December 19, 2016 • 31 mins
Since last year's episodes on non-Santa holiday figures were so popular, there's another installment for 2016! This time around, Frau Perchta, Olentzero, Mari Lwyd and Ded Moroz get the spotlight.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. H and Tracy.
We've had a lot of heavy episodes as of late.
We sure have, which is great, but we are heading
(00:25):
into the holiday season and sometimes you want to have
a little frivolity. Ye. Last year we did two episodes
about holiday figures from around the world, where we talked
about the many non Santa Claus figures that are celebrated
during the winter season. So we talked about Crampus, Laba,
Fauna Center, Claus Varta, Pete Gorilla. When Tracy went on
(00:47):
her honeymoon, she brought me back a lovely grilla ornament.
We talked about Bell Nickel and Pare Futard and TiO
di Natal. But there are more than that. Uh So
today we're going to add a third installment. This will
be the edition of the Crampus and Friends Holiday Power Hour,
although right out of the gate, there's no Crampus in
this one. We're just using that that naming convention to
(01:08):
continue the series for continuity, but you can always go
back to that previous episode and it's not really an hour,
so we're fibbers as well in that regard. But but
it is intended to mostly just be a fun way
to think about the holidays. From some other perspectives, some
of it is very kookie, and you'll be like, what
that's a Christmas or New Year's tradition? Yeah. Uh. One day,
(01:33):
I think you were out of the office for for
some reason, and I put a little thing on our
Facebook that that was like, Okay, what sorts of winter
slash Christmas slash yule tide topics do folks want to
talk about? Because sometimes it feels like we are nearing
the end of seasonal topics. Um and two of the
(01:56):
stranger from my point of you, uh figures we will
be talking about came directly from the folks suggestions. Yeah,
and I'm you know, we we love more. So if
you want this to happen again a year from now,
feel free to keep sending those. We'll keep a list.
(02:17):
Even though Holly just beautifully pronounced so many names, we
do want to say, well, there are a lot of
different languages represented here. We don't speak any of them.
We are gonna make our our best heavily researched effort
to try to say all of these right, but please
(02:37):
forgive us when we don't. And I would say, I
think Tracy is probably being very kind when she says
how beautifully pronounced those, because I'm confident there was some
butchering taking place as we were reading them, though I
was like, oh, those sounds so lovely. We're going to
begin with Frau Perta, who was a holiday figure associated
(02:59):
most with the Alps. She's common in Austrian and Southern
German folklore, although she's certainly not confined exclusively to that area,
and she's been part of the lore in other places
as well. And there are also some slight variations to
her name, which generally correlate to how she is represented
in different geographical areas, and there's a bit of debate
(03:22):
around parts origins. Scholars who link her to Paganism suggests
that she was originally a goddess figure that then became
twisted into a more sinister hag character as Christianity enveloped
cultures that had pagan roots and kind of tried to
adopt and adapt those those ideas. So her name, according
to Jacob Graham's Deutsche mythology meant shining one. But it's
(03:44):
also suggested that her name was potentially originally a completely
different word, which is stamp Uh associated with stamping, sort
of a more violent, angrier kind of idea and the
darker parts of her mythology. And she's also sometimes associated
with a figure called frau Holda or fraud Hola Uh.
(04:04):
Sometimes they're kind of represented as sisters or cousins, or
one is the northern version, one is the Southern version,
and that's a figure of possibly Scandinavian origin who's also
associated with agriculture and the arts and has parallel festival timing,
which is why they're often linked together. But much of
PETA's origin story is a mess of speculation and piecing
(04:26):
together puzzles which are missing really big pieces. This is
one of those cases we often find where one writing
in this case Grim's asserts some things and it gets
picked up and repeated as fact without any actual substantiation
for those claims. Yeah, that happens a lot, particularly in folklore.
I'm sure anybody should we have any folklore scholars listening,
they know that this is a big part of picking
(04:48):
apart and teasing out the truth of any given origin story,
so away from the paganism interpretation. There is a folklore
scholar named J. B. Smith, and he spoke at a
conference in tooth Holes in where he described her more
as the folk gloric personification of Epiphany. And this was
as he put it in a paper that he published
(05:08):
later quote in harmony with a general medieval tendency to
personify feast and fast days. I'm just gonna take a
moment to say, I really miss La Bafana, the Epiphany Witch.
