Cold War Santa with Sarah Archer

What happens when Santa trades his sleigh for a rocket ship? Christmas correspondent Sarah Archer tells Sarah about how the Cold War era affected the image of old Kris Kringle through the rampant consumerism and shiny new technology of a post-war economy. Digressions include Reagan’s girlypop diet, the Freudian aspects of the Nutcracker, and the thrilling history of aluminum. Visit the YWA Instagram for visual references More Sarah Archer: https://www.sarah-archer.com/ Sarah on Instagram Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler More You're Wrong About: linktr.ee/ywapod Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

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

• 0:17Sarah Marshall?

  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. 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're talking about a particular moment in Santa history. We're 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. We've had many great past Sarah Archer episodes, including one on Martha Stewart

• 1:00Sarah Marshall?

  and one of my favorites titled, "The Trad Wife Rises." 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. 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. 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 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

• 1:45Sarah Marshall?

  of the questions that we just have not been able to explore in this show. But I would love for you to join us over there. And we will be putting out new episodes for the next couple of weeks, as well as bonus episodes. And you can find The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts, of course. We also have a very fun bonus episode coming for you soon. It is a little survivalism Q and A with our survival correspondent, Blair Braverman. 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. Thank you for continuing on into the wintertime,

• 2:27Sarah Marshall?

  if that's what's happening to you too right now. And here's your episode.

• 2:42Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where, once again, the holidays are happening to us. And with me today is Sarah Archer, who is, dare I say it, our Christmas correspondent.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:57Sarah Marshall?

  And you are here with us today to talk about, 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!

• 3:10Speaker 01

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

• 3:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Hair tossing from side to side. Yeah. And I think we deliberately put Santa Claus on pause in unintentional rhyme. At the end of the last episode.

• 3:28Sarah Marshall?

  Santa Claus on pause sounds like a Disney movie.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Santa Claus on pause. It doesn't exist.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  From the 80s.

• 3:34Sarah Marshall?

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

• 3:41Speaker 01

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

• 3:44Sarah Marshall?

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

• 3:59Speaker 01

  God only knows what. I know.

• 4:01Sarah Marshall?

  Obviously. God only knows. And not even myself.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  I know.

• 4:06Sarah Marshall?

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

• 4:13Speaker 01

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

• 4:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What's the hustler to this episode's The Color of Money?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. That we left, you know, we went, we sort of tore through. History from the ancient world to kind of the Gilded Age in the United States. But I wanted to kind of get your, your sort of overall impression of kind of who and what Santa was sort of, what, what is Christmas for in this era? What was the era when we left off? You know what I mean? And kind of who was he? What, what is he? What was he getting up to?

• 4:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'll try. I'm gonna, the interesting thing about making a podcast, I think, and maybe you 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 it's so focused on what's going on right now. And then I guess like, release everything I've just learned to make room for the next thing.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 5:11Sarah Marshall?

  It feels like. And so if I listen back to an episode, I often am like, wow, that's so interesting. Or I'll say, I'll make an observation. I'll be like, oh, that's pretty good, you know? Cause I don't remember thinking that, which is unfortunate, because some of my best revelations I have forgotten about.

• 5:27Speaker 01

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

• 5:30Sarah Marshall?

  Well, exactly. Which is why Nixon had the right.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. About so many things.

• 5:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, that's, well, certainly about cottage cheese. I mean, let's be honest.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yes, and grapefruit. Yeah.

• 5:41Sarah Marshall?

  Nixon was the OG cottage cheese influencer girly pop, I must say.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Girly pops.

• 5:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Nixon ate like a girly pop. It must be said.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  That's what was going on with him.

• 5:51Sarah Marshall?

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

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Was he really?

• 5:56Sarah Marshall?

  Just like a girly pop.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:59Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Nuts, nougat, little chocolate?

• 6:02Sarah Marshall?

  I think Milky Way, I want to say.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so no nuts. All right. All right.

• 6:07Sarah Marshall?

  But I can't, like, I wouldn't, I'm not, I wouldn't testify to it under oath, Sarah. I like all candy bars, but I would never take one from a baby.

• 6:16Speaker 01

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

• 6:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 01

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

• 6:25Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:26Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:35Sarah Marshall?

  They would, but that's okay. But I take pride in my Nixon impression and my Ethel Merman impression, as I think you know.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  I think, yes, I think I do know that.

• 6:43Sarah Marshall?

  Have I done that one for you?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think you have. Yeah.

• 6:46Sarah Marshall?

  You're supposed to say no.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  No, do it again. Do it, do it for the first time.

• 6:53Sarah Marshall?

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

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Can, can you do Santa Baby?

• 7:01Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, yes. Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree for me.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 7:13Sarah Marshall?

  She's got laryngitis. She's got a cold.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  She, yeah, but she's supposed to.

• 7:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Always.

• 7:18Sarah Marshall?

  But I love her so much.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, 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.

• 7:25Sarah Marshall?

  Well, anyway. Okay, so the role of Santa, as we had talked about it, and Christmas, I think, was not so different, actually, from an episode I did with Chelsea 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 controllable and less chaotic behavior, where, you know, in kind of our originating Christmas traditions, we have, you know, what, like the wassailing, I guess, as a verb, where?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Exactly, wassailing.

• 8:07Sarah Marshall?

  Tell us about wassailing.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Right, which initially.

• 8:09Sarah Marshall?

  Or wassailing.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Wassail, yes, what, like, which I think nowadays, if, if you're familiar with the word wassail and wassailing, 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 that, this kind of Victorian, you know, very cozy. Image.

• 8:31Sarah Marshall?

  Have you heard the factoid 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.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:44Sarah Marshall?

  Maybe.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I, which might be true. I actually don't know whether that's true or not, but I'd believe it.

• 8:47Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:54Sarah Marshall?

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

• 9:01Speaker 01

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

• 9:05Sarah Marshall?

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

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Right. So it's like Valentine's Day or like Arbor Day. I don't know what, you know, what, what holidays are there? And well, I guess sometimes there's Easter, but we had kind of gone back in time to Saint Nicholas, who was a real person.

• 9:24Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Who existed in the ancient world, third century, what we now call Turkey. 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. So that, that was Santa Claus in the ancient world. He's associated, then he gets kind of grafted onto European celebrations like Yule and for the sort of figure of Father Christmas, who's kind of associated in a, in a general way with all these different kind of folkloric traditions throughout Europe. So the fact that Santa Claus has a lot of different names, like he'll sort of be referred to as Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, Santa, Santa Claus, is a kind of a fossil record of the

• 10:07Speaker 01

  fact that he's sort of was woven together from these different traditions.

• 10:10Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Just like the word bimbo.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Which is equally etymologically fascinating. Exactly.

