Stuff You Should Know - The SYSK 2020 Holly Jolly Extravaganza!

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

It's here again! Our annual ad-free holiday spectacular. So pour up a hot toddy, throw a log on the fire and listen with the whole family! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, ho, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's even here, and we're all wishing you glad tidings and merry tidings. And decking the halls and all of that for this very special 2020 Christmas edition of Stuff You Should Ho. Did you say Stuff You Should Ho? I did. That's great. I thought so, too. How have you never said that before?

I don't know. It just came to me, and, you know, it basically made up for the Pan of Apple Pie turnover analogy in the buffet episode, if you ask me. You tried it twice, though, didn't you? The Apple Pie one? No, I hit the three-time thing. Oh, you did? For genuine community effect. And I think that episode might, I don't know, is that going to come out before this one? Yeah, it came out on the 23rd.

Oh, okay. And what day is this one out? The 25th, I believe. Is it on Christmas Day this year? I don't know. I'm going to look right now to see, and as I'm talking, no, this one comes out on the 24th, so buffets came out on the 22nd. Oh, but it's Christmas Eve. That's even better, almost. Yeah, Merry Christmas Eve, everybody. Yeah, Merry Christmas Eve, and we like to remind people, as per tradition, we fight tooth and nail for this. It is an ad-free episode, and that's all we have to say about that.

We don't do ads for these episodes. Nope, this is a very special thing every year. This one in the Halloween episode. Yeah, we didn't even talk about how we're going to order these, but I'll go ahead and make a pitch for lead tree stencil to go first. Okay, that's what I've got up first too, Chuck. It's a Christmas miracle. So, Tinsel, I think we've talked about in another episode before, Chuck, where that came from. I believe it was in one of the really early Christmas episodes, but we can give a little background here in that. I think starting around the 16th century or the 17th century, the very wealthy aristocrats started putting actual gold and silver strands,

or more commonly, I think these kind of twisted, almost candy cane-looking hooks made of gold and silver. They would put it all over their tree, hang this stuff, and they called it Tinsel, which is from the old French for estin sale or sparkle, and that's kind of where Tinsel came from. But you have to be fairly wealthy to put strands of pure gold and silver on your Christmas tree. That kind of is how it goes. Yeah, I'm surprised that's a French word. It sounds very German, Tinsel. Yeah, Tinsel does, but estin sale. Well, that sounds very French, you're right.

It does. It's almost like that Esprit brand of clothing, but it takes a real sharp turn after that first ES syllable. So, yeah, the rich people were doing this on the tree. They kind of kept it to themselves, and then the industrial age rolls around, and all of a sudden, we had less expensive varieties of this kind of thing, which meant aluminum, copper, great for both, and lead, not great. Well, the aluminum wasn't so great either. They would make an aluminum paper tinsel with acetate, and that stuff would go up faster than a matchbook on like a dead tree. And, you know, this is a time when everybody was smoking everywhere all the time, so the aluminum one was particularly bad, and the copper I saw is still around, Chuck.

They make garlands of copper tinsel, but it's not for decorations. It's for you to walk through to discharge static, like if you're going into, say, like a computer clean room or something like that. They make copper tinsel now, but that didn't really catch on either. So they settled finally, like you said, on lead, and, you know, that's kind of problematic, because lead is poisonous, as we talked about in our Why Is Lead So Poisonous episode. Did we do that? Yeah, don't you remember in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum made the case that the end of leaded gas actually was responsible for the decline in violent crime over the years?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did an episode on that. That was a good one. That was a long time ago. Yeah. So this was before the FDA got involved and knew that lead was, you know, in our plates and in our paint and in our jewelry was killing people. And there was a German company called Sta-Staniel Fabrik Epstein. Very nice.

And they had an imperial patent on lead tinsel in 1904. And people love this stuff. It translated Sta-Staniel Lametta into tiny blade, which is hysterical, if you think about it. It's kind of what they were. Yeah. But it was, people love this stuff because they started making it in South Philly, too, in the early 50s. It really hung on, it really looked great. It hung on the tree very heavy, obviously, because it's lead.

