Chapter 1: What is the theme of SYSK's 2025 Holiday Extravaganza Christmas Special?
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck. And Jerry's here, too, somewhere in spirit. She may be haunting somebody right now as a ghost of Christmas past. I'm not sure. Yeah. And this is our annual Stuff You Should Know holiday special, huh, Chuck?
That's right. I tell you what, it's one of, if not our favorite episodes of the year. I will say it's getting harder and harder to come up with stuff. We're delving further out into the world and further back in time.
Yeah. Yeah, this is our Anglo-American edition, I guess.
Yeah, that's right. European listeners are going to be pretty stoked. And also, we'd like to point out, this is one of two episodes of the year where we draw a line in the sand and say, sales, take the day off. No ads for this one.
Yeah, because Christmas is commercial enough. Am I right? Yeah, man.
We're not going to sell these.
No. These belong to you guys, the people.
They're our gifts. That's right. And by the way, if you hear the tinkle tinkle of ice, it's because Josh talked me into making the drink that we're going to, you know, sometimes we have a little Christmas drink. that we put out as a part of this episode, and we're doing that again this year. And so I'm having what we call here in the South a nooner.
I didn't have to try very hard. What do you want to start with, Chuck? And also hats off to Jerry for doing all of the wonderful sound design that makes this Christmas episode so special every year.
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Chapter 2: What unique Christmas traditions do the Moravians bring to America?
Yeah, they're like, where am I going to put the manger repair guy? They had no spot, so they created, they just expanded the natural scene around the, I guess, the barn. They created fields, of course. All of a sudden you had lakes, you had cliffs, you had rivers, you had buildings, you had more buildings.
And before you know it, a putz, or a putz rather, it's probably putz, it could take up an entire room. Like they would clear out a room and dedicate it to their putz.
Right. And so there is a tradition that kind of grew up around this where that room would usually be closed off to the kids of the family. Got to do that. And the adults would go in there and putz around their poots. Then on Christmas Eve, they would unveil the poots, the family poots to the kids. And I'm sure it was just a great, a great time for everybody.
That's right. And now I digress very briefly to tell you of a little natural diorama I made at my camp on a stump, on a big old tree stump that I brought up there from a neighbor's front yard. You brought your own stump? I brought my own stump, which is a whole story in itself, which I won't get into.
But the stump is now located near the fire, and I created a whole scene there where we display the rocks that we paint when we go up there. And then I brought it a step forward, and I made a whole nature scene featuring little plastic animals of all the animals that I've called in the camp cam.
Nice.
And I mention this only because while I was doing it, it was a weekend with a lot of the kids there. A bunch of neighbors and friends went up and families. Were they invited? They were not. Every time they came over there to try and arrange things, I kind of very gently said, this is Mr. Chuck's project. Right. Yeah.
So that wasn't so much fun, but it reminded me of the Moravians saying, kids, get out of here.
Right. Did you unveil it to the Children's Delight, though, on Christmas Eve?
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Chapter 3: How did the Thames Frost Fairs become a festive tradition in London?
They eventually added trains. And once Lionel came along with their electric train sets, sometimes the village went away and it just became a train around a tree.
Yeah. And then people who had those trains around their trees grew up. They got nostalgic for them. They started setting them up for their kids. And it became a Christmas tradition thanks to our Moravian friends.
That's right. And that is the story of the Moravian Tiny Villages.
And scene.
What do you want to do next?
Do you want to tell everybody about your drink so they can possibly press pause and make one and then come back for the rest of it?
Yeah, why not? This year, the drink that we're going to talk about is Chuck's special Pumpkin Spice Old Fashioned. I've been drinking these lately because when fall rolls around here in Georgia... That's when the whiskey and the bourbon kind of becomes a little more to my taste. And this year I heard about a pumpkin spice old fashioned and I thought, you know what?
I've never made my own syrups and stuff. So I'm going to make my own pumpkin spice syrup from scratch. And I did. And it's great.
I have some questions about your recipe. I may have some some suggestions.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Vince Guaraldi's music in Christmas celebrations?
I mean translucent, but still dark brown.
I don't even know what translucent means then.
It means like it goes from cloudy to where you could see through it, even though you're seeing through like brown.
I don't know if you could see through this stuff.
Okay, well, then this is some thick syrup.
Yeah, I mean, it looks sort of like a Coke in a bottle.
OK, great. So I do have one one thing to add. OK. If you so if you take cinnamon, it does not like water. It's hydro Haiti. I can't remember which which what it's called, but it does not like to mix. Do you ever have trouble mixing it in with the with the boiling water?
Nope. Mixed up just fine.
Okay, well, I've found that if you mix something like cinnamon, and I would guess all of the spices, with sugar ahead of time, it binds to the sugar and it allows it to dissolve more easily.
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Chapter 5: How can you creatively store Christmas tree lights?
You can just put just a little bit if you don't like it too sweet and you're still going to get that flavor. And, you know, all of this stuff, you can make it less boozy if you want. The one I made for today, since it's a nooner, I just made a little happy. So I just did one ounce of bourbon.