• 10:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  There was this group of prominent New Yorkers, uh, which included, uh, was our three guys who we talked about, uh, Merchant, John Pintard, the writer, Washington Irving, and poet and real estate heir, Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote, uh, A Visit from Saint Nicholas. 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 harass.

• 10:49Sarah Marshall?

  Not youths.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  It was youths, Sarah. It was youths on the street. They wanted everybody inside. They said like they wanted everybody indoors. They want, 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 terrorize the community. And this is the moment when Christmas pivots from being kind of this basically holiday, sort of festival for, for grownups to being very child focused and kind of self consciously so.

• 11:18Sarah Marshall?

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

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. It's, it starts off especially in New York City.

• 11:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Or, or St. Patrick's Day.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:29Sarah Marshall?

  It's a day for like, normal working people to cut loose.

• 11:32Speaker 01

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

• 11:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Puke in the street, perhaps.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Puke in the street.

• 11:39Sarah Marshall?

  If one must. Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Once or twice a year.

• 11:41Sarah Marshall?

  Better there than indoors.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  And so the, that poem, which you, you read for us, as I recall, in the voice of Rod Serling, as baby Jesus intended, A Visit from St. Nicholas, basically sets the scene for the way that we envision Santa Claus now.

• 11:53Sarah Marshall?

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

• 11:57Speaker 01

  He's a tiny little guy. So this is why we're going to look at your, 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. The first one is from Harper's Weekly.

• 12:14Sarah Marshall?

  Incredible.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And describe what we're seeing. He's like, I would say not elfin.

• 12:18Sarah Marshall?

  No, he's got a nice red mac on, I would say, or like a, a big sort of red one-piece cloak with a nice pointed hood. Actually, he's kind of dressed like a cardinal, isn't he?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And he's got like, big kind of knuckle-y hands and a big, and a, and a big bushy beard.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. And he's tall.

• 12:42Sarah Marshall?

  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-sized tree.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:55Sarah Marshall?

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

• 13:10Speaker 01

  It's a little bit, yes. Well, actually, and we're going to get to that because he's the next one, if you scroll down, is from the turn of the century, about a decade or two later. And this, to me, this is kind of like classic or Santa, like what he's wearing.

• 13:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. 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. It is cold out there, you know, and 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, red velvet Santa cap with the white fur trim. And he's got a sack full of toys, of course, 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.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Or because drums look kind of cool. And I think as 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, 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. 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.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And it's happening at the time when, I mean, it is so weird to even contemplate the United States as not a consumer society, because we, none of us have any living memory of that. 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? Is it, you know, conspicuous consumption? Is it, you know, is it sensible? Does, you know, what is this all for? So one of the key things to note, kind of before diving in, is that Santa's scene, his mise en scène, his workshop, his

• 15:32Speaker 01

  outfit, what he does, the fact that he 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. He kind of craft washes the whole consumer process that makes Christmas possible. 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, 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. So it's, the other thing

• 16:15Speaker 01

  is that, you may have heard, Sarah, that we're, that there is a war on Christmas.

• 16:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yes, I have heard about that.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Which, I guess, we should, we should say from the outset is, A, not true, but B, if it were true, it is kind of fighting a 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. 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. Like, when it became child-focused,

• 17:04Speaker 01

  is when it became retail-focused. So those two things have never existed separately. And, but it is, it's easier to be nostalgic about something that never was, because you can't recreate it.

• 17:14Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 17:23Sarah Marshall?

  So by definition, nostalgia is like a selective emotion.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  And you'd have to start becoming charitable yourself in the present day, which, like, God forbid. So, there's, so the Gilded Age is when a lot of our- Our customs gel in in America. It's in 1870, it becomes a federal holiday. Louis Prang markets the first commercially available Christmas cards in 1875. That is roughly the time, exactly. Right? It's sort of like alternative crayon brand. Right? Isn't it? Aren't they these kind of, they're like box candy?

• 17:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the ones that like

• 17:56Speaker 01

  That are in crayon.

• 17:57Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, ah, mom got me Prangs.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's all right. It's it's like, it's a

• 18:02Sarah Marshall?

  It'll do.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Santa.

• 18:03Sarah Marshall?

  Until you can get a real crayon.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  You can get your real with a built in sharpener.

• 18:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And this is also the moment when we start to have Santa present in department stores. So instead of, so there's this funny gesture of kind of Exactly. Like, instead of sort of like 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 the sort of the magical man who's in the fancy place and you, it's kind of like confession.

• 18:35Sarah Marshall?

  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. I think I was one of the many kids who absolutely melted down during it, 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 like, it's kind of more important when you're a kid because presents are a lot more real to you than like damnation or whatever.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:00Sarah Marshall?

  And yeah, as we talked about it last time, the Santas should be smaller. There should be approximately the size of Zelda Rubinstein and they should talk very quietly.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Oh, that's such a good idea.

• 19:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, they should be like, hello.

• 19:10Speaker 01

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

• 19:19Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  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. That's, you know, that's sort of like a different outcome, but it's like there is something strangely ritualistic about how all of that transpires.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:50Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 19:57Speaker 01

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

• 20:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Describe to us what we're seeing.

• 20:04Sarah Marshall?

  All right. So in my best 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. And you caption this wartime propaganda poster from the Office of War Information, 1941. And Santa is wearing, you know, a nice.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Kind of a fatigue coat.

• 20:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I don't know any of the correct terminology, but clearly he's, he's joined up. He's got a helmet on. His beard has been shorn to.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Like regulation.

• 20:40Sarah Marshall?

  And he, and we also are seeing the face of Drunky Santa.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:45Sarah Marshall?

  Very, truly as red as two cherries.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And so the timing of this is interesting because they're, 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 lock, stock and barrel, like the Coca-Cola company. What they did invent was a very recognizable depiction of Santa.

• 21:13Sarah Marshall?

  And a copyrightable one?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And a copy, I think because it was designed by an artist named Haddon Sunblum, who lived in Michigan. And he was, you can Google him. He was a really cool guy. He often is shown wearing a Hawaiian shirt. 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, but kind of make it look like a kind of cozy, older, kind of grandfatherly, you know, rosy-cheeked guy.

• 21:45Sarah Marshall?

  Which is interesting because the outfit has become so ritualized.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  I know.

• 21:49Sarah Marshall?

  But at this point, it feels like seeing somebody wearing like a conductor uniform or something, or like an airline pilot. It's like not a person, it's an identity.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's, it's his work outfit.

• 21:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Like Busy Town, like that, what like, he's like the guy in Busy Town who brings everybody, Prezzy's.

• 22:04Sarah Marshall?

  Is he influenced at all by the ghost of Christmas present in Carol's Dickens?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 22:09Sarah Marshall?