And it looked, apparently this woman, Susan Wagner, wrote a book called Handcrafted Christmas, where she talks about how wonderful it was. And it didn't tarnish. And it just gave a really kind of heavy icicle look to the tree. Yeah. And so that German patent was issued in 1904. I guess it took almost 50 years before it made its way over to the United States. But by the 50s, there is a company called Bright Star Manufacturing that was making lead tree tinsel for use in the United States, too.

But the party didn't last very long, about a decade, really, before it was becoming quite obvious that lead poisoning was a real problem. And the thing is, it's like you said, there's a lot of places where lead turned up in your house, including on the plates you ate from. So tree tinsel was probably one of the lesser evils in your house that you were going to get lead poisoning from. But it was also one of the easiest things to phase out. And the FDA kind of zeroed in on getting rid of lead tree tinsel using these kind of back channel methods to get rid of it before anybody knew what was going on. Yeah. So they ended up making a deal, the FDA with tinsel importers, and said, you know what? You've got no product here that you can sell here anymore.

And this was in the early 70s. Your time, face it, your time here is done. The thing is, though, they didn't get the word out. It's not like that was like burning up the headlines all over the country, because what they were afraid of was people love this stuff. And if they hear that it's going to go away, people are going to go out and start buying up all the lead tinsel. Totally. And it's going to be counterintuitive to our goal here, which is to get rid of the lead tinsel. Right.

It would take years and years before that finally got phased out. It would be so much easier if it just didn't come back one year. And that's basically what happened. The FDA managed to kind of secretly get rid of lead from Christmas tinsel and say, come up with some other stuff. And very short-order plastic came along to replace it. But what was crazy, Chuck, is that lead tinsel remained available in Germany until 1988. Really? Yeah. They did not get rid of the Lameda until then.

Wow. Very surprising. Germans are tough. So I want to say also a big shout out to our friend and longtime listener, Robert Paulson, for suggesting that one. And as you'll see later on in the episode, he's basically the secret elf for this year's Christmas extravaganza. So thank you very much, Robert. That's right. His name is Robert Paulson. Should we move on to Charles Dickens?

Oh, yeah. I thought we would just leave it at his name as Robert Paulson, but yes. All right. Here we go with a little bit on how Dickens saved Christmas. So everybody thinks like a Christmas carol is the most Christmassy thing that anyone's ever come up with. And until a Christmas story came along, that was true. And a Christmas carol is kind of responsible for a lot of the traditions that we think of as Christmassy these days. It basically came from the end of Dickens' pen, things like this idea of having your family around you and being charitable and spreading goodwill and peace and all of that stuff.

Like all of that kind of came from this Christmas carol. And in fact, even wishing people married Christmas was a Dickens invention too. But what a lot of people don't realize is that Dickens, when he wrote a Christmas carol, he basically grabbed Christmas out from the clutches of oblivion and dragged it back into popular culture. That he was largely responsible, or one of a few Victorian authors who were responsible for saving Christmas from obscurity from around that time about the middle of the 19th century. It is hard to believe, but that is true, that in 1863 Christmas was dying in no small part by the hands of a man named Oliver Cromwell, Lord and Protector of England, a very famous 17th century Puritan,

who didn't like Christmas. He didn't like the people going out and having a good time and drinking and eating too much. And he was like, listen, there's no scriptural basis for Christmas. It's not in the Bible. There's the Sabbath, of course, but it doesn't say, hey, everyone get together on the 25th and get drunk. Does it? Right. I mean, that's definitely what they were doing. In fact, since the medieval era in Britain and other parts of Europe, especially Celtic-centric, but pagan basically parts of Europe, they would get together and kick off, I guess, the whole thing on Christmas kind of like Fat Tuesday ends Mardi Gras. It's like in reverse. Christmas kicked off 12 days of festivals and celebrating, of gathering at the tavern, of having friends and family over for a big feast, and all of it can be traced back to these pagan winter solstices.

But then when Christianity came along, they said, oh, we'll just say it's the birth of Jesus kicking all this stuff off. But it was a big, long 12-day winter festival of revelry, and people really appreciated it. And Cromwell said, no, that's too much fun. Christmas is here by band. And he got it pushed through parliament that Christmas was in fact banned. Yeah. And a couple of acts of parliament in 1447, he pushed it underground, essentially, because people still did their celebrating. It just wasn't as a raucous at the local tavern. It was a little more at home behind closed doors, but he certainly could not dampen people's spirits. They just took it inside, basically. Then the Industrial Revolution comes along, and people worked on Christmas.

