Advent Calendars

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, as this episode airs,
we are already into Advent, both on the religious calendar

(00:22):
and as the word relates to Christmas countdown calendars and
those two things. Even though the countdown calendars have become
very very secular in some iterations, they still share a
root origin. And today you can get gift calendars that
are called Advent calendars don't even count down to Christmas,
they don't really reference Advent at all, but they'll still
get called that, right, Like there are birthday countdown calendars

(00:45):
you can get. It's doesn't have anything to do with Advent,
but the name has become so connected to this idea
of a countdown calendar. And to talk about Advent calendars,
which is really what this episode is about, we do
have to talk about the religious observation of Ada, which
has historically been less clear cut in execution than you
may imagine. I feel like, especially if someone's not deeply

(01:07):
religious or if they're not Catholic, they're like, Advent has
a lot of rules well kind of, we'll see, they
don't always get they have certainly not always, and even
today they don't always get observed in the same ways.
And the transition to commercially available products that are more
about the secular celebration of Christmas than the religious one,

(01:30):
but still have the same name centers more than anything
on children and private celebrations, and how that kind of
changed over to be something else. But the commercial version
of the Advent calendar, i will say, is a pretty
recent development. So that's what we're talking about today. So
the word advent comes from the Latin ad venire to

(01:51):
come to, and you'll sometimes see the word adventists, which
means arrival. So from a religious perspective, Advent is part
of Christian religious preparation for Christmas. Just does a note
of clarity, Like we were talking about non Orthodox, like
not the Orthodox churches, but like Catholicism, most Protestant denominations. Right,

(02:17):
there are other versions of Advent within those other religions,
but they they're on a slightly different calendar and they
don't track quite the same way. Right, So the common
version of Advent that our listeners are probably most familiar
with runs over four Sundays leading up to Christmas ending
on Christmas Eve. So, for example, the year that we're

(02:39):
recording this in twenty twenty three, Advent is on the
shorter side because Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, so
this is from Sunday, December third to Sunday December twenty fourth.
This period is intended to be a time of reflection
and preparation for the Christmas holiday, and it's also considered
a preparation for the second Coming of Christ. In I

(03:00):
would say in some denominations that was like not a
big part of it in my upbringing. Yeah, there are
some Catholic churches that really go in on that in
my experience, and some that do not. So some churches
celebrated it more generally as a season to focus on
and honor Christ. Advent marks the beginning of the liturgical year,
and depending on the denomination, Advent celebrations might include an

(03:23):
Advent wreath with those four Sundays represented. Those Sundays usually
each have their own theme. A lot of times it's hope, peace,
joy and love, and the use of a wreath to
celebrate Advent is tied to German Lutheran Johann Vickeran who
introduced it as a visual countdown to Christmas in his
church at a home for boys in eighteen thirty eight,

(03:45):
and we'll come back to that. Advent has been around
at least since the fourth century, when Bishop Perpetuus of
Tours set up a pre Christmas fast as part of
his church's calendar. Similar pre Christmas observations rapidly spread to
other parts of Europe, and it took different forms then,
often dependent on location. So there was a version of

(04:06):
it that lasted for six Sundays. Pope Gregory the First
also known as Gregory the Great, reduced it to four
Sundays during his papacy that ran from five ninety to
six oh four. And while there appear to have been
some efforts to confine Advent just to December, that timeframe
was not adopted by the Catholic Church right so Advent

(04:26):
can start in November. The longer version may have been
intended to include Epiphany that would account for that six
weeks that goes past Christmas and beyond, but that's a
little bit unclear. It doesn't really match up to some
of the original dates mentioned, but there is a pretty
popular theory that includes Epiphany, in that early instances of
Advent may have tied not just to a Christmas countdown,

(04:49):
but to the preparation for the baptisms that would normally
happen to coincide with Epiphany. The start of the Advent season,
going back to Bishop Perpetuus, appears to have initially co
incided with the death of Saint Martin in a fast
that follows the Feast of Saint Martin that begins in
early November, So that would have initially included the stretch

(05:09):
from early November to Christmas, not into January, and that
might account for the sixth Sunday length. By the eighteenth century,
the idea of Advent had been deeply cemented as an
important part of the religious calendar. There had also been
more lore and tradition established regarding Advent. In the seventeen

(05:30):
seventy five book The Movable Feasts, Fasts and Other Annual
Observances of the Catholic Church, the reverend doctor Alban Butler
wrote this about Advent quote, Advent is a time of
penance and devotion before Christmas, appointed by the Church to
serve as a preparation to that great solemnity of the
birth of Christ. Festivals were commanded by God himself and