  Christmas Carol? Okay. Cause he's wearing velvet and ermine, maybe.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  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. And sometimes before the 16th century, bishops wore green. So that you'll sometimes see, the reason Santa wears red is because he's wearing bishop's clothes. 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. 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. There's a lot of rationing of not just, like the food is what a lot of people remember, you know, coffee.

• 22:57Sarah Marshall?

  Let's all have a World War II Christmas. No more Ralph Lauren Christmas. We're gonna have a ration Christmas. Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  No meat, no dairy.

• 23:06Sarah Marshall?

  We're gonna drink chicory and tall, tall tales.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. We're gonna like, we're gonna sit around the radio, we're gonna stare at it. And we're gonna have, have faux coffee with, with faux sugar. So, but basically everything that you kind of think to do around the holidays is curtailed. Rubber and metal are both in short supply, gasoline, anything nylon, long distance phone calls are restricted.

• 23:32Sarah Marshall?

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

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:37Sarah Marshall?

  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 isolationist than we've like chosen to remember, been educated about typically during this time period. But really, in like, as I learned from my Molly books, Americans, to a great degree, believed that it was their patriotic duty to endure personal deprivation in order to help the war effort.

• 24:13Speaker 01

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

• 24:22Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Which is interesting, because in a way, it sort of like becomes folded into capitalism, the sort of like identity of, yeah, being the kind of person who's helping the war effort.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. Because if you scroll down past Santa at War, you will find two print ads for Hoover vacuum cleaners.

• 24:42Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yes.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  And the first one you'll see is not advertising a vacuum cleaner. What is it advertising, Sarah Marshall?

• 24:49Sarah Marshall?

  It says, "Give her a war bond, and you give her the best." And then it's a pair of sexy lady hands with pretty red nail polish, opening up a beautiful war bond.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  With a red ribbon.

• 25:02Sarah Marshall?

  And then let's read the copy here. "For 35 years at Christmas time, it has been, 'Give her a Hoover, and you give her the best.' Today, few Hoover cleaners are available. 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'll be a victory. Someday, those war bonds will turn into US currency. Now, let them stand for the money you're saving for the things you can't buy, the money you'll have when the good day, capital letters, comes to pay for new electric cleaners and automobiles and refrigerators and stoves. Then, again, we'll say when Christmas rolls around, 'Give her a Hoover, and you give her

• 25:47Sarah Marshall?

  the best.' It beats as it sweeps, as it cleans. The Hoover Company, North Canton, Ohio." Incredible.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  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. And this was essentially women's magazines and home magazines.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  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, 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. 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, only now you're using like tinfoil, cellophane, plastic, et cetera. But at the time, it is, I don't know if you're aware of this, but the, I was not aware of this until I started

• 26:53Speaker 01

  doing this research. Most of the really good Christmas stuff historically came from Germany. So all like your ornaments, toys, like really good children's toys.

• 27:04Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So not only are we rationing, you know, things like meat, dairy, you know, all sugar, coffee, all that stuff.

• 27:12Sarah Marshall?

  Because where do all the nutcrackers come from?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:16Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:17Speaker 01

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

• 27:22Sarah Marshall?

  The nutcracker is one of the weirdest stories.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  It's incredibly weird.

• 27:25Sarah Marshall?

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

• 27:30Speaker 01

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

• 27:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. 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 I'm actually, I'm so glad that Freud never had the chance to analyze Clara.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  I know. Poor Clara. In Clara's case.

• 27:51Sarah Marshall?

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

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so this is like interesting moment where every company, it's weird to think, again, sort of like thinking about the US as not being a consumer society. 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, there are all these big companies, you know, Raytheon and Boeing. And North of Grunham that are constantly producing things and have government contracts and sell things to armies overseas, but are massive, huge industrial concerns. That didn't really exist when the US 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.

• 28:41Speaker 01

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

• 28:45Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  And it happened to people, too. 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.

• 29:10Sarah Marshall?

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

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Apparently. They didn't ask him because he is in metallurgical heavens, and he was not available to be asked. But I think that was the first problem. 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, how can we apply what you've learned to airplane propellers or some part of a machine that we need to refine? And so then after the war ends, this infrastructure is still there. 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-

• 30:01Sarah Marshall?

  Ronald Reagan for General Electric.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  -Ronald Reagan 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.

• 30:14Sarah Marshall?

  If you build it, they will come.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Yes, I understand that, but there must be something you want for Christmas, something you haven't even told your mother about, eh? Aw, come on now. Why don't you give me a chance?

• 30:35Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, it's Natalie Wood.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  It's Natalie Wood.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 30:38Sarah Marshall?

  Little Russian child.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, which nobody knew.

• 30:42Sarah Marshall?

  Santa has his beard at Ward Lake.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Well, it's only 1947.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  That's what I want for Christmas.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  You mean a doll's house like this?

• 30:53Speaker 03

  No, a real house. 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.

• 31:02Speaker 02

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

• 31:08Speaker 03

  That's what I thought you'd say.

• 31:10Sarah Marshall?

  Susie is early representation of women with autism.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  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 in context for us. What are we? What are we seeing?

• 31:26Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  It's Macy's. Yes, it's because it's the parade.

• 31:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, OK. And he, but he's like, basically, definitely, actually Santa.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:43Sarah Marshall?

  And it's, I think, like, a busy woman who she played by Maureen O'Hara.

• 31:47Speaker 01

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

• 31:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, one of those career girls, you know?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yes, one of those in 1947.

• 31:58Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Which is fabulous.

• 32:06Sarah Marshall?

  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, I like, 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. And it's very, I mean, and there's a lot of kind of movies like this. I also, this is revealing me as like a boomer, basically, that I've always been very fond of the Bing Crosby as singing priest movies.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Oh, sure, of course.

• 32:40Sarah Marshall?

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

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Both equally terrifying, right?

• 32:50Sarah Marshall?

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

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Along the way.

• 33:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:19Sarah Marshall?

  Right, or certainly being conceived of, yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  And it is a moment when, um, 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. 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 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. And then Santa and his kind of sidekick, the neighbor, Mr. Gaily.

• 33:58Sarah Marshall?

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

• 34:02Speaker 01

  You can trust men. You, 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. 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?

• 34:20Sarah Marshall?

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

• 34:23Speaker 01

  I am a huge fan. This is Liza, historian Elizabeth 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. And so the idea that-

• 34:37Sarah Marshall?

  Cause the depression is, you know, basically use it up.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:41Sarah Marshall?

  Wear it out.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  For the country.

• 34:42Sarah Marshall?

  Use it up, all, all that stuff. Yeah. And for yourself because you don't have any money. Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  And in the, 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. He, he basically like steers them in the direction of a house. They get married.