And it wasn't like, oh, I got to work on Christmas this year. It was like Christmas was kind of like any other day. And you just worked because the factory was open because there were seven days in a week and you were expected to work all of them. Yeah. Cromwell couldn't quite get rid of it. And he actually, he and the rest of the Puritans got pushed aside when the monarchy came back and all that stuff got overturned. But just, yeah, about 100 years later when England went through the First Industrial Revolution, that was, I mean, that almost did it in, because like you said, everybody was too tired to celebrate Christmas. They didn't have any time off, but also very importantly, Chuck, a lot of those people who had been celebrating these Christmas in the medieval style with feasts and friends and family and revelry and carols and all that stuff, they used to do that back in the country during the agrarian age. Well, the agrarian age had come to an abrupt halt during the industrial age.

And so all those people had moved from the country to the city, and they didn't have these longstanding multi-generational community ties any longer. So celebrating Christmas kind of fell away. It stayed back there in the rural areas, and it didn't quite make that transition to the city. So between these long seven-day work weeks and then this transplanting from the countryside to the city, Christmas was almost lost had it not been for Dickens. That's right. Then a Christmas carol comes along, and that kind of did it. People loved it. It was a very big hit. He didn't make a ton of money on it, and that was kind of his fault, because he really wanted a really good-looking book that was packaged well. He didn't want to charge a lot for it. And like you said at the beginning, a lot of the things that we think of at Christmas, like saying Merry Christmas, wishing for a white Christmas, this all comes from Dickens' version of a Christmas carol. And it was a big hit. And he worked in stuff like ghost stories, which in the medieval times they told Christmas ghost stories.

So people think that's kind of where he got the ghostly visitors from. Yeah, I think we talked about that. I think the live Christmas show, we talked about that, didn't we? I think so. Yeah. But yeah, thanks to Dickens, Christmas was a big hit again and has not been threatened since, except for people trying to kill Christmas now. I guess. It's rampant, isn't it? The new Cromwells, right? That's right. Well, now you can say Merry Christmas to everybody, and you can know you're giving a hat tip to good old Charles Dickens.

Music All right, next in our list of merry-ment is finance and economics. Put in a very fun way. I think I got to feel like we've talked about this before because it seems so familiar. But the PNC Christmas Price Index since 1984, the PNC bank has been doing this where they calculate the current annual cost, or the cost of that year for the items on the song from the song The Twelve Days of Christmas. Obviously, we're talking about French Hens and Leaping Lords and Five Golden Rings, and all of that livestock and jewelry and entertainment. They have very, in a very fun way since the mid-80s have been calculating, hey, what would that cost this year? Yeah, and in fact, there's one particular economist at the bank, Rebecca McCann, who kind of oversees this whole thing.

She's like, yeah, it's super fun. I don't get to stop doing any of my regular work. They make me do this on top of everything. Yeah, probably. And I don't even give me a bonus anymore. They did away with bonuses in the merger of 1995. So it's funny when you think about this, a lot of these are pretty easy to get, like turtle doves and partridges. You could call bird suppliers or hatcheries for hens and swans, or a nursery for pear trees and stuff like that, or obviously jewelry chains for gold rings. But it gets a little trickier when it comes to ladies dancing and lords leaping. What do you pay for that? Well, she calculated the cost by getting in touch with things like dance companies. The Philadelphia Ballet, I think, was one of them for the Pennsylvania Ballet.

The other one, she got in touch with Philodanko, which is a dance company in Philadelphia, believe it or not. And said, basically, how much would it cost to put on a show or to rent, I guess, 11 lords leaping? And I'm sure they hung up a couple of times on her before she finally convinced them to give her a straight answer. But yeah, she really goes through and figures out the price of each of these things. But then she's also being an economist, says, well, it's more than just that. You also have to pay for things like gas, for shipping. The cost of services has gone up recently, but the cost of goods has gone down by comparison. She takes all these different prices together, adds them up, and that is the consumer price index every year.