(05:51):
the Old Law to commemorate his principle, benefits and mercies,
that men might be more perfectly instructed in them, bear
them all ways in mind, be always thankful for them,
and stirred up to dispose themselves to receive the fruits
of these wonderful mysteries. The festivals of the New Law
of Gray sought to be celebrated with so much the

(06:12):
greater preparation and devotion as the mysteries which we commemorate
transcend those of the Old Law, which, how wonderful of ever,
were no more than weak types and figures, and empty
shadows of them. By the time of Butler's writing, the
rules of advent timing within the Catholic Church were firmly established,

(06:33):
though he notes that there continued to be differing observations regionally.
He establishes the four Sundays of Advent as falling from
the Sunday nearest Saint Andrew's Day on either side of it,
so even if the Sunday was before it or after it,
whichever was closest, that's where it started. He also notes
in the text that a forty day Advent was in

(06:54):
place at one time as a sort of parallel to Lent,
and was established in five eighty one at the Council
of Mine. That version was forty days, no matter how
many Sundays were involved. It was also sometimes called Saint
Martin's Lent rather than Advent. Butler also notes that in
Milan in the late eighteenth century, the six week Advent,

(07:14):
which includes six Sundays, was still being observed when he
wrote this so late eighteenth century. According to Butler's research,
in the tenth century, Pope Nicholas the First also endorsed
the four sunday version rather than forty days. Up to
that point, monks in England and Ireland particularly had continued
to observe the forty day rule, fasting most of the

(07:36):
day and then eating one meal in the evening. Butler
concludes his discussion of the varying advent calendar dates by saying, quote,
almost the whole Latin Church, in conformity with the Roman
has long since reduced advent to the uniform rule of
four weeks, or at least four sundays beginning about the
end of November, from the Sunday nearest the Feast of

(07:57):
Saint Andrew. So we just mentioned fasting, and even the
rules around that have been wildly different depending on the
time and place. That Council of macall in five eighty
one that we mentioned laid out a proposed fasting schedule
of three days a week Monday, Wednesday and Friday for
the whole forty days, and even on days that weren't

(08:18):
fasting days, meat was to be avoided. Some churches encouraged
both fasting and quote abstinence from cohabitation in the married state.
Some observances of Advent focused more on spiritual preparation for
the Christmas holiday and its meaning within the church, rather
than requiring physical observation through fasting or abstinence from sexual intercourse.

(08:41):
Even in Butler's book, he notes that quote in monastic orders,
the fast of Advent has always been looked upon us
less rigorous and less solemn than that of Lent. The
bottom line is that even though there are church recognized
dates and practices of Advent, even within any religious denomination,
different areas or even individual churches can still define for

(09:03):
themselves a lot of the specifics about how this period
is observed and celebrated. So this is all religious history
obviously that we've been talking about, but Advent is often
marked by secular advent calendars, So how did that start.
We're going to talk about it right after we take
a quick sponsor break. We noted in the discussion of

(09:33):
religious observations of Advent that a wreath was introduced into
churches as a way to visually mark the progression of
the season and the approach of Christmas, and in Germany
in the mid nineteenth century, this was one of several
practices that shifted the Advent to include ways to track
the countdown to Christmas at home for children. So sometimes
marking the days that countdown to Christmas was really simple,

(09:56):
like families just marking the day with chalk. I read
different accounts it said like in some families, like they
would put on the door, for example, like all of
the chalk mark for all of the days, and they
would erase one each day, and in others they would
add one each day. Like it was a very personal
way of marking it, and everybody had their own way
of doing it. It also started to include small physical

(10:18):
daily items, often paired with Bible verses to combine the
religious observation with this idea of excitement of a visit
from Santa and also teach kids about calendars. This started
to shift from lining up with the moving target of
Advent dates that are like the four Sundays, say and Andrews,
to just being December first to twenty fourth. And that

(10:38):
makes sense, particularly when you consider that these work countdowns
that focused on children. Right, it's easy to track Advent
when the first day of it lines up with December
first and so on, but it would surely be harder
for little kids in particular to have the calendar say
November twenty ninth, for example, when the Advent calendar says two.
So for example, a family might be setting up a