• 35:05Sarah Marshall?

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

• 35:08Speaker 01

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

• 35:14Sarah Marshall?

  Certainly not at that new plant.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Not at the new plant, nobody, nobody's talking about that. That that kind of spending is good. It's not frivolous. It's 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. 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 trapped women at home.

• 35:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 35:40Speaker 01

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

• 35:43Sarah Marshall?

  Surrounded by appliances.

• 35:45Speaker 01

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

• 35:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And that all of this is being presented as, as good and patriotic and that it's a form of sort of patriotic spending.

• 35:56Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Interesting.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then this is the moment where we, we meet Santa Baby for the first time, who is kind of, I don't know, an appliance pimp for, 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. 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.

• 36:25Sarah Marshall?

  Santa's into sugaring.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. Santa is kind of, right. But like he, he would be interested in your OnlyFans, like.

• 36:32Sarah Marshall?

  Although interestingly, he is Santa Baby and not Santa Daddy.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right. So we're kind of, we're seducing him.

• 36:38Sarah Marshall?

  But there's a lot of, there's a lot of baby men with a lot of money. So.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so that basically, you know, if you know, you want a fur coat, a car.

• 36:45Sarah Marshall?

  You gotta put out for Santa.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Right. And not just, yeah, exactly. Not just carrots for the, for the reindeer.

• 36:51Sarah Marshall?

  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, so many women, either sincerely or for engagement, one of the two, I mean, they both work. So many women we're, 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. 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. And then we invented the Sunday paper so they could ignore their families on Sundays.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And a pipe to go with it. Exactly.

• 37:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  And then we invented TV to make sure that we they could absolutely, fully ignore. But yes, I mean, basically that-

• 37:45Sarah Marshall?

  So that their children could be taught by puppets.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 38:06Sarah Marshall?

  I think that's absolutely true.

• 38:08Speaker 01

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

• 38:21Sarah Marshall?

  Let's go back to my scroll.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Your scroll, unfurl your scroll, and it should be passed underneath Eartha Kitt. So we've got Santa Claus.

• 38:29Sarah Marshall?

  Honey.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  I know.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  That's a real like Samantha voice.

• 38:38Sarah Marshall?

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

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 and-

• 39:01Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, and this is canonical little Santa, little dane to be to-

• 39:04Speaker 01

  It's little Santa.

• 39:09Sarah Marshall?

  He eats fish.

• 39:12Sarah Marshall?

  And so it's Santa on top of a chair because he had to get on the chair to-

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Because he's little.

• 39:17Sarah Marshall?

  Down from the mantle. Yeah, because he's just a little guy. And then there's, he's like in, it's so good. I love it. So he's like inside different circles. So one of them is the Christmas tree.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:28Sarah Marshall?

  He's up on a ladder trimming a tree. 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, I guess Santa set them up.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  I think he, 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 mizal sin, under the tree.

• 39:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. He's the god of the dollies.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  The god of the dolls.

• 39:52Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 40:01Sarah Marshall?

  And then, oh God, this is so good.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  I know.

• 40:04Sarah Marshall?

  Which dolly will you have? And then there's some beautiful dolls lined up. Christmas Eve, where he's bursting through the night sky on his chariot of reindeer, making dollies clothes. A lot of emphasis on the dollies. I really like making dollies clothes.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Does that sound fun?

• 40:21Sarah Marshall?

  Because it's him.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  He's sewing.

• 40:22Sarah Marshall?

  With his little glasses on.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:24Sarah Marshall?

  And yeah, he's sewing doll clothes. God, Santa works hard.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Cause he's a crafts, he's a crafts person. He, he works tirelessly.

• 40:31Sarah Marshall?

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

• 40:38Speaker 01

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

• 40:42Sarah Marshall?

  Cause he's elf and 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.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  I know. The record of behavior.

• 40:53Sarah Marshall?

  Tell us about this, Emma.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  It's incredible. It's so, it's sort of positioned Santa as almost a kind of like, he's sort of like an accountant's ledger. And it's this, as though he's keeping track of who's good and who's bad in a gigantic like binder.

• 41:07Sarah Marshall?

  But he's like, a binder full of children, but he's standing up.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Children, but it's like as big as he is, which is so funny.

• 41:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. The book is like waist high to him.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  It's so cute.

• 41:16Sarah Marshall?

  In terms of the page height as he's turning the pages and it's probably like four times his height if he stood it up.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:21Sarah Marshall?

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

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Holiday week. He's chilling.

• 41:37Sarah Marshall?

  With his dogs up in front of a fire.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  What a week I've had. Oh my God. Having delivered, you know, 800 million presents around the world. He's now, he's putting his feet up. Cause that's a lot for one little guy.

• 41:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And he's a really little guy. Delivering full-size presents, although I guess children were also slightly smaller back then because they weren't getting adequate nutrition.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  That's true. They weren't getting enough niacin or whatever, but yeah. And then we contrast with-

• 42:06Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 42:17Speaker 01

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

• 42:20Sarah Marshall?

  And an early film of Pia Sadora.

• 42:23Speaker 01

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

• 42:25Sarah Marshall?

  She plays a Martian child. Yeah. 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, as promised, Santa in his little Jetsonian spaceship. It looks like a B-52 bomber, honestly. But it has snowfla- I mean, not at all, really. I'm sure anyone who would look at this and be like, Sarah, no, it doesn't. But it looks like maybe like a vaguely military aircraft of the Cold War era.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:58Sarah Marshall?

  It looks like it could like, it could bomb Russia inside of like three hours, is my point, I guess. Yeah. And it's got snowflakes painted on the wings and it's got a Christmas tree painted on the, on the body. And then the caption just tells you how to make your own spaceship for Santa. If you cut up part of the card and you use such exciting products, obviously a scotch tape and rubber bands.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 43:25Sarah Marshall?

  And yeah, it's very different. And we don't know how big Santa is, although actually I know we do because he's got presents in there with him. So if they're regular sized presents, then he is probably a regular sized adult male.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 44:00Sarah Marshall?

  As kind of like a little sprite.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  As a little sprite.

• 44:03Sarah Marshall?

  Little fairy worker.

• 44:04Speaker 01

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

• 44:14Sarah Marshall?

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

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yes, during this kind of obsession with outer space during the Cold War. And so there's like a sort of body of Santa. Now, I find this super fascinating because this is not the Santa that I grew up with. 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.

• 44:49Sarah Marshall?

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

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Which begins in 1955. So they're right. So there's this like.

• 44:58Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God, that's really early.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  It's really early. 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. That begins in the mid 1950s.

• 45:13Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Why? Exactly.

• 45:25Sarah Marshall?

  Why does Satan make the story so sticky? 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.