You don't have to miss her. You can have her
in her home. This holiday season where so fraud Practa's
role as part of a holiday celebration has evolved, just
(05:29):
the same as many many other holiday figures. She shows
up during the twelve days of Christmas, and in modern
traditions she has come to be known as sort of
a behavior barometer for keeping children in line. Good children
are rewarded and bad children are punished, and lying makes
her especially angry. She's kind of a grumpy protector, taking
care of people and wording off evil, but really ready
(05:52):
to dole out penalties if she thinks you've misbehaved. But
earlier incarnations of practa were much dark her in the
judgment of good versus bad behavior, So she would punish
people who worked, specifically those who worked at spinning, which
is a task she's very closely associated with, who did
that on holidays or did not participate in community feasts
(06:16):
and celebrations. So she's often referenced as like the keeper
of an enforcer of taboos. So like you do not
work on holiday, you take that time to be part
of the community and feast at times and her mythologies,
she's taken on some truly gruesome characteristics. She would seek
out the lazy members of a community and then punish
(06:36):
them for their lack of motivation by cutting open their bellies,
removing their viscera, and then filling them up with garbage.
There are some lines that can be drawn from all
of this belly splitting and her connection to feasting and
making sure that people observe the holiday calendar. Yeah, there
(06:57):
are some kind of theoreticals where people say, oh yes,
because they're they're not taking part in the feast. She
will fill them with things that they don't like if
they're not willing to be part of that meal in
celebration and community moment, but her sinister holiday dealings were
not just about dolling out consequences for the lazy. Greed
was also a target and even being too inquisitive. So
(07:19):
you can see how this kind of uh gets really
to the heart of that whole community thing, like, basically,
don't be a troublemaker, do your work when you're supposed to,
take breaks, and be part of the community when you're
supposed to h And there are even some less common
variations in her lore in which she finds children who
have lied. We mentioned a moment ago that she really
hated it, and she scrapes their tongues with glass. In
(07:42):
some places, her legend extends beyond winter and the winter
holidays and crosses over with other mythical figures. She said
to live in lush wooded areas and in lakes in
the summertime, and to bless flocks of sheep for shepherds
who brought her flax when it was warm. She was,
in some places so associated with this more agrarian spinning
(08:03):
culture that it was said that she could sometimes be
seen wandering the green slopes of mountains and twilight carrying
a golden spindle. And then she moved into the more
mountainous caves in the winter, which is where she would
make snow just sort of lovely and nicer than her
cutting people open and stuffing garbage in their abdomens. There
(08:24):
are some really specific folklore stories about Perkra, and there
are three that we're going to mention. These were referenced
again in that longer paper by J. B. Smith, and
they feature traveling with sort of a band of ghosts,
and those are those of unbaptized children who could not
travel to their afterlife. So she and this group of spirits,
and sometimes these spirits are characterized in this benign way
(08:46):
as sort of these orphans and unbaptized children, but at
other times they're depicted more as a collection of demons
that travel with her, and those are referred to collectively
as Perkton. And in these tales, which are more modern,
she serves in a role which rewards good for the
most part, rather than her more terrifying belly slitting, tongue
scraping incarnation. And one, while she's traveling with her party
(09:09):
of unbaptized children in a carriage over reugh terrain, a
wheel falls off of their ride and a kind passerby
makes a new lynch pin by carving it from wood,
and she tells him to keep the wood shavings, which
then turned into gold in his pocket. Sort of a
much nicer version. In another story, an impoverished man goes
(09:29):
looking in the night for a godparent for his newborn child,
and this baby in the story is a fresh addition
to an already large family that he is struggling to
provide for, and when he happens upon Pecta and her
destitute children in the woods, he shows them compassion, remarking
to one who looks especially poorly clothed. In some stories,
this child is wearing only their undergarments. I'm gonna butcher
(09:52):
this word, so I apologize you, poor little Zoda Vasher.
And in addressing the child with a name which apparently
translates rough lee to ragged little might and showing kindness,
he earns Peracta's blessing, and good fortune soon comes to
him in the form of a wealthy benefactor. The last
of the park to stories that Smith recounts features a
(10:13):
farm hand who hides in a stove to spy on
Peracta and her children after his employer prepares a room
for them in their farmhouse for twelfth night. When the
travelers arrive, she tells one of the children to plug
up a hole she sees in the stove, and that
was the one that the farm hand was looking through.
He waits out their stay and when he's when he
emerges after they've left, he realizes that he is blind.