That's right, the Christmas price index. That's right, I'm sorry. It reflects the consumer price index, which is a legit thing that's used as a metric to track the economy of the United States. This is a slightly more tongue-in-cheek. Although, as we're going to see, it actually does have some real-world reflections to it. If you went through and hired 11 lords of leaping, this is probably roughly what you would pay for it. Yeah, I think the saddest one for me would be Maid's of Milking, and it's also the easiest one to figure out, because all she has to do is plug in minimum wage, because that's what a milking maid would probably get paid. But that one hasn't changed, obviously, since 2009, as horrifically the federal minimum wage has been locked in place for 11 years at 7.25 an hour.

Yeah, so that one's a bit of a bummer, and then the big surprising thing for me, definitely, was that there were a number of things that you couldn't get this year, McCann found out, that this year's total Christmas price index was about 60% less than last year's, the cost of it. In 2019, it was $38,993.59. In 2020, it cost you just $16,168.14, and you say, like, oh, okay, well, that's great, you know, prices are going down. Well, no, like I said, the reason why the cost had gone down is because you couldn't get things like lords of leaping or drummers drumming or pipers piping or ladies dancing because of COVID-19. Yeah, that kind of surprised me, and it's not very fun. No, it's not. You could get a drumline outdoors, space them out and pay them money. I guess so. Maybe McCann wanted to point out that there's a coronavirus pandemic going on right now. Yeah, I think that's kind of the deal. I think there's a bit of a nod and a wink and a message to be sent each year when this is released. Yeah, but the thing is, Chuck, even if you're like, whatever, I don't care about the pandemic, I've got this price in hand.

I'm going to go with the 2019 prices because I'm really going to twist the arms of those dance companies and get them to lend me some dancers. Do you have to stop and ask yourself, like, are these actually good gifts anymore? Yeah. The answer, I think, would be no. I mean, yes, the birds are calling. Those are canaries. That's a pretty good idea. Sure. Or if you have like a farm friend and you're like, not only did I get you some chickens, I got you some French hens. I think they might be slightly impressed. Everybody would like five gold rings, that kind of thing. But if you put the whole thing together all at once, it can be kind of overwhelming.

And they mentioned this on an episode, a Christmas episode, the office where Aaron, the receptionist says, whoever is my secret Santa that's buying me the 12 days of Christmas presents, please stop, it's ruining my life. Yeah. She said the French hens are plucking at her hair to make nests out of it. Oh, that's good. And other terrible stuff. So I guess if that's your idea, if that's your thinking that you're going to buy your true love, the presents from the 12 days of Christmas just don't.

Don't do it. Maybe some leaping lords, but then stop. All right, shall we move on to our next segment? Yes, let's. We need to thank Robert Paulson for this one too, right? The little elf from Los Angeles came to visit us yet again. Yeah, the little elf who could. So this is about the first department store Santa Claus and we need to caveat this in a big way because

1890 is when Colonel Jim, James Colonel Jim Edgar of Brockton, Massachusetts, claims and people look at him as the first department store Santa Claus. And we were emailing back and forth because Macy's they say goes back to 18, what, 60 something? There's apparently, there was another one called, I think J. W. Parkinson's from Philadelphia who hired it somebody to dress up as Santa and climb the roof even before Macy's. But Macy's was the first to actually have a Santa in their store. And there's postcards from the 1870s that clearly show this, that Macy's was the first. And yet you can go all over the internet and you search the first department store Santa.

You're going to come back with James Edgar. And people even mentioned this in the same article that yeah, Macy's had it first, but this guy's the first. Just, you know, let's go out back and fight over it if you want to. Yeah, I think what you found and what we're just going to agree on is that it said he was the first known. What was the exact wording? Not known quantity, but known individual. Known entity. I think it's how they put it in the weirdest possible way.

Yeah, the only thing we could figure out is that James, Colonel Jim Edgar was the first person to say, Hey, I'm Santa Claus in this town. And my name's Colonel Jim Edgar. And everyone knows it's me that's doing this thing. And he became known as the guy. Whereas I guess Macy's just had nameless Santa Claus. So maybe that's the difference. That's all I can figure out.

But let's put all that nitpicky stuff aside. Okay. But I think it's important that we said it. And I'm glad you brought it up. But the thing is, is I think a lot of the reason why people are really willing to go out back and fight you over Jim Edgar being the first Santa Claus is because this guy's character was as close to Santa's probably ever any Santa's helper who ever put on the suit and when worked at a department store over the holiday season ever has. Yeah, he seemed like a really good guy. And there are stories that abound about the good things that have happened with Colonel Jim and in his wake.