• 45:41Sarah Marshall?

  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." You know, whereas Jesus, on the other hand, says he'll be right back and is evidently taking his sweet time. Although, according to my theory, Jesus has been reborn many times and never got as far as he meant to because of how unjust society is and he keeps dying.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:08Sarah Marshall?

  Keeps being an undocumented baby.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:10Sarah Marshall?

  That's the kind of theory that makes me think I should probably just cut to the chase and become a Quaker. 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 gonna come back all the time. Like, you can't even get rid of him.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:29Sarah Marshall?

  Which is scary, but it's nice. The idea that like someone from a supernatural religious realm, or that offers you proof of your religion, like, might actually show up. And yeah, Satan comes, or, I was about to say Satan comes once a year. Santa, Santa comes once a year, which is very comforting for a child, you know, it's just so regular.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, we're gonna take a little detour into atomic age design. And if you scroll past your American Christmas card spaceship, 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, a clock and a chandelier.

• 47:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  You see? Okay. 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, the machine age, the kind of use of techniques like 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. 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. And all, you know, designers like Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Brooke Stevens,

• 47:55Speaker 01

  famously sort of transformed the look of household appliances, stoves, fridges, you know, anything, you name it.

• 48:00Sarah Marshall?

  Is this an aesthetic where the Hudsucker proxy would be a good place to see it on display?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  100%. Yes. Or, actually, in a strange way. 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 a lot of-

• 48:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I love the Tim Burton Gotham. It's so good.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  It's so good.

• 48:20Sarah Marshall?

  And the giant statues of the big muscly guys.

• 48:23Speaker 01

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

• 48:26Sarah Marshall?

  Tim Burton's Metropolis.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  You're in Tim Burton's Metropolis. It's, you know, everything is streamlined. There looks like a train in the 1930s. 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, what have you. And the next iteration of this kind of gesture in design that happens, happens during the atomic age. 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.

• 48:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. So I'm seeing 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?

• 49:12Speaker 01

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

• 49:17Sarah Marshall?

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

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:25Sarah Marshall?

  Not the atomic symbol, but like-

• 49:27Speaker 01

  The starburst.

• 49:27Sarah Marshall?

  Tell us about that.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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. 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 friggin' 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.

• 50:12Sarah Marshall?

  It does look like that.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  So there's kind of like, there's rods, there's spheres.

• 50:16Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and there's, I would say, a sense of playfulness to it.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 50:19Sarah Marshall?

  Interesting to think about as something that was partly inspired by, you know, the tools of the greatest American death machine.

• 50:25Speaker 01

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

• 50:33Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:46Sarah Marshall?

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

• 50:53Speaker 01

  I would not be surprised. 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. Like there's the Tomorrowland, 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. And there's this funny conflation, I think, maybe in part because it comes out of the Disney sort of idea factory of ancient mythology with physics and science. And so our friend, the Adam, tells the story, quote unquote, of nuclear energy

• 51:32Speaker 01

  using the ancient folk tale that, which I believe comes from Shahrazad, it's 1001 Nights, of the fisherman and the genie. 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 it health, peace and energy. 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 of, as Werner von Braun. And he essentially becomes the voice of, you know, this is physics in the 1950s and 60s. It's like the, you know, the guy with the 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.

• 52:16Sarah Marshall?

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

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And don't just don't worry about it. It's going to be totally fine. 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 Nagasaki in 1945.

• 52:36Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Right. 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 folktales that are kind of.

• 52:57Sarah Marshall?

  Or at the very least, Johnny Appleseed.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Right. And he's also kind of weirdly not alone about that because think about like the things that are on TV at this time. 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. And so there's this kind of, there's this conflation in a lot of different cultural properties of folklore with the high tech.

• 53:24Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And it is the time of like My Magic Wife.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right. And so if you look at the, the visual, like this little sort of collage that's in your, 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. 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. So when the time comes for an aluminum Christmas tree, which is all the rage between, you know, kind of circa 1958 and 1964.

• 54:04Sarah Marshall?

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

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Of course. Yes.

• 54:11Sarah Marshall?

  I think Howard Cunningham says this, but the joke is that someone brings home an aluminum Christmas tree. And the joke is, well, we'll save a lot of money on tinsel because it's already looks like tinsel.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  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. Aluminum was-

• 54:32Sarah Marshall?

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

• 54:36Speaker 01

  I think we can do it. I think we can do it.

• 54:37Sarah Marshall?

  This is a hurdy crowd.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  This is, yeah, no, we're tough. 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 because, not because it was rare, but because it was very difficult to refine. 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 than, let's say, the 1920s and 30s.

• 55:02Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 55:08Speaker 01

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

• 55:14Sarah Marshall?

  While Lucky's down there panning for aluminum.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 55:16Sarah Marshall?

  And if he finds a piece big enough, he's gonna buy a new wig for his girlfriend.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Brought it through with the electrolyzer. And then, so these two guys form, basically two Gilded Age characters, you know, form, form a company, which is eventually known as the Aluminum Corporation of America, or ALCOA. And ALCOA has a very sweet deal with the United States government for a while.

• 55:38Sarah Marshall?

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

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. And they've, and funded the forecast program where they had people like Charles and Ray Eames and Isomun Noguchi designing, you know, tables and sculptural works of art to kind of like experiment with aluminum and see what cool things we could make out of it. 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, once the, the, 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

• 56:24Speaker 01

  overseas in, you know, it's kind of not officially an empire, but it's kind of an empire. And they have a patent with the government, which means that for World War I and World War II- Most, if not all, of the aluminum that's used for the war effort comes from Alcoa. So they have, they make out like, like, you know,

• 56:41Sarah Marshall?

  Good deal.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Like, they make out like mineral tycoons, which is, which is, which is what they are.

• 56:45Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  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, 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. There's, you know, Pittsburgh is home to, to big aluminum. And it's also kind of a cool, new kitchen gadget and kit and sort of tableware material that, that plays a similar role to plastic because aluminum doesn't shatter. So if you're comparing it to glass, let's say.

• 57:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 57:26Speaker 01

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

• 57:45Sarah Marshall?

  And I imagine for like kitchen tools, it would be really revolutionary too, right? For like, like a colander and stuff like that.

• 57:52Speaker 01

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

• 57:58Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God, yeah, cookie cutters.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Cookie cutters. I mean, so there's a ton, 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. And so the aluminum tree then becomes, takes on this almost kind of iconic status during 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.

• 58:28Sarah Marshall?

  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. 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. It becomes crispy.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  See, this is the thing. I mean, do we want to create more plastic in the world? No. But if you can find a used, this is my, I will die on this hill. 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?

• 59:04Sarah Marshall?

  Etsy.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Etsy.

