James Cooper
speaker
360 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Dec 2024
James Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That was from Towards the Night Before Christmas in 1823.
before that he always arrived on a horse and it was really because um the reindeer you had some people drawing reindeer up in um the northern states in the snowy states and also up in uh norway and sweden it's thought that um Clark Moore drew some of the inspiration from Nordic traditions of the sleighs over there, which are pulled by reindeer to bring the reindeer into the poem.
And that's where we get the reindeer from. Although, of course, Rudolph only arrived in 1939 for Montgomery Ward department stores when a book was written about him. And then the cartoon was made in 48. And we have the famous song in 49.
That's a good old British tradition, and that was invented in the same year that A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was published, which was 1843. Christmas cards were invented by a man called Sir Henry Cole. He was one of the founding members of the Victoria and Albert Museum over here in London. And he also helped set up the earliest UK post office.
And he invented and introduced a new cheaper form of postage stamp. So he got a friend of his called John Horsley, an artist, to design him the first Christmas card, basically to show off that you could use this cheaper penny postal service.
It was kind of a marketing toy to show that he'd got this new way of cheaper postage and he could send out these cards to his family and friends to wish them a Merry Christmas. And it really took off from there. And then when cheaper printing came in, in the 1860s and 1870s, and the cost went even cheaper, then Christmas cards sort of blossomed around the world.
Yeah, no, I think they're on the way out, frankly. I think five, 10 years time, Christmas cards, certainly in the UK will be a thing of the past because one, postage is so expensive these days. And two, we just have other means of communication. They were often a time when families would catch up once a year, the traditional family newsletter of what's been happening through the year.
But now we have email and WhatsApp and social media that we're in much more close communication with lots of people all over the world these days.
Yeah, again, they're an American thing because they come from Mexico. The poinsettia, it was made widely known because of a man called Joel Roberts Poinsett. And that's why we called them poinsettias. And he was the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 1825. He had some greenhouses on his plantations in South Carolina.
He visited Mexico and saw these interesting plants growing that were beautiful colors around Christmas. And so he got some of the plants and took them back to his plantation and grew them in South Carolina and then sent them out around America to his family and friends, kind of like early Christmas cards in a way.
He sent them to John Bartram in Philadelphia, who was a big botanical name in Philadelphia. And that's where they became. They really bloomed into popularity as a Christmas plant because they were something again with the reds and the greens that were already associated with Christmas that they just really fitted with Christmas decorations.
Well, thank you very much for having me. It's always fun to do these sorts of things.
Yeah, good morning.
Well, it's nice to have football back, isn't it?
I think, you know,
Whatever reason, it's coming back and I think people are pleased and people are looking forward to it.
I think having spoken to clubs and players, certainly in the North West, I think, forget the politics and the agendas or anything like that, I think most of those players and coaches are just desperate to be getting back after the longest break many of them have known in their careers.
Yeah, I think it's funny in the sense of excitement around it.
I think United are in cobble with other clubs and having a full squad to choose from.
And I think, you know, there's an argument saying they're going to come out of lockdown perhaps stronger than they actually went into it.
Showing 41–60 of 360 · page 3 of 18
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