(10:59):
line of candles on their mantle to be lit in
a succession as the twenty four days from December first
to December twenty fourth unfolded. The Advent wreath, as we noted,
is credited to Johann Heinrich Vickern in the eighteen thirties,
and this was adapted for home use in Germany in
a way very similar to the way that we use
Advent calendars. And in this countdown, each day a prayer

(11:23):
or a Bible verse was read and then a candle
was lit on the wreath. If you haven't seen one
of these before and you're like, how would this work?
The wreath is flat on a surface or hung from
a chandelier. It's not vertically on the wall or a
door or something like that. Versions of the Advent wreath
could vary from the four candle one that mimicked those

(11:46):
that might appear in churches all the way to twenty
four day ones that mark December one through twenty fourth.
These could be decorated with ornaments, but the focus remained
on the religious verses and using the light the candles
to create kind of a halo. So the Advent wreath
is associated with Protestant traditions, and this too offers a

(12:08):
possible insight into why they count down from December first
instead of the religious calendar of Advent as it related
to the Catholic Church. They simply were not governed by
the Catholic Church's rules of when Advents started, since most
of the Protestant versions of countdowns were part of family
traditions and celebrations rather than part of any more formalized
church observants, they were also just free to do what

(12:30):
they wished and what made sense for their family in
this regard. Another Protestant originated countdown convention is the Advent tree.
This is a practice that began in eighteen forty six
in Duisburg, Germany. And once again this was a tradition
that started in a home for wayward boys as both
a Christmas countdown and in didactic religious practice. So a

(12:52):
small fur tree was planted in a pot in the
home at the beginning of Advent, and then every day
a Bible Verse was read aloud by one of the
boys with the intention that they would all memorize it
that night. And then the next day a candle was
lit on the tree and another Bible verse was read
to be memorized, and this daily candle and Bible verse

(13:13):
practice continued every day of Advent until the tree was
decorated and Advent ended. This practice was picked up in
private homes as well, and a business grew out of
it as printers started producing heavy paper or cardboard ornaments
that had Bible verses printed on them and even stars
to top the tree. So to be clear, this Advent

(13:34):
tree was not something used instead of a Christmas tree.
A lot of times the two would be alongside one
another as kind of a commingling of Christmas decora and traditions. Yeah,
one rite up that I read kind of made it
sound like you did the Advent tree and then when
it was done, you carried that one into the room

(13:55):
with the Christmas tree. But I wasn't sure if that
was a translation issue. It seems like it would be
a pain in the neck to move a tree with
candles on it, so I think that is what the
problem was. Austria developed its own variation on the Advent calendar,
called a Heaven Ladder. This version walked children down the
ladder as the days progressed, so each wrung was a

(14:15):
day and it was intended to represent the way that
God descends to earth to be present with humanity on Christmas.
There were also candles that could be used in some celebrations,
intended to be burned only a specific amount each day.
That was in both Austria and other European countries. There
are also, we should say, a lot of different ways

(14:36):
to count down Advent that we're not even touching on
because some of them probably aren't even documented as personal
ways to do it. The German Christmas Museum describes Advent
calendars this way, which Holly found delightful. Quote. Advent or
Christmas calendars are tools devised by adults for children to
make the remaining time until Christmas Eve countable and to

(14:57):
stir up anticipation. Their English translation of their page on
Advent calendars, so Holly is hopeful that the German language
version is just as charming. I don't know why. It's
like it's a tool for kids to make them happy,
keep them occupied. We noted that the days were sometimes

(15:19):
marked really simply in advent countdowns, like with chalk. But
another form of simple advent calendar was mentioned in an
eighteen fifty one children's book about Christmas by German social
activist Elise Averdick. In that book, a little girl in
her mother marked the days by hanging pictures on the
wall related to the story of Christmas, and a lot
of homes did this for decades. Advent calendars for home

(15:42):
use were also homemade. I don't want to make it
sound like that's over. There are still people that make
homemade Advent calendars, and so they can take whatever form
the creativity of the adults involved desire. The first printed
Advent calendar was made in nineteen hundred in Munich and
told the story of Santa Claus. But this is a
very small run. Two years later there was a commercially

(16:04):
made Advent clock. This was not really a clock, but
it was two printouts of clockfaces in which each of
the twelve hours on the first image corresponded to December
one through twelve, and the twelve hours on the second
image corresponded to the days thirteen to twenty four. So
each day the hands of the clock this paper clock

(16:26):
could be advanced as Christmas could grew nearer. Because that
nineteen hundred Santa Claus Advent calendar appears not to have
been widely released, there's another point at which the Advent
calendar is often said to have been invented. In the
early nineteen hundreds, a German printer named Gerhard Lang is
credited with printing the first commercial Advent calendar. According to

