point, I think Donald Gardner told a joke and all the children started laughing, and he noticed something very significant about those kids that inspired him. They did. And he actually put a number, thanks to the Washington Post. I know the actual statistic is 16 out of the 22 children in the classroom were missing

their front teeth. The front toothing is funny when you have a kid. My daughter is pretty late on her teeth, losing her baby teeth, so she still has this cute little top baby teeth. But sometimes you'll see, like, a kid as young as like four and five that have these giant honking front teeth, because, you know, those adult teeth come in. Sometimes they don't fit in the mouth so well. Yeah.

No, true. But it's always funny to see her friends at school, like a lot of them have those big teeth. They still got her little teeth, but losing the two front teeth is a big deal. I remember I lost my front two in a pretty quick session and we talked about, and I even put it on my Instagram when my mom dressed me up as Huckleberry Finn for the photo shoot, which you can find at Chuck the Podcaster on my Instagram. You'll have to dig back, because I'm not going to repost it or anything like that.

But losing the front teeth is a big deal. All these kids had their teeth out and it struck Donald Gardner as very funny, and apparently he whipped up the song, you can tell, in about 30 minutes. Yeah. That's pretty amazing, though. He was also, like, he was a music teacher. He also was really good at writing music as well. He went on to write songs for musical textbooks, among other things.

But the song initially was just relegated to Smithtown Elementary for the first several years. But it became a tradition that they still carry on today. At Smithtown Elementary, they have a holiday sing-along, and invariably they play or sing All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth. But it really kind of blew up in 1948 when it was first recorded and kind of hit, I think, that's the impression I have, after Spike Jones and his City Slickers recorded it. Yeah.

It was a lady right before this who heard Gardner sing this thing at a teacher's conference and said, that's really catchy. Why don't you meet my boss at Whitmark Music Company. They published the song, and then, like you said, Spike Jones and his City Slickers put it out, and it was, yeah, it was the number one hit in 1949, didn't get much bigger. And it got covered most notably by the chipmunks. Yeah. That was a chipmunk song, wasn't it?

It was. Man, the chipmunks' Christmas songs are great. We listen to a lot of Christmas music over the course of December. I love it, until I don't. But Emily, she dives in right after Thanksgiving, and in fact, wanted to play it before Thanksgiving this year. I was like, babe, it's, come on. Too early.

Just too early. Can we at least wait till after Thanksgiving? So we haven't put on the chipmunks yet, but that's always a fun one in the house. My favorite of all time is Ferrante and Tiker. They're dueling pianos. I haven't heard that one. Oh, man. Good stuff.

Yes. Yes. It is just, I mean, I'm sure it's nostalgic for me because I grew up on that, but I don't, I can't imagine anybody would hear it and be like, this is terrible. What's it called? Like, it's really great. Ferrante, F-E-R-R-A-N-T-E, and Tiker, T-E-I-C-H-E-R. And they actually did the theme to Midnight Cowboy, too.

They were really accomplished musicians. But they would both play grand pianos. That was like their thing. And their take on Christmas songs with two grand pianos at once is really, really something to hear. Well, that's what I will try and do most times is put on like Christmas piano solo stuff to keep from hearing the bad pop music. So I'm all over it.

You're going to love them. Yeah. Yeah. That and a little Mannheim steamroller. And I'm all set. Stirring stuff. All right. I think it's sleigh time, right?

It is. So let's play on over to something else with the musical interlude. So Chuck, we've got a little shorty here that we're going to squeeze in about peppermint. Because if you stop and think about it, I can't think of a taste, especially now that chestnut trees are all dead, that is associated with Christmas more than peppermint, you know? Yeah. We might get those little peppermints on the way out of a restaurant, but aside from that, you're not going to be tasting a lot of peppermint, I don't think, outside of December.

No. And there's a writer named Sam Worley for Epicurious who kind of rattles off some good examples. Like there's a bunch of mochas and Starbucks that uses it. There's ice cream treats called frosty trees that I looked up, I was not aware of frosty trees and now I really want a frosty tree. Have you ever had one? No.

Is it like a hand pie? Basically, but in the shape of a Christmas tree made of peppermint ice cream. Okay, a frozen hand pie. So the peppermint is, it's kind of the unofficial flavor of Christmas. And Worley asks a pretty good question, like why? How did that happen? He ascribes it to peppermint candy canes. I think that's a pretty good case.

But I also think you could make a case that peppermint is like a cool blast of winter in your mouth. Oh yeah. So I can see just from that as well-being associated with it. Yeah, totally. It's not like it tastes like, you know, broiled liver. No. Boy, that would be, imagine the world if that was the taste of Christmas.