And one that happened in his wake was about 30 years after he started doing Santa. I guess he was gone at this point. But Brockton mass was a shoe making town. It was very famous for making shoes. But by the 1920s and 30s, it had fallen upon hard times. And there was a truan officer that found out that hundreds of kids were not even going to school because they didn't have new shoes or a means to repair their shoes. And so that truan officer's name was Charles Brooks explained this to William Wright, the president of Edgar's department store. And he said, what should I do? What should I do? And he said, you know what you do? You do what James Edgar would have done.

And the guy says, what? And the other guy goes, God, do I have to spell everything out for you every Tuesday? I have to explain everything I say. And the other guy, the truan officer said, please just one more time, I have to know what would James Edgar do? And he said, well, here, rip off Macy's. And yeah. So what he said was that James Edgar would fix these shoes and that he would use his company to do that. And so that's exactly what the president of James Edgar's department store did. They removed the third floor of the department store from use, bought, I think, a $3,000 shoe repairing machine, hired six cobblers in the town and started repairing children's shoes for free.

Amazing. You found another little piece about James Edgar and what kind of guy he was too, right? Do you want me to talk about it? Because I will. That'd be great. So this is why I said he had the character of Santa. Like he would dress up as a clown or that kind of stuff like and wander around. And finally, one day he decided to dress up like a Santa, but he loved children. Like really genuinely loved the kids. And I read Chuck that when he died and the local school let out for lunch, all the kids went down to his funeral to pay their respects, like hundreds of children in town.

And that was because he did things like he was well known to take care of his staff, his employees. He made them shareholders in the business. He lived on a second floor walk-up apartment, even though he's a very wealthy man, because he wanted to have more money to share with his employees. So cool. He would close early four nights a week so that his employees could go spend more time with their families. And he had a really great quote that I think sums him up pretty well. I've made a barrel of money and I have spent it as freely as I've made it.

Thousands of it goes back to the people from whom I made it, for I fully believe in that kind of an exchange. And he seems to be the kind of guy who really literally put his money where his mouth is. He would take his money, put it in his mouth, and be like, kakakwana. Good one. Thank you. So the whole reason people say Jim Eger was the first department store Santa's,

because he did this thing in 1890, and he attracted kids from all over the Northeast. And in very short order, starting the next year, department stores all over the place, suddenly had mall Santas or department store Santas. So a lot of people point to Jim Eger's influence as the reason why. I love it. So hats off to you, Colonel Jim. We salute you, sir. Yes.

Yes, we do. All right, so the leg lamp from a Christmas story. I know that we had to have talked about this at some point when we talked about a Christmas story in one of our previous holiday episodes. But we're going to talk about it again. We could talk about this every year and I'd be happy, man. Everyone knows the very famous major award from the Christmas story when the old man wins this award that is brought into his house in a crate, pulled out to the horror of his

wife, the wonderful Melinda Dillon, and the leg lamp and the kitschy item that everyone likes to have on their tree or in their actual window to this day was born. Yep. So there's some really great background about that leg lamp in particular as far as the movie's production went. It was designed by the production designer, I believe. His name was Reuben, what was his last name, Chuck? Reuben Fried.

Reuben Fried. And so Reuben Fried based it on the description by Gene Shepard who wrote the book and God We Trust All Others, Pay Cash, that a Christmas story was based on. And apparently Gene Shepard was involved in the production and saw some drafts of what Reuben Fried had drawn up and said, yep, that's it. But he apparently, Gene Shepard apparently based it on a knee-high sign that he'd seen as a child. Right?

So the knee-high soda, you can still get knee-high soda, I like the knee-high orange and grape. And I think it had a pair of gams, had some ladies' legs, and he liked the look of them. And this is how, I love the reading actually, and this is from, I actually got this part from the man behind the leg lamp from Reed Krieger from InventorDigest.com a few years ago. This is from the actual short story, my old man and the lascivious special award that Herald did the birth of pop art. And I guess was that the deal is, and God We Trust All Others, Pay Cash was a collection

of short stories? Yeah, and that Bob Clark interpreted them perfectly into the movie A Christmas Story. So this is how it was described in that book, the leg lamp. From ankle to thigh, the translucent flesh radiated a vibrant, sensual, luminous, orange, yellow, pinkish, nimbus of pagan fire. All it needed was tom-toms and maybe a gong or two, and a tenor singing in a high, quavery, earnest voice. A pretty girl is like a melody.