(16:50):
the legend, this was inspired by his mother's practice of
sewing twenty four cookies into a box lid for him
every year as a child, to be opened day by
day as Christmas approached. And if you're wondering how cookies
would survive twenty four days involved in this countdown, these
were allegedly Vibela cookies, which are more like biscuits that

(17:12):
share characteristics with meringues or the cookie part of a mackerel,
so they were probably okay for a few weeks. The
last few probably chewier then that would be freshly made.
Because Lang's not only made a widely distributed calendar, he
continued to print new ones for decades. His name is

(17:35):
the one that's most associated with the beginnings of advent
calendars as a consumer product. There is not a load
of readily available information about Gerhard Lang. If you search
his name, a few examples come up over and over,
none of which are him. One is a printer from
Frankfurt who was born in nineteen twenty one and is

(17:55):
linked to the beginning of font design, which is pretty fascinating.
Another was a botanist born in nineteen twenty four, and
yet another was a brewer and Democratic State committeeman who
lived in Buffalo, New York. None of those are the
Advent calendar guy. So we don't know much about the
life of Gerhard Lang, who is sometimes called the inventor
of the advent calendar. But what we do know is

(18:15):
that he eventually was made a partner in a publishing
company called Reichold and Lang. The date that Lang published
his first calendar is different depending on what source you
look at. Some say nineteen oh eight, others placed the
date earlier in the nineteen hundreds. There's a children's book
called Waiting for Christmas from two thousand and six that
shares an imagined version of Gerhard Lang as a child

(18:38):
learning about Advent through his mother's cookie countdown. The book
says the cookies were Lebkitchen, So who knows that book
included the nineteen oh eight date, and it might be
where other recent accounts picked that year up. Lang's collaborator
on several of these Advent calendars was an illustrator named
Richard Ernst Kepler. You can find some of Kepler's early

(19:01):
Advent calendar illustrations for Laying online, and one of these
is from nineteen oh three, and it's titled in the
Land of the Christ Child, and it features in an
array of scenes that all depict children, either representing moments
from the life of Christ or showing some imagery that's
commonly associated with the more secular aspects of Christmas, like
nutcrackers and dolls and other toys. These calendars started out

(19:23):
just as paper calendars that had a degree of activity
to them. You could open a little window and see
a Bible verse, or you could paste an image onto
the square that noted the day. The original edition of
In the Land of the Christ Child, for example, wasn't
even sold on its own, It was an insert in
a newspaper. It was the Stuttgarter new Tagblat. There were

(19:46):
two sheets that made up the calendar, and then after
reading the Bible verse framed in each square of the calendar,
kids could cut out the corresponding art to paste over it.
The National Museum of Germany recognizes nineteen oh three as
the year of the first advent calendar because of that
newspaper distributed start of Lang's long career, making them Another

(20:06):
reason the nineteen oh eight origin date comes up is
because although Lang started before that date, it wasn't until
nineteen oh eight that he was actually producing advent calendars
that sold just on their own outside of some other publication.
Over time, the Lang Advent calendars became more complex and
they started to look a little more like the ones

(20:27):
that you could purchase today. If your family has one
of those calendars, that's like part of the family tradition
that hangs on a door with pockets or some other
interactive feature. Those door calendars are an idea that came
from Lang. Similarly, the first Advent calendar with a chocolate
behind each door is credited to him, although his first
one did not have the chocolate included. It was just

(20:48):
set up so that parents could fill it up for
their kids to then have them. This is a good
way to get around the idea to sidestep the problem
of chocolate getting stale on shelves because it goes out
onto the show shelf sometime in July. One of his calendars,
which sounds very quaint, was a small cardboard house, and
each day of the Advent countdown, one of the windows

(21:10):
would be opened, and then when all of the windows
and finally on the last day, the door was open.
The calendar had become a lantern and it was meant
to put a candle inside. He created the first Advent
calendar for blind consumers in nineteen thirty and by the
nineteen thirties Advent calendars had become very popular in Germany
and they were a pretty standard part of a lot

(21:31):
of families holiday traditions. They had also become pretty popular
by that time in Great Britain because Lang had started
shipping them there in the years following World War One.
During the time that Lang was making calendars, the Sank
Johannis Printing Company also started making Advent calendars. Sank Johannas
started printing in the nineteen twenties and sometimes is credited