Oh, as the story goes, and I found this in a bunch of different places and Sam Worley kind of helped to verify it at Epicurious, but as the story goes, and certainly in the book The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, there was a German choral master in Cologne, Germany in the sort of latest 17th century who had some rowdy German kids at a live nativity and was like, this is getting out of hand. Every time these kids come in, all they're doing is cutting up. So can I get something, Mr. Local Candy Maker? Like a candy that will last for an hour or so and keep them busy.

And voila, the candy cane. Right, because nothing settles kids down like a sugar stick. Yeah. But that's how it came up. And apparently because of that link to the nativity, that's the reason a candy cane is curved. It's supposed to replicate a shepherd's staff or echo it, I guess, like that. Yeah.

And I think originally they were only white and the red stripes came a little later. And I think, you know, it's funny you think of peppermint as like red and white, but that's, I think that's probably strictly coloring, right? Yeah, peppermint is, I mean, it's a lot like spearmint. It looks very green and leafy. And it's apparently indigenous to the Middle East and Europe. And it was used as like a medicine for a really long time. But yeah, I can't imagine peppermint as anything but red and white stripe, too.

That's what we know it as. I am not a big peppermint guy, but I'll munch on a little candy cane every now and then for nostalgia's sake. Oh, sure. I like the fruity kinds, though, more than anything. Oh, like the rainbow colored. What about the big, giant miniature baseball bet peppermint candy canes that you would get as a kid?

Well, it's a little ostentatious for me. Do you remember those, though? Sure. They were like, like Billy clubs. They were. And if you had an older brother, they were probably used like a Billy club against you. Although not Scott. Scott would never do something like that.

He would never do that. He would lick his into a vampire killing spear and just drive it right through the back of your knee. That's right. So here's a little fact for you. You can bust out at your next Christmas party or holiday gathering. The candy cane was invented about 200 years before it became peppermint flavor. It was this kind of plain sugar flavor up to that point.

Yeah, like a lick'em stick. Yeah, I love those as well. All right. Let's see what Slay is calling our name, my friend. Let's get in. The seat's still warm. Gross. Oh, sorry.

I wish I had not had that broiled liver. Gross. And alive. I thought with the open air of the Slay, it might not really hit your nostrils too bad, but. No. Christmas is ruined now. I was mistaken.

So speaking of Christmas, how about Elvis? How about him? So you dug something up about Elvis and Christmas, apparently the two went hand in hand. And if you stop and think about Elvis, I am not at all surprised that this particular season was like the end all be all to him. Yeah, Elvis was very into his family and his friends, very into just sort of home in America and just a well-grounded Tennessee truck at it. Right.

That was about to say really into Benzedrine. But he was way into Christmas and I have been to Graceland two times. I went once regular and I went once during Christmas. Oh, you show off. It is really lovely. I would recommend going not at Christmas. It's sort of like if you've ever been to the Biltmore House in Asheville, I find that the regular tour is better than the Christmas because it's so overdone Christmas.

It kind of gets in the way a little bit of just the regular beauty of both of these places. I see. But Elvis did it up for Christmas. Colored lights everywhere, six, eight foot Christmas trees out front, blue lights up that long driveway. It's funny they call it a mansion. Graceland was not that big. Every time people go to Graceland for the first time, they're always like, huh, this

is it? Yeah, I remember thinking that. But it's a fun visit and you and Yumi should definitely go at Christmas if you haven't been. If you've seen it regular, then you should go at Christmas. Yeah, we saw it regular style, not peppermint style. You said that he lined his house with blue lights. I just find that so wonderful.

Yes, plain white lights are good. Even multicolored lights are good, but something about blue lights at Christmas, they really kind of make it more Christmassy to me for some reason. Totally, and that was sort of the style back then before everyone thought like the only thing you could do was classy white lights. Right, exactly. I know you like your colored lights. Yeah.

No, I love the big fat multicolored bulbs for sure, but something about the small blue lights too, I'm kind of, my tastes have evolved into that, I think. So we have a quote here from the Memphis Press Cemetery in 1966 where Elvis said, it really is the best season of the year, man. The Christmas carols, the trees, and the lionesses grab you, there's something about Christmas and being home, I just can't explain. Maybe he's being with family and friends, time to read and study, and of course snowball fights and the sleigh rides and just home.

Beautiful. That was wonderful, Elvis. Yeah, I think he did a great job describing it. So you can imagine that Elvis, as he was, and as rich as he was, and as much as he liked Christmas, he really overdid it with presents. Usually employees got big fat cash bonuses. Friends and family would get anything from like jewelry to cars to dogs, he gave a girlfriend a poodle once, he just really liked to do it up.