• 59:05Sarah Marshall?

  eBay, Etsy. These are my twins, eBay and Etsy.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  They're both very mature.

• 59:11Sarah Marshall?

  They're temperamental.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  They're very entrepreneurial.

• 59:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  That 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.

• 59:22Sarah Marshall?

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

• 59:27Speaker 01

  I am in the same boat. I find, and I'm also kind of allergic to the crud that exists on the.

• 59:32Sarah Marshall?

  Right. 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, is a period during which that concept was kind of cemented, arguably. I don't know if you would agree with that.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I totally agree.

• 59:55Sarah Marshall?

  This idea of like The Way We Never Were being one of the great books about it.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:58Sarah Marshall?

  Where like, you know, it's not that we used to live in nuclear families. 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.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  It's a double meaning.

• 1:00:11Sarah Marshall?

  Conveys 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 Festivus language.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:20Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Because it's an argument.

• 1:00:34Sarah Marshall?

  Right. 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 the decorations are on it. But the process of getting it. Can be brutal.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:56Sarah Marshall?

  Worship of Victoria and Albert.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. The worship of Victoria and Albert.

• 1:01:00Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:10Sarah Marshall?

  Are pretending to, to work in agriculture a little bit because I think that that's what we, we understand that we have some kind of a need to like be in touch with the seasons. And so, you know, and so we have pumpkin patches, which is our like stand in for the kind of.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  An apple picking.

• 1:01:27Sarah Marshall?

  You know, wicker man seasonal rituals that we used to do. And now we just go to the pumpkin patch.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:43Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, good.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  One of the big sort of areas of conflict within it is the nature of what kind of Christmas treats you have.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

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

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Well, I guess we'd better concentrate on finding a nice Christmas tree.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  I suggest we try those searchlights, Charlie Brown.

• 1:02:06Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  This really brings Christmas close to a person. Fantastic.

• 1:02:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. This is what I picture when you mention aluminum Christmas trees.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Right? Pink, perky.

• 1:02:26Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:32Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Gee, do they still make wooden Christmas trees?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  So cute.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  This little green one here seems to need a home. I don't know, Charlie Brown. Remember what Lucy said? This doesn't seem to fit the modern spirit. I don't care. All decorated and it'll be just right for our play. Besides, I think it needs me.

• 1:02:57Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. The, but the single banana needs you to rescue it from the produce market. 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. 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.

• 1:03:46Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  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, 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 Guaraldi's jazz music on the little pond, but he doesn't feel happy. And the dog is kind of tarting up his doghouse with all this kind of like Christmas crapola that's like really tacky. And, you know, every, everything is so commercial.

• 1:04:26Sarah Marshall?

  Snoopy is doing the old Clark Griswold over there.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Totally. He's do it totally doing a Clark Griswold.

• 1:04:32Sarah Marshall?

  And why is the carpet all wet, Todd?

• 1:04:36Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know, Margot.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  That's so good. So the suggestion is made because remember, there's also psychoanalysis because there Lucy has the, like, the psychiatrist is in. 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? 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.

• 1:05:06Sarah Marshall?

  I don't remember that.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  It's really cute.

• 1:05:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I gotta watch this thing again.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you really need to watch it again. 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.

• 1:05:20Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Like pink spray paint, which is not a thing, but pink spray painted. And Lucy is like, yeah, get a pink one, get, you know, like the biggest one you can find.

• 1:05:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. Oh, wow. I have a Lucy tree. Wow.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Right, 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 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.

• 1:05:53Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:11Sarah Marshall?

  The angel Gabriel appearing before the shepherds. And he says, be not afraid, afeard.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Be not afraid, even though I'm biblically accurate and have 17 eyes or, um, don't be afraid. And, you know, that's what.

• 1:06:24Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Don't freak out, but FYI. And so, and then he just kind of calmly delivers because that, that's his line in the Christmas pageant and says, well, that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. And do you want to know what the reaction was from the network when this was initially shared before it was broadcast with the, uh, the brass?

• 1:06:48Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:59Sarah Marshall?

  Which is interesting because now we're trying to have less Chris Christianity forced upon our children.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:05Sarah Marshall?

  But at the time it felt subversive, I bet.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:15Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  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? Apparently, the exact same thing happened when Prince played Kiss for executives at whatever his music, you know, Warner or Sony or whatever his music company was. People, they were panicked. There was like, this is so minimal and stripped down. It's so weird. 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 would hope.

• 1:07:54Sarah Marshall?

  Just wait five minutes.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Wait five minutes. You might be in the same category as Prince and Charles Schultz. And the people, you may be creating a stone cold classic and not realize it.

• 1:08:03Sarah Marshall?

  And also, you know, the commentary for The Godfather is pretty fun. And it's like,

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I bet that's fun.

• 1:08:08Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, it's Coppola in all his glory. But 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. The studio was kind of watching, I think that, 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. I don't know how movies are made. 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. 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. You know, they famously wanted to cast Robert Redford as Michael originally.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:54Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  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. And I thought that we could read ourselves a little excerpt or two from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Um, are, how familiar are Are you, you had sort of, you remember aspects of Charlie Brown? Do you remember the sort of the gist of The Grinch?

• 1:09:32Sarah Marshall?

  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. And he lives above Whoville on a mountain with his, his dog. And he decides it's, you know, it's not just a clever title. He decides to steal Christmas and specifically to steal all the presents and Christmas foods and decorations and all the kind of like 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, well, and then he goes to, I think, his last house where a little baby Cindy Lou Who lives.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Cindy Lou.

• 1:10:17Sarah Marshall?

  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 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.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Do you, so I've, I've selected three passages from it and I figured we could alternate.

• 1:10:39Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God, I would love that. Okay. Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot, but the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville, did not. The Grinch hated Christmas the whole Christmas season. Now, please don't ask why. 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, I can't remember thinking, ah, that can't be it.

• 1:11:06Sarah Marshall?

  That's a weak excuse.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Weak sauce, yeah.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  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, his reign of terror when he's kind of going through Whoville, attempting to steal Christmas. Then he slid down the chimney, a rather tight pinch. But if Santa could do it, then so could the Grinch. Then he slunk to the icebox. He took the Who's feast. He took the Who pudding. He took the roast beast. He cleaned out that icebox 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.

• 1:11:49Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, it is like, it's a fun sequence, like both in the book and in the adaptation. It's fun to watch him steal all this stuff. It's very resourceful. Okay, should I read the ending now here?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:12:01Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And we'll talk.

• 1:12:02Sarah Marshall?

  And this is our thrilling conclusion. 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. 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. 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, someone who is like, a textbook killjoy, is like, I hate Christmas. People only care about buying things.

• 1:12:47Sarah Marshall?