(21:52):
with the openable doors on Advent calendars, although Lang also
gets the credit for that in a lot of sources. Yeah,
it's hard to pin down. World War two, though, put
the brakes on the printing of Advent calendars, as it
put their Greeks on a lot of things. Not long
after the war started, the rising prices on paper products
meant that reich Holden Lang just could not stay in business,

(22:15):
and then paper goods were also rationed. Then no illustrated
calendars were allowed to be printed under the Third Reich,
at least not any that were not Nazi produced and
intended to indoctrinate children in a Nazi ideology. New Advent
calendars just simply could not exist during World War II.
But when the war ended, the Advent calendar was one

(22:36):
of those things that pretty quickly bounced back. The companies
that had survived the war were able to get back
into printing production relatively quickly, and this also was probably
motivated by a desire to recapture a sliver of normalcy
for children in Germany post war, and there were Advent
calendars available by Christmas nineteen forty five. US soldiers stationed

(22:58):
in Europe bought them and then brought them home when
their tours were over. One of the major sellers of
Advent calendars after the war was Richard Selmer, who started
producing Advent calendars in nineteen forty five. Selmer's first calendar
was called The Little Town, sometimes also appearing in print
as the Little Christmas Town, and it featured a serene

(23:18):
looking village in the winter kind of a balm. After
the war. Incidentally, you can still buy the Little Town
calendars from Selmer's company, which today is called Selmer Verlag.
As their offerings have expanded to include a wide variety
of Advent calendars. Selmer Verlag reports that they sell as
many for adults as they do for children. Her website

(23:40):
also has photos of some of their Advent calendars from
decades ago. Selmer's real genius, though, was expanding his business
into the international market, seeing how eager visitors to Germany
were for Advent calendars, who started distributing in North America
in nineteen forty six, and one of the pivotal moments
in the US that is cited as giving Advent calendars

(24:02):
a huge boost was a photo that was published during
the Eisenhower presidency. That photo was of Dwight D. Eisenhower
opening an Advent calendar with his grandchildren. There were also
some additional photos of the kids holding up the calendar
and smiling. Those photographs ran in Newsweek in nineteen fifty four,
and it made the novelty of an Advent calendar something

(24:24):
that a lot of US families wanted in their own homes.
A photo, though, was no accident. The photo op was
intended to promote the sales of the calendars to raise
money for the National Epilepsy League, and the calendar that
was photographed with the Eisenhower family that was Richard Selmer's
Little Christmas Town. Selmer had arranged for the calendars to

(24:45):
be sold for charity because he knew that it would
help establish the United States as a market for Advent
calendars for years, and he was of course correct. In
nineteen seventy one, Cadbury introduced its first Advent calendar filled
with Cadbury chocolate santas, although that didn't catch on immediately,
and the company didn't always offer Advent calendars because they

(25:07):
didn't always sell. By the nineteen nineties, though, they had
become a regular part of the annual product offerings. Today.
One of the interesting ways that Advent calendars have evolved
is into this unique space of being a marketing tool.
So more and more companies have custom calendars printed just
to market their products, and this can be a giveaway,

(25:28):
so like think the kind of calendar mailers you might
sometimes receive from companies in the winter to promote their
offerings or and this is really fascinating to me, there's
this more subtle aspect where they become products themselves. So
when consumers purchase Advent calendars that are made by companies
because they're perhaps fans of that company, they're also essentially

(25:49):
getting samples of products that might lead them to buy more.
And because Advent calendars are also marketed as gifts, it's
kind of like consumers are paying a company for a
gift they will give someone else that will help market
that company's products to the recipient. We mentioned a moment
ago that Advent calendars have become not just a way
to count down to Christmas, but also are now gifts themselves,

(26:12):
and there's truly something for everyone. There are socks. Every
ip you can think of probably has an Advent calendar
associated with it. Another evolution of the concept of Advent
calendars is like virtual digital calendars, and sometimes these are
packaged as a physical item, but every day's reveal is

(26:34):
something that you have to open online. Yeah. Sometimes it's
like the music download calendar and you just get a
new song every day, like the There have been so
many creative iterations of how to use this concept. The
largest Advent calendar on record, according to the Guinness Book
of Records, was built in two thousand and seven at
Saint Pancras station in London as part of the station's

(26:55):
renovation celebration. That was seventy one meters that's two hundred
and thirty two feet and eleven inches high and twenty
three meters as seventy five feet five inches wide. I
will say I have seen some other Advent calendars that
looked like they might be more giant than this like,
there's a town in Germany where their town hall is
made into a giant Advent calendar every year. And I'm