And apparently between 1954 and 1976, he celebrated 23 Christmases at Graceland. Wherever he could, he would make his way home and spend the holidays at Graceland, and more often than not, he was able to. That's right, and we know this because of the book Elvis colon day by day by Ernst Jorgensen and Peter Guralnick. I think you got it the second time. I think so, but they went year by year, and it sounds like day by day, but we're going to go over a handful of these years that are notable in 1954.

This is before Elvis was a big famous star, and his family lived in a little apartment on Alabama Street, and just the week before that, Elvis made his first musical appearance at the Louisiana Hayride radio program. A few days after Christmas, he ended up playing a club in Houston, and his career started on its way, basically. Yeah, but 1956 was his breakout year, get this, he had 17 songs on the Billboard 100 that year. The three of them were number one in 1956.

So in 1957, he had bought Graceland, and this is his first Christmas at Graceland, but it was ruined by the U.S. military. That's right, a few days before Christmas, he got his draft notice, and on Christmas Eve, he asked for a deferment and got it, and pushed that by just a few months, actually a year and a few months, pushed his deferment to March 20th, 1958. Yeah, that's still just a few months. Oh, okay, yeah, that's how years work. Yeah, you're gonna make me cough.

What else happened in 1958? Well, his mother died, it was his first Christmas without his mother, I'm sure that was rather sad. It was. It was also a Christmas that he spent in Germany, because he was stationed there during his military service. So he probably was not very happy in Christmas 1958. He was trying to make the best of it, not a blue light to be found in Germany, and his

mom was missing, so not the best Christmas of all time. 59 was his first with Priscilla, but you mentioned the girlfriend who got the French poodle. He had a girlfriend at the time named Anita Wood, and he sent Anita the French poodle while he was canoodling in Germany with Priscilla. So by 1966, he said, I'm gonna make an honest man out of myself, and he proposed to Priscilla on Christmas Eve, which now I understand that's a super Elvis thing to do, and apparently between 1967 and 1973, there wasn't a whole lot going on, just happy, normal holidays, because we pick up again at 1974.

Yeah, and this was the last few years of Elvis' life, or well-documented, is not being great for his health. He was having some health problems in 1974 during Christmas, and so to pick his spirits up, I think, he flew in a gospel backup group called Voice a few times in and out of Memphis, just so they could sing with him at Graceland. Yeah, that's pretty cool. What about the last one? Why are you leaving that to me?

I'll take it then. So this is the year I was born. I've always been convinced that I am the reincarnation of Elvis. In 1976 is the last Christmas of Elvis' life. He apparently, it says that he had a bizarre Las Vegas engagement. Was that the very famous, like, Vegas fat Elvis? Well, sure, in 1976, absolutely. Okay, so that happened right before Christmas then?

Yeah, but I can't remember the incident, but there was one concert in particular that kind of went off the rails. Okay, it sounds like it was this Las Vegas one. Yeah, I think it's the one where he couldn't remember lyrics, and he was sweaty, and it was just a bad scene. That's not good. So that was his last show before Christmas. I guess he went and recuperated, and then two days after, he started up another tour

at Wichita State, and then six and a half months later, he died where, Chuck? On the toilet at Graceland. Right, well, I was just going to say at Graceland, but yes. Yeah, you can't go up there in his personal quarters, as you know. No, totally. You can't go up those stairs at Graceland. So that was Elvis and Christmas in the blue lights there. I loved it.

They were like, all right, Elvis, you got one more tour in you. Let's launch it at Wichita State University, where all the best tours are kicked off. All right, should we finish up with a boozy recipe like we like to do? I think we should, but first, how about a musical interlude from Jerry? Okay, Chuck, I don't know if we had a boozy recipe the last couple of years, so it's time to bring it back. And this one, anyone can make. You can make it with your eyes closed.

You can make it with your feet. You can make it very easily. You could have your eight-year-old child make it for you if you wanted to. It's just that easy. But what's interesting about it, it's called Moose Milk, and it's associated exclusively with the Canadian military. That's right. Apparently, all of the militaries in Canada, the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and

their Moose Patrol, they all claim, I guess, ownership, or at least claim to have written the recipe, but we do know that regardless of who did it, it was a drink that was concocted back in World War II and has become just a very, very customary drink to have in Canada, I think, certainly for the military, but I think all the way around Canada, right? Yeah, especially on Christmas and New Year's Day. So there's a lot of different things you can do. There's a lot of different ingredients as you'll get the gist of it from this, and you can kind of let your imagination run wild.