  And then he realizes that, no, they actually love it because they're just like, good and nice. And then he's like, well, never mind, we should buy even more things.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:18Sarah Marshall?

  Much like Scrooge. Yeah, which I think was like, kind of an antiquated verb of the time. But like, yeah, Ebenezer Scrooge, it's perfect.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it's perfect, perfect. But it also has the cadence of A Visit from St. Nicholas.

• 1:13:31Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's identical. I'm not enough of a pantameter.

• 1:13:37Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:07Sarah Marshall?

  And it's right. And I never thought about it, but it's like what the American brain perceives is like the Christmas meter, the Christmas dog roll.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  It's Christmas meter. It's da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, whatever you hear.

• 1:14:19Sarah Marshall?

  It's the rhythm of a horse drawn sleigh.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Of like little reindeer hooves on your, on your roof. Yeah. And I sort of, I love the kind of, the fact that this is initially published in 1957. 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. 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. Like, you just need to, like, hang out with your hooves and sing a song. Maybe somebody will bring roast bees. Don't plan too hard. But it's kind of, I think it's, it's kind of remarkably subversive for the time.

• 1:15:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. It also makes me think of A Christmas Story, which is why, you know, speaking of things that took a while to become beloved, that's certainly one. It's like the wet, hot, American summer of Christmas movies.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:15:19Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:15:24Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Well, so for Christmas, in terms of like, stuff to watch, I, I pretty much always watch Miracle on 34th Street. Like, that's sort of probably like my all time. And because it takes place in the neighborhood where I grew up.

• 1:15:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  And it's sort of, it's where the, the parade begins. And it's really, it's so it's, it's very, that's very cozy for me. Um, I super love vintage, like, I'm kind of a call the midwife person, which is weird, but they always have a Christmas special. 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. 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.

• 1:16:06Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  So I'm a huge fan of that. I'm also a huge fan of like certain Christmas music. Like it's, it becomes, you know, it's as Karen Thompson famously said in that documentary, it's Karen carpenter season, you know, once you hit Thanksgiving.

• 1:16:18Sarah Marshall?

  It is Karen carpenter season.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  It's Karen carpenter season. So there's the, you know, there's Merry Christmas darling.

• 1:16:23Sarah Marshall?

  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. It's almost like an invitation to too many feelings. Cause 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.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:10Sarah Marshall?

  All of your trauma potentially.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:34Sarah Marshall?

  Fantastic.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:46Sarah Marshall?

  Man.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  And that part of the reason why grownups collect stuff, especially things from their childhood.

• 1:17:51Sarah Marshall?

  Back like boats against the tide.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's this, you know, you're, you can never recreate it, but you can kind of glimpse, you can listen to the music, you know, you can listen to Eartha Kitt, 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. And there is actually a scene in the movie Scrooge that I think, do you remember this? When it's David Johansson?

• 1:18:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  From what is it? Like the, the New York Dolls?

• 1:18:20Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Buster Point Dexter. Yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Buster Point Dexter, 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. It was like.

• 1:18:33Sarah Marshall?

  Is David Johansson the ghost of Christmas past in this scenario?

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:42Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  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, what are you, a millionaire? And it sort of captures that feeling of like, the toughest, most cynical dude you've ever met. Like if you, 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.

• 1:19:06Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  It's a portal. Yeah.

• 1:19:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Cause one of the things I love about A Christmas Carol is that Scrooge is only transported back to his boyhood for like five or 10 minutes before he starts crying, you know? It's like, kind of, he does not take that long to be worked on, honestly. He folds pretty fast.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:39Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  There's an extreme amount going on.

• 1:19:59Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  I think we're actually right on schedule. We covered like most of the larger themes that we were going to get to. You know, we've arrived somewhere in the mid 1960s and we're probably poised, perhaps, I don't know, for maybe for a part three one day.

• 1:20:17Sarah Marshall?

  I think so. The Santa trilogy.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, tell me about kind of who, who is Cold War Santa spiritually? And when does he exit the scene? Or does he just become part of the broader Santa that we now live with?

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I, so I remember there was a super interesting conversation over on, I want to say Blue Sky, about. How do you date the Cold War? Or how do you date mid-century? I was thinking it was how do you date mid-century in terms of design?

• 1:20:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, because it's obviously not literal or also would be for like one day.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:13Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:19Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  It's a little too strong. People are, you know, buying stuff like there's no tomorrow, consuming, nesting, white flighting out to the suburbs, buying aluminum trees, you know, watching TV, et cetera. And then when the oil embargo happens, suddenly like we can't afford things again.

• 1:21:42Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  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. 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 the space age starts to seem like really dorky by comparison. Like it had seemed very.

• 1:22:08Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  It that basically like the dream of the early 60s then decays into this, you know, Vietnam and assassinations and.

• 1:22:23Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:45Sarah Marshall?

  What are your opinions about the Christmas aesthetics of today?

• 1:22:50Sarah Marshall?

  Or kind of the, you know, the recent past and looking ahead.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Like most curmudgeons, I'm having a hard time with today. And I'll tell you why.

• 1:22:57Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yes, it's a little rough.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  For a number of reasons. One of the things that drives me batty is the kind of AI-generated, like printed Wine Mom font, 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 how much of this, you know, that there's, you're aware, even though neither of us are on Twitter anymore, but you're aware that Twitter is now a cesspool of like official federal government accounts, basically posting.

• 1:23:32Sarah Marshall?

  That's pretty much why I left. Yeah.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:42Sarah Marshall?

  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. And it's all really happening. Yeah.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  It's really happening and it's happening self-consciously. And one of the ways that 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. So it's not in German, but it'll say.

• 1:24:17Sarah Marshall?

  Why, Sarah? Why?

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  I know. I mean, it's a good, it's a really good point. Why are they doing that? I know.

• 1:24:22Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:33Sarah Marshall?

  I hope he gets visited by a biblically accurate angel.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  Angel, many repeatedly. Just scares the crap out of this, these people. 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? I mean, probably not, because most people don't. I mean, but it's just kind of 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, as a way of like documenting it. And so I just, I'm aware that it's happening.

• 1:25:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  This is going to sound extremely dorky, because it is extremely dorky, but to kind of take.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Propaganda from World War II and position it as though it's sort of like you're defending the homeland, you're defending the borders, like using essentially like, just makes me want to vomit. Like, it just is so, you know, if you, I mean, and it's not, for, 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-

• 1:25:35Sarah Marshall?

  Well, actually, you are, because apparently a lot of people are pro the very thing-

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  I guess that's true.

• 1:25:40Sarah Marshall?

  But, you know, but yeah, but there are a lot of us who are feeling equally ill right now. Yeah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  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, and now to be kind of like fucking around with it.

• 1:26:03Sarah Marshall?

