Brian Earl
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Brian Earl’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This nostalgia for the way things used to be and family gatherings and things. That music really, believe it or not, had a lot to do in shaping how we see Christmas today as this time for gifts and romance in the snow and homecomings and thinking about the good old days and all of that. They've made an enormous impact and had an enormous influence on shaping Christmas for this generation. Yeah.
Well, one of the probably the most interesting thing about a lot of our Christmas foods is that they didn't start out as Christmas foods. They only became that through a process of elimination. Fruitcake is a really great example. In Victorian times, fruitcake was just something you had. You might have it with your cup of tea. It was common to serve it at weddings.
And as a matter of fact, it was served at Queen Victoria's wedding. And she very famously saved a slice and didn't eat it to practice her restraint. There were all kinds of legends around fruitcake, where if you cut a slice and put it under your pillow, you would dream of your future love, things like that. But only recently has it sort of disappeared outside of the Christmas season.
The same is true for gingerbread. Gingerbread for a long, long time was almost like the funnel cake of its day, the thing that you would go get at a fair. And then it's mostly been weeded out of the rest of the year. Eggnog or some version of eggnog, right? Eggnog is more like a family of drinks called posset, these milk and egg punches that are spiked with alcohol.
You'd see those all over England. And they came over here, too. I think George Washington famously served something that we would recognize as eggnog to visitors. Martha Washington published a recipe for it. How these things disappear outside the Christmas season is really the story. And for each of them, it kind of just has its own little trajectory.
Gingerbread's an interesting one because I think it's mostly in America that we tend not to think of it outside of the Christmas season, whereas in places like Germany, you're more likely to find it throughout the year. Mince pies are a particularly interesting one. Because previously, minced meat was literally that. It was meat that was minced up.
And you would preserve it by adding sugar and dried fruit. Over the years, the meat was taken out and it was just the dried fruit and the sugar. And we now have the version that we're familiar with today, which is usually this sugar, fruit. Usually you preserve it with a little bit of alcohol so it has a bit of a boozy kick and then wrapped up in a pastry shell.
Well, word is that during the Puritans ban on Christmas in England, mince pies in particular were banned and that you could get fined for baking one. I did a chapter on this in the book where I interviewed this journalist from the BBC who said she looked into that in particular. And it turns out there's probably not a lot of historical accuracy to calling out mince pies in particular.
And it's more that a legend spread about the Puritans really being petty about mince pies, you know, as a way to sort of mock just how ridiculous the ban on Christmas had become.
This was back in the 1930s. The Montgomery Ward department store would hand out little booklets to shoppers. So parents would come in, they'd give something to the kids to keep them busy while the parents shopped. And what they did is they tapped a copywriter named Robert L. May.
and said what we'd like you to do is come up with something for this year's christmas season and so he had a daughter who really loved the reindeer exhibit at the zoo and the legend goes it's probably a mixture of fact and legend that he got the notion when he was driving home one night and it was very foggy and he kind of put two and two together he wanted to do something his daughter would like he wanted to make a story about a reindeer who gets caught in the fog
So he wrote up the story and he worked with the commercial artist there to kind of do a little bit of a mock-up. And he took it to his bosses and they just rejected it. They said, no way. I don't want to do this. This doesn't work. He tweaked it a little bit.
and part of the feedback that he got was the red nose this was a time when wc fields was really popular in the 1930s and they said well i think the red nose people are going to associate that with with um alcoholism or someone being a drunkard we don't want that but anyway he eventually got them to to agree so they printed up a bunch of copies of this booklet which it's a story told in rhyming verse you can find it pretty easily online and eventually it just sold out
Or not sold out. They gave it away. They ran out. And then something really interesting happened where Montgomery Ward gave the rights to the story over to Robert L. May, which is really unusual. He was just a copywriter who worked for the company.
But anyway, Robert L. May's brother-in-law was a guy named Johnny Marks, who, if you know the song Silver and Gold and Holly Jolly Christmas, he wrote those songs. So he asked Johnny Marks to write a song based on Rudolph, which he did. And it came out, I think, in 1934. And then the following year, Gene Autry's version came out, which was a number one hit.
And then eventually he sold the rights to it to make that Animagic movie that came out in the 1960s. And during all of this, Robert May was, again, kind of a work-a-day copywriter. He was writing catalog copy for Montgomery Ward, just things like about buying this sweater and things like that. But during all of this, his wife was dying of cancer. And so he was in financial straits.
He was raising a young daughter who's still alive today, by the way. But after all of the success with Rudolph, he died a very wealthy man in the 1970s. And Rudolph, for all practical purposes, should have been just an other annual leaflet handout for Montgomery Ward. But it really caught on. And now it's just an essential part of the Christmas season.
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