Such great writing. It is really great. I love Gene Shepard stuff, even though I've never read a lick of it. I just love the Christmas story that much, right? Exactly. The leg lamp actually made its first debut before a Christmas story did. It showed up on a PBS special called The Phantom of the Open Hearth. And I watched it.

Dude, I watched it and it is wrong. It is the most alien thing I've ever seen. Ralphie's like 15 and a bit of a punk. Randy is like about what Ralphie's age is in a Christmas story. It's just really weird in mid-70s. So it should be stricken from the memory of humanity. But if you're interested, you should go check it out. And you'll see what I'm talking about.

It's just very weird. But they have a leg lamp in there. They basically adapt the same short story. But this leg lamp is way more tasteful than what Ruben Freed came up with. And once you've seen the Ruben Freed one, everything else is kind of pales in comparison to it. Yeah, I mean, you remember Ruben Freed's version had a stocking and a little fringe hanging down. It was a very sexy lamp. And I think that's what made it so iconic.

I believe they made three of them for the movie. The story is that they were all broken during the production of filming, although, and this is from Reed Krieger's article, supposedly there was a special effects like Prop Shop in Toronto that said that they had one of them, one of the originals until the early 1990s, which may be true. Yes. There was a guy named Martin Malovoir. And he worked on the movie.

He worked on several movies, but he worked on a Christmas story. And he said himself that he had several of these things in his shop, that they actually made more than a dozen, not just three. So it's not entirely clear, but there doesn't seem to be any surviving ones. He said he threw his out in the 90s, which is terrible. It's like me throwing out Bert Reynolds door or Jackie Gleason's door. Yeah, or Bert Reynolds mustache. Don't throw that out.

But the one thing I couldn't find was whose leg it was molded from, because it was supposedly molded from an actual human model's leg. And I could not, that seems to be lost to history. Another kind of fun fact here. If you notice carefully when they're bringing that crate in, it says his end up instead of this end up. And a lot of people think that's just a little joke, but apparently it's just a movie thing.

The crate was too big to fit through the door. So the set carpenters came in and shaved four inches off, which included that letter T. Yeah. That's a good one. And then that lamp is just so iconic. It actually is patented. The lamp itself is patent number 3364542.

And there's Christmas ornaments you can get. We actually have a string of lights of leg lamp lights. Oh, nice. But the ornament itself has a patent. And the town of Cleveland, where we talked about Christmas story being shot partially, turned one of its skyscrapers, like they changed the light so that it created a leg lamp

to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the movie in 2013. And that's right. And as we said back when we initially talked about the Christmas story house, if you were a fan of that film, I highly, highly recommend you visiting the Christmas story house there in the shadow of Cleveland. It's to walk around that home is a pretty great thing. Very special place to be.

I got to go. You still, oh, you never went? No, I still not been. Yeah, you guys will make it over there at some point. Go to Cleveland. Cleveland's great. Go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Check out this.

You probably don't care about the NFL Hall of Fame. That's kind of cool though, if you're into football, but it's worth it to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Christmas story house. Are you talking about the Hard Rock Cafe Cleveland? No, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I don't know what that means. It's where you walk around at the end

when they have everyone's original clothing and these iconic outfits like Prince's Purple Rain and Mick Jagger's thing and Bruce Springsteen's outfit from Born in the USA. You just walk around and look at them all and think, was Prince nine years old? Yeah, he was a little guy, wasn't he? Was Mick Jagger 12?

They're all tiny. Well, they have a lot of energy. It's like a small dog. Small dogs have a lot more energy than big dogs. You know what I mean? That's right. Man, I guess that's it about the leg lamp, huh? Yeah.

Well, actually, I want to know where you hang those lights. Do you string those on the tree? Or are they like, you know, on an archway or something? Archway or something? Yeah. Yeah. Because you can't just throw one string of leg lamp lights among your other lights.