Very smart. So you take that, you make sure everything is at room temperature, you put it in a glass and you drink it and say, no, no, no, no, no.
What I do, I mean, you can just put it straight over ice and mix it with a spoon or something. But if you really want to do it right, put that stuff in a cocktail shaker with ice, shake it really, really good. And then get a nice heavyweight cocktail glass at a cocktail cherry to the bottom of that thing.
Pour it over a giant square ice cube or a giant round ice cube if you want to really be fancy. And then here's the key, as you know, Josh, you got to get that that orange peel, right?
Oh, yeah. You want a nice wide swath of orange peel. No pith, no white on the bottom or as minimal as possible. Yeah. And you twist it, twist it over the top of the drink. And if you look closely, you can see a spray come out. And then all of a sudden there's a little oil slick on top of the drink.
And you, friend, have just expressed the essential oils from that orange into your old fashioned drink.
That's right.
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Chapter 6: What are some fun Christmas drink recipes mentioned in the episode?
And just a quick PSA for all the bartenders out there, when you make a martini or anything with like a lemon or orange, make it a big, wide, you know, they have those, the little peelers that, you know, like a cocktail peeler. You can get the kind that does the little tiny pigtail curlicue. Those are annoying. They curl them up. They hang it on the outside of the glass.
But the whole point of that peel is to get that essential oil. And you can't do that with those little skinny things. So bartenders, for the love of Pete, give the customer a big, wide peel so they can express that thing themselves.
Our listeners named Pete just said, yeah.
That's right.
What's the last little bit if you really want to show off though, Chuck?
Oh, if you want to, if you have a zester, like the little grater, get a cinnamon stick and just grate a little fresh cinnamon on top.
Just a little bit, just a touch. That's right. And people will be like, this is the best Christmas I've ever had.
Yeah. Or you can stick that cinnamon stick right in the drink if you really want to get crazy.
One other thing that we should probably say, though, off the bat is when you make the syrup, you want to make it ahead because it needs to cool and go in the fridge. Right.
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Chapter 7: How do the hosts reflect on the importance of holiday spirit?
Yeah. Yeah. Keep that thing in the fridge. And like I said, I use an old liquor bottle because it has a cork on top. Or if you have those fancy bottles with the little.
clasp on top with the cork like that's great when I went to my brother's Thanksgiving this year I got one of Emily's little tiny like you know four or five ounce bottles and poured some in there and brought it along it's a nice nice thing to give as a gift that is classy buddy thank you okay well I guess we should probably let everybody pause go make the pumpkin spice syrup wait a couple of days and then come back and we'll start the next segment how about that that's right
What do you want to do next, Chuck? Well, I mean, let's go back to one of yours. Should we do the Frozen Fair?
Yeah, we're going to go back in time, way back.
Frozen Fair, the Friars Fair.
The Frost Fairs.
I didn't get it once, did I?
Featuring the Friars. That's right. So we're talking about a series of basically impromptu winter festivals that happened to London over the course of a few hundred years. And hat tip to the BBC, London Museum, History Jar, Honest History, and the podcast Tales of History and Imagination. Ooh. And what we're talking about is they're called the Frost Fairs.
And we should give you a little background first, because the bridge that's now London Bridge was built in the 60s.
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Chapter 8: What heartfelt messages do the hosts share for the holiday season?
The bridge before that was built in 1831. And that 1831 bridge was disassembled and reassembled in Lake Havasu, Arizona, which is where it stands today. And that little gift from London to Lake Havasu gave rise to a really great 1985 TV movie starring David Hasselhoff called Terror at London Bridge. Oh, man. Definitely worth watching.
But the problem is the 1831 bridge and the 1960s bridge put an end to this impromptu winter tradition in London forever.
That's right. That new London Bridge has five arches. The one previous to that from 1831 had 19 arches, but they were closer together. They were pretty narrow and water didn't flow through those things very well. And it was also a time when the Thames was shallower and was it narrower or wider? Wider, wider and shallower. Wider and shallower.
So all of this sort of added up to because of a strange weather phenomenon that Josh is going to describe a time when the Thames would actually freeze over.
Yeah, the Little Ice Age was going on too. From the mid-1300s to the mid-1800s, this period of about 500 years, there was some really weird extra cold weather. Global temperatures dropped. And that means ultimately, for our purposes with this story, that winters in London were way colder during that 500-year period than they are today. Yeah.
So you put that together, the design of the bridge with way more narrow arches, the Little Ice Age and the wider, shallower Thames. That meant that the Thames could freeze over sometimes like it can't today.
That's right. And that happened in 1564 when it froze over and people in London were like, hey, that's pretty cool. Let's go out and get drunk and walk around and play on that thing.
Yeah. Apparently, even Queen Elizabeth I was like, that looks fun. Let's go.
She packed up her corgis and slipped around on the ice for a little while. It froze again in 1607-08. And this time they were like, hey, blimey, this thing's frozen again. Let's get drunk and sell some things.
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