(10:37):
He returns to the stove the following year, and this
time Pta tells her child to unplug the hole. In
his state, his his sight is restored. I made a
note that it's like mythical lazing um. So while parks
modern incarnation follows the frequent theme of holiday figures designed
to encourage good behavior in children during the holidays, she
(11:00):
has throughout her years been many things too many people,
but always with a touch of magic, and of course
including some of those dark things like being a belly slidter.
There are also areas where a modern pecton celebration takes place,
and it's kind of like Crampus knocked where her demons,
which are young men in scary wooden masks called shia Parton,
(11:20):
run through the streets of the town, and in some
places this happens twice. The scary version comes first, and
then later when they run through the streets again, they
are in handsome, non demonic forms, uh, which sounds kind
of fun to me, but also exhausting if you have
to do it twice. So we're gonna pause in the
festivities here for a little break from one of our sponsors.
(11:48):
So next up is the Welsh holiday figure Mari Luid,
and this name translates to gray mayor. You'll sometimes also
see it as Holy Mary or ray Mary, and it
can be to foreigners sort of equal parts festive and frightening.
It almost seems, if you are not familiar with this custom,
more like a Halloween celebration, because while the Mighty Luid
(12:11):
is a character of sorts, it's really an act of Mary,
though maccabre puppetry. The Marie Luid tradition is believed to
bring good fortune, and it all starts with a horse
skull on New Year's Eve. That skull is then adorned
with decorative ears and eyes and dressed up with accessories
like bright ribbons and bells, and that's carried around on
(12:32):
a pole, usually with a sheet wrapped around it to
conceal the person who's carrying the pole, and traditionally the
Mighty Lud was carried door to door by merrymakers who
would sing. They would challenge the occupants to verse battles
and ultimately, if the Mighty loud Bearers were the winners
of those battles, would ask to be invited into the
home they were visiting. And there's actually a really fun
(12:55):
BBC film from nineteen sixty six of this call and
responsive song that goes is on that's available on YouTube,
and we will have a link to that in our
show notes. Once inside the home, the visitors would be
treated to refreshments and sometimes would receive small gifts of cash,
and in exchange they would entertain for a bit before
moving on to the next hound. To have Marie Luid
(13:17):
in your home was believed to bring with it good
fortune and to clear the home of bad spirits. So
really this whole horse bearing visitors are always invited in
for some hospitality. Yeah, they always win in the battle,
whether no matter how it plays out, they're always kind
of the winners, and so they get to come in.
And this is actually, if you really want to trace
it back to its most basic roots, a very very
(13:40):
old tradition and it's certainly not exclusive to Welsh culture. Certainly,
performing with animal masks and singing and call and response
style as part of a cultural tradition, and sharing food
and drink have been parts of very ancient customs that
built community and marked the changing of the Season's way
way back into mankind's history is for the origins of
(14:01):
this particular tradition. Because of how old it is, things
a kind of nebulous really quickly, but piecing together the ingredients.
The horse and Celtic Britain represented fertility and strength. And additionally,
the idea of passing back and forth from the living
world to the underworld is one that held a lot
of power and this is the horse's skull. So the
(14:22):
horses deceased. Yeah, so the horse is doing that passing
back and forth as part of this New Year's celebration.
But this old form of caroling turn friendly competition has
also had a really pretty active revival in recent decades.
There are a number of small groups that like to
perform the Mighty Luid in various Welsh towns as well
(14:42):
as bigger regional gatherings where the horse skull puppet comes
out and this old ritual is enacted really with great glee.
This is another thing you can find videos of online
and they're really quite fun. In addition to all the
New Year's appearances, it's also sometimes there are appearances in
the spring. You Yeah, and there's also for people who
are curious what this actually looks like, there is a
(15:04):
really interesting flicker group that we will link to in
the show notes so you can see photos of some
of these decorated horse skull puppets. They're really quite fun.
It sounds a little weird and creepy if you're not
familiar with it, but it seems so joyous and delightful
when you actually get to watch it. Our next holiday
figure is from Basque Country and it's sort of a
(15:24):
Santa Claus variation, or Lanzero is an old man, grubby
with smears of coal dust and has a pot belly,
and that may initially sound similar to Santa but lanzero
is not dressed in red for trim suits. He wears
more standard clothing, usually that of a peasant, a peasant farmer,
and he has a big red nose. Yeah. I was
(15:44):
reading a translated page about him where that there was
a significant hint that his nose suggested that he had
some pretty chronic drinking habits. But I don't know if
you if we should include that because it was just
in the one spot. Uh. And following the theme of
many of these holiday characters, Olentzero's origins are not entirely clear.