And that's kind of what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to make it to taste using as much or as little as you want. But our friends at Atlas Obscura found a recipe from the Cape Breton News, and they recommend that you basically stay with whiskey, rum, or vodka. I've seen rum more often than not, and apparently, though, the military used rum when they ran out of whiskey. So I would recommend one of those, too, but if you don't like the brown liquors, vodka apparently works.

Yeah, this sounds, I barely even drink anymore, but I am inspired by this very soothing, sweet-sounding Christmas treat, so I'm going to have one of these soon. Okay, but you should probably have it in the morning because of the first ingredient, or else you'll stay up all night. Nah, coffee didn't keep me up, so one cup of cold coffee, a cup of half-and-half. That is a lot for one cup. That's a one-to-one? Yeah.

Holy cow. What else you got in there, ice cream, maybe? Yeah, one-and-a-half cups, good vanilla ice cream, not the cheap stuff. That could be vanilla bean, perhaps. So and this is basically, I don't know how many servings this makes now that I think about it, but based on the amount of liquor, I would guess one serving because it just calls for two ounces of rum, whiskey, or vodka, actually it says and or, and then a tablespoon of Kahlua, and you mix it all together in a bowl, whisk it until the ice cream has melted,

and then you put it in a cup and top it off with either nutmeg or dark chocolate shavings to make it classy. I would say not for the lactose intolerant. No, definitely not, and I've seen that mentioned, like this is not for you if you are lactose intolerant, but regardless of what recipe you use, whoever posts the recipe invariably mentions that if you're in the military, go ahead and double the amount of alcohol called for. Yeah.

I mean, if you've got a cup of coffee, a cup of cream and ice cream, I think you could stand, you know, a half a cup of rum. Sure, I could. Navy strength. No wait, that's gin. Yeah. I think there's navy strength rum too though. Oh, okay.

This is, I mean, this is not too far off from one of those trendy espresso martinis. That's right. That's right because the Kahlua and the coffee, yeah, really kind of make it like that. So that's kind of a fancier version. I found another one on a cooking website called withlovefrombex, B-E-X, and her recipe, apparently her husband was in the Canadian military. So I'm getting the impression that it's adapted from him. It's way easier.

It's way more straightforward, and this is the one that your eight-year-old can make for you. Yeah, this one's got ice cream, vanilla again, and rum, but this time it's got eggnog in it. And then just a little nutmeg, that's about it. But again, you just mix it all together, mix it all together, and then whip it up into a cup. And she uses like two liters ice cream, four liters eggnog, two liters rum, and a tablespoon of nutmeg.

Obviously, this is for more than one person, I hope, I really hope. Yeah, I wonder if our buddy, our colleague Alex at work, has a great tradition he does every year, where he makes the George Washington recipe for boozy eggnog, and he makes big batches and bottles and leaves it on his front porch and sends out the email to all of us and says, hey, it's out there again this year, come by and get some if you want. Yeah, and he makes the nog from scratch, like with eggs and everything. I've made the recipe with store-made eggnog, but then with brandy, I think, whiskey and rum.

Yeah. And it's really, really good. Yeah, and I've yet to have any of Alex's, I'm sure that it's just knock your socks off when it's made from scratch. And Alex says a great podcast as well called Ephemeral that we can recommend. And also before we close, I did a guest spot on another I Heart show called Parenting is a Joke with the great Ophira Eisenberg of Ask Me Another Fame, and she's got a show with us.

Our old buddy, Julie Smith, produces it. Oh, really? That's awesome. Julie got in touch and she was like, hey, you want to be on Talk About Parenting? And so I'm on an episode that has already dropped. It'll be a few weeks old by the time you hear this, where I talk about parenting and Ruby's adoption story. And if you stay and listen through the credits, there's a very short little 45-second interview

with Ruby that's adorable. Oh, that is adorable. Great plug, Chuck. So check it out. And it's a really good show. We got Ephemeral and happy holidays, everybody. Yeah, yeah. Here's the part where we wish everybody happy holidays, right?

I mean, I just did. Okay. Well, I'm going to take it up from there. I'm going to say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, have a tip-top tet, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa, happy holidays in general, however you celebrate them. We're really glad that you hung out with us and we hope we gave you some holiday spirit, right, Chuck? That's right.

And we always like to think of our listeners who have a bad time this time of year because that's true for a lot of people. It's not all merry meant for everyone. So if the holiday seasons are rough for you, then we are thinking about you and you are not alone. And we just want to wish everyone well and let's head into 2023 feeling good. Yeah. So from Chuck and Jerry and me and from Frank the Chair, from Dave C., from Max, from Ben,

from everybody here at Stuff You Should Know, have a happy holiday. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.