(27:15):
not sure it's not bigger than this, but this is
the Guinness World record holder. But this giant Advent calendar
at Saint Pancras station had digital windows. The entire thing
was really a fundraiser for the Great Ormond Street Hospital charity.
Maybe the most startling of all the advent calendars that's
turned up in Holly's research was one that was offered
by Porsche in twenty ten, and there were only five

(27:37):
of them made available, one for each continent where the
company had businesses. The physical calendar itself was made of
brushed aluminum and as tall as a person. The treats
inside each revial were completely over the top. The recipient
of this would get a watch one day, gold sunglasses another.
There was even a custom designed kitchen and custom yacht.

(28:02):
Each of these Advent calendars, sold in twenty ten, cost
one million dollars. One of the most beautiful advent calendars,
in my opinion, that has been published since twenty twelve
is the Atlantic's annual Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. So
This online outlet posts a new image from the Telescope

(28:24):
each day, selecting some of the most spectacular and fascinating
photos of space that humans have ever seen. The Advent
Calendar has also manifested as a community event in some places.
So every day people gather at a spot to see
an actual thing like a storefront window or a church
door or et cetera, something that's been decorated to mark

(28:45):
the day. Some of these are religious, some are more secular.
It's a neat way that's sort of taken something that's
become very commercial and maybe kitchen some ways to more
bring people together. Yeah, Advent calendars. Listen, we can talk
about having calendars a lot behind the scenes because I
love them. Uh. And now we're gonna pop over to

(29:07):
listener mail. Hey, this listener mail is from our listener Rebecca,
and she is writing in response to our episode about
Gin based cocktail history. She writes, Hey, y'all, I have
started to write so many times, but the Gin Cocktails
episode finally made me follow through. I was raised by
a very proper Southern Baptist Mama. Yes I am that Southern.

(29:27):
My parents were and will always be Mama and Daddy
They weren't exactly teetotalers, but alcohol just wasn't a thing
in our home when I was growing up, like everybody
else in North Georgia. They both had uncles who made
liquor or were known to frequent the best moonshiners when
they got a thirst. My parents married in the sixties
and started to move in circles where an occasional cocktail

(29:48):
was served. A lady in town who was known for
exceptional good graces and manners advised Mama to order a
Tom Collins and sip it very slow, and throughout their
social lives that became her go to. In my college days,
I had the requisite fun that comes with matriculating in
a southern university town. Go dogs. But if my parents knew,
they never let on. I'm going to pick up this

(30:09):
email from Holly and say after graduation, Mama sat me
down and said, now, when you're at a cocktail party
or a work function, order a Tom Collins and sip
it really slow. She had no idea that I was
much more educated when it came to cocktail choices, and
I let it stay that way for the most part.
Mama passed away in February the episode brought me a
sweet memory of a story I've shared many times through

(30:31):
the years. Sometime soon, I planned to have a Tom
Collins in memory of both my parents. I don't have
a pet right now, so I don't have a picture
to share. I tried to find one of Blackie, mama's
last cat. She showed up one Saturday morning and didn't
leave for eighteen years. Daddy was a dog person, but
that cat stole his heart too. Thanks for all the
great and hard work. I hope y'all do a live

(30:53):
show in Atlanta someday soon so I can meet you
both in person. Rebecca Tracy picked that up because I
got real weak about it. So I also read this
email this morning, and it reminded me earlier in my life,
when I was in college. I think I went to
the beach with my mom and a couple of her sisters,

(31:16):
and they wanted to make a thing they can they
typically consumed on their beach trips, which they described as
wine coolers. It was diet mountain dew mixed with white sefidel,
and they were having trouble getting the cork out of
the white zefandel, and I went and effortlessly took care

(31:41):
of it, and there was a shared moment among my
mom and her sisters in which they just sort of
wordlessly acknowledged that I, their daughter slash niece, who they
still saw as a child, knew how to operate a corkscrew.
I love it. I love it. Good memories. We'll talk

(32:02):
about that Diamount and Duo White z Evanel in a
minute when we do behind the scenes. I have some thoughts,
So if again, thank you so much for this email,
and I want to send my condolences. You got me
all choked up. It's so sweet. If you would like
to email us, you can do that at History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on
social media as Missed in History, and if you have

(32:25):
not subscribed yet, you can do that lickety split in
the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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