  And to embrace it enthusiastically.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:26:25Sarah Marshall?

  I was kind of asking you more about like, the idea of a Ralph Lauren Christmas being this thing this year, but I think what you said is a lot more relevant, and mine was like a brain dead question.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:26:42Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  It's an echo of the Reagan era.

• 1:26:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, God, it is. Oh, it's right out of the preppy handbook, isn't it?

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  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. And the, the world that Ralph Lauren- Depicts, which is this kind of like Western ranch slash like New England country estate slash, like it's kind of a, it's like a non-place that has sort of.

• 1:27:16Sarah Marshall?

  I would say that the classic eighties Ralph Lauren looks are like you're cosplaying, maybe not a character on Dynasty because they were just like dripping in jewels and stuff. Like that was pretty over the top and I would say not preppy really.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  But like a horsey, like horsey plaid.

• 1:27:32Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:27:42Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And you're wearing a plaid a lot of the time and you've got the, the LL Bean boat tote or whatever it's called.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Oh, the pullover. Yeah, exactly. The boat tote with the little, um, little monogram that, you know, that is depicting an extremely white racial landscape of 1980s America.

• 1:28:08Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. I don't mean to cast dispersion on Ralph, but.

• 1:28:18Sarah Marshall?

  Not, not, well, I mean.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  Personally.

• 1:28:20Sarah Marshall?

  But not for this reason, maybe I guess, but like.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Right. Not for this reason.

• 1:28:23Sarah Marshall?

  And this idea that like, you know, Ralph Lauren, I think real name lip shits is like.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:28:28Sarah Marshall?

  As an outsider, and I remember I did an episode on kind of prepped them with Avery Trufelman a while ago.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:28:34Sarah Marshall?

  Took an outsider.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:28:36Sarah Marshall?

  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 it.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:57Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  That's where it came from. Exactly. It was aluminum. It was, yeah, exactly. Um, so I think, yeah, I mean, I don't want to, you know, Ralph has a kind of like 19. Century Santa Claus appearance nowadays. So I feel, I feel kind of bad. He's Andy Santa Claus. So I don't, I don't want to cast dispersions, but I think I am a firm believer that store and mall Santas should reflect the communities they serve.

• 1:29:28Sarah Marshall?

  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, because have you ever experienced like Mickey Mouse at Disneyland or Disney World?

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, as a child.

• 1:29:44Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  I know, it would be so weird. Whereas, I mean, didn't we talk previously about the idea of either John Waters or Fran Lebowitz being Santa?

• 1:30:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  And I think either of those are great choices, I think. But there's infinitely good Bowen Yang. I mean, there's incredible choices out there.

• 1:30:08Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:16Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:30:31Sarah Marshall?

  To me, a Ralph Lauren Christmas is also basically like the entire aesthetic of the McAllister household and the Homeroom movies. And those people, except Kevin, eh, 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 a little bit atomic egg, as evidenced by my Christmas tree.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:30:56Sarah Marshall?

  But also my Christmas aesthetic is, I am tired and whatever I bother with is great. And I think that that's the aesthetic for 2025 that I believe in personally.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:31:10Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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, because on the one hand. And 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. So I have to be really careful in kind of the edit of like what I, you know, what gets put out, what are, what will they leave alone?

• 1:31:41Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:31:45Sarah Marshall?

  That's because the cats use it as a climbing wall.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  So part of that, I mean, so we're kind of Christmas minimalist a little bit 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 atomic age festive, festivus for, for, for all of us.

• 1:32:01Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and you just need more lights up because it's dark all the time.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need more lights and then, you know, you, you are tempted to dress up the cats, but then resist doing that and, you know, make special food, have some, 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, like 10 out of 10.

• 1:32:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And, you know, and my advice this year is, I think it was last time is let's try to the best of our ability to stop trading 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.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Truly do less, have a better time because people, yeah, people don't care. And if they do care, it's weird and they're caring about the wrong thing and just, yeah.

• 1:32:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Cause 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.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:33:14Sarah Marshall?

  And that's to keep them running while we're asleep as well.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:17Sarah Marshall?

  And that our time is really precious in a way that I think that we're more and more becoming conscious of is 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.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  And taking our attention.

• 1:33:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Exactly. 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 are.

• 1:33:44Sarah Marshall?

  Trying to get by with less, you know, for a lot of people, certainly in the United States, than than 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. So I feel like this is really a time to try and celebrate and share the joys that come with just like within, 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. Because whatever we choose to do is the right thing for us.

• 1:34:26Sarah Marshall?

  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. 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, I will always say that.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Sarah Marshall?

  Christmas is also a time when abusive people use the holidays as an excuse to get you to do what they want you to.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  Ugh, God, I know.

• 1:35:00Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think that is one of the things that I really love and try to remember always about. I think it's a useful thing. If your personal relationship with Christmas is fraud, which I think honestly, like most people's kind of is to some extent.

• 1:35:18Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. Because I mean, just look at it.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  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 this unstoppable force. 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.

• 1:35:43Sarah Marshall?

  You're a people.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  You're a people also. You can be a Grinch temporarily if you feel like it.

• 1:35:47Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:02Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  And to all a good night.

• 1:36:09Sarah Marshall?

  Sarah Archer, you're so great.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Oh, well, Sarah Marshall likewise.

• 1:36:13Sarah Marshall?

  We're gonna put this out around Thanksgiving, actually, because like the Christmas tree, we want to give it extra time to stay out.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:36:20Sarah Marshall?

  And become desiccated.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:36:22Sarah Marshall?

  What, what, 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?

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:39Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  It is the book version of this podcast, exactly. 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 actively. 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, could be.

• 1:37:10Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  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 Sartreize, 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. And yeah, so I would love to hear from you if you're out there and want to talk about Christmas stuff.

• 1:37:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yay.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Or cats, or whatever.

• 1:37:39Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  Oh, it's such a pleasure.

• 1:37:45Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Anytime, truly anytime.

• 1:37:55Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Sarah Marshall?

  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 will be judged on the way we've taken care of them.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:38:13Sarah Marshall?

  So when things are feeling difficult, just.

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  Take good care of your cats.

• 1:38:17Sarah Marshall?

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

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  Do what it wants. Yeah.

• 1:38:22Sarah Marshall?

  And then you'll, you'll have done something, something good, and that'll make it easier to do your next thing. All right, a lot of good advice.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Excellent advice all around. Merry Christmas, Sarah Marshall.

• 1:38:34Sarah Marshall?

  Merry Christmas.

• 1:38:47Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being here. 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 Zickler for editing and producing. Don't forget, we have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus. Check out The Devil You Know from CBC Podcasts. Check out A Sunset. They happen at 4:15 now, so they're a little bit easier to catch. We will see you next time.