No, and plus, I mean, the tree's already got it going on. Those leg lamp lights, they can really light up a neglected or overlooked area. That's what they do. They're so beautiful. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. I got to get some of those myself.

I'll get you some for Christmas. All right, Chuckers, so it wouldn't be 2020 if we didn't have a Christmas segment about COVID-19. This is for all the kids out there. Because I know kids listen to this with their families on Christmas Eve, it's a tradition. Nothing else happens on Christmas Eve in homes across America except people listening to this.

That's right. So this is from people.com from Rachel DeSantis. And this is a great article from Dr. Anthony Fauci, revealing to all the kids all around the country and all around the world that they don't need to worry about Santa Claus coming in with COVID because Santa Claus is basically immune to coronavirus because, as Fauci says,

quote, of all the good qualities he has, a lot of good innate immunity. Yeah, so Dr. Fauci is reassuring us that Santa is immune. And it makes sense, Chuck, because, you know, as everybody knows from a night before Christmas, Santa is actually an elf. He's a jolly old elf. So of course he would be immune to something like COVID-19.

That's right. And that's not to say that Santa's helpers who are in department stores and malls all over the country and all over the world. Yeah, like James Edgar. That's right. Those guys oftentimes are elderly gentlemen. Sometimes they may be carrying a little extra weight.

And I guess the nicest way to say this is that those Santas are high risk. Right. But everybody wants to see Santa's helpers in the mall whenever they get a chance to, even during a pandemic. So there's a lot of these Santa's helpers who are figuring out how to do it as safely as possible. This year, there's things like virtual Santa visits,

which apparently Macy's, which apparently is the originator of the department store Santa. This is the first year since the 1860s that Macy's will not have a Santa at their department store in person. They're still going to have a virtual Santa though. The ghost of Colonel Jim Edgar is right now just saying, why are these two loud mouths messing with me? Right.

I will haunt you. Yeah. And he has been. Has he been haunting you? He's been haunting me for the best couple of days for sure. He is terrifying. So yeah, they're doing some virtual Santa meeting by appointment. I thought this was fairly creative.

This one Santa named Stephen Arnold, who is a professional Santa, said he has three engagements where they are setting him up in sort of a protective bubble built to look like a snow globe. And I thought that was a very cool kind of fun creative idea. Yeah. He's going to be sitting on a giant fire truck or a giant sleigh. Like a don't climb up me fire truck. Basically.

Yeah. With his foot sticking out. Like stay back. Yeah. Stay back. But yeah, there's no reason you can't see Santa, probably just virtually this year, you know? But at the very least, you don't have to worry about the real deal

coming through on Christmas Eve and Christmas, you know, when Santa comes through, because he's not going to be spreading COVID. He's just going to be spreading glad tidings and jolliness. Nope. So you don't need to worry about that kids. You need to put out those cookies and milk. You need to put out those carrots and celery for those reindeer.

Yep. And make sure you're cooperating with your parents. Or else you're going to get cold in that stocking. That's right. And it always helps to put out probably triple or quadruple the amount of celery or carrots you think you should kids. That's right. So is that it?

I think so, Chuck. I think it's time that we wish Merry Christmas to everybody in the Charles Dickens way. That's right. Put a figurative bow on it. Mm-hmm. And what else? Well, put your finger right here and I'm going to tie the bow.

Okay. And then when I count to three, move your finger at the last second as I tighten the bow. You ready? Uh-huh. Three, two, three. Ouch. Okay, we just got it.

Got you a little bit. You're going to lose that nail. So happy holidays, everyone. No matter how you celebrate it, we're thinking of you. It's been a tough year for everybody. We look forward to a light at the end of the tunnel next year. And we just hope you're with the friends and family that you really care about.

I know everyone's forced to keep it small, but hopefully that will not tarnish your Christmas and that everyone has a really great holiday. Yeah, just remember there's going to be another Christmas sixth year and the year after that and the year after that. And we can all make it through this one because Christmas isn't necessarily about traveling or flying or doing or seeing.

It's about feeling and family and charity. And you can experience all of that online this year. So no matter where you are, no matter how you celebrate it, no matter who you are, Merry Christmas, happy holidays, however you say it, hopefully the joy of the season alights upon you and yours. Merry Christmas all.