(16:08):
His name may suggest the idea of calling or asking,
related to an older Basque tradition where children would go
from house to house sort of singing for their supper.
They would entertain in the hopes of getting food or money,
but this was not like trick or treating. They would
actually collect these things, and then they would go back
to their own home and and that food and money
(16:29):
that they had gathered would be used to assemble a
feast meal. In writings dating back several hundred years, olentzero
appears as a member of a race of giants who
lived in the Pyrenees. According to this legend, these people
saw a glowing cloud in the sky, so bright that
it was painful to look at, and a man who
was partially blind could look at it. So the giants
(16:52):
held him aloft so he could get a closer look.
When they put him back, he said the sign was
He said this, that the cloud was a sign of
the birth of Jesus. Okay, so this may sound sort
of nice and kind of an interesting and variation on
this story up to this point, but brace because things
are about to get really really weird. Uh So, fearing
(17:12):
the changes of the world that the arrival of the
Son of God might hearken, this old, partially blind man
wanted to die, and he asked the giants to throw
him off a cliff. And they walked up a mountain
and fulfilled this wish. But then as they descended, they
all fell to their deaths save one survivor, and that
was Oleno. Now, according to this about to get grizzly legend,
(17:37):
Alonzo continued down the mountain into the villages below, and
they got there and punished people who were eating too
much on the day before Christ's birth by slitting their throats.
There's some irony here, and that Alonso was something of
a glutton and a little too fond of drinks. So
that's a little dark. Yeah, that's maybe not the most
(18:01):
merry Christmas story ever, And that is not the story
as it's told today. So now uh Ano is not
a giant but a regular human man who spreads love,
and in this version of the story. He was adopted
by a fairy after having been found in the woods
as a baby, presumably abandoned, and as he grew up
he became a charcoal maker, and then he would carve
(18:23):
figures out of the charcoal to create toys for children,
and he would visit villages and distribute these toys every
time he had filled his sack up with them. And
on one such toy distribution visit, he was trapped while
saving Sometimes it's one child, sometimes it seems like it's
several children from a burning house, and he became trapped
in the house and it looked like that was his end.
(18:43):
But his fairy mother came to him in that moment,
and to reward him for his bravery, she not only
saved him, but made him immortal so he can make
and share toys with children forever. Now, life size figures
of Aalencio are made with wood or paper mache, and
then they're carried to the streets on Christmas Eve. Yeah,
I read in one spot, but I couldn't verify again
(19:05):
because most of this is foreign language and I'm reading
interesting translations. Um. Sometimes he is set on fire as
part of the festivities to kind of represent that story.
Uh so, again an interesting twist on the Christmas story.
And I need some eggnogs. So let's pause for a
sponsor break. Does that sound yah me to you, Tracy? Okay,
(19:28):
let's have a sponsor break. We'll get some magnaga and
then we'll get to our next holiday story. Dead Motives
or Father Frost is a Slavic variation on Santa Claus
and Dead Motives is an icon of Winter, and he
and his granddaughter or daughter or possibly fairy god daughter
(19:50):
depending on your source, bring New Year's gifts as they
ride in their sleigh, which is drawn by a trio
of horses and also includes a beautiful evergreen tree as
its cargo. Snegoka is often mentioned is the thing that
sets dead morals. Apart from other Santa like figures, which
there are many, none of the others travels with a
(20:12):
female counterpart. Snegor Rochka is also called the Snow Maiden
or just Snowy, and as we just mentioned, she has
a number of different roles because her origin story really
varies quite greatly. She maybe Father Frost's daughter with the
Snow Queen, or she might, as one legend tells it,
be a girl made of snow by a couple desperate
for a child, and then brought to life by their
(20:33):
love in a legend. Because she cannot withstand the transition
from winter to spring without changing form, she sometimes becomes
a cloud after the warmth melts her, and so she
represents the changing of the seasons and when she appears
with dead mottos. However, Snegroa is a gorgeous, glamorous creature.
Her long winter robes are always bejeweled, and she helps
(20:56):
deliver gifts to good children. She also serves as sort
of this breed edge between Father Frost and the children,
because she'll play with the kids and she'll get Father
Frost to join in from time to time. Dead Moros
has roots in the St. Nicholas story, of course, as
well as the Russian hero figure of Morotsko, who is
similar to Jack Frost, sometimes described as a demon of
(21:17):
snow who can freeze water with his cold iron fists.
Morotsco and in turn Dead Moros as a duality of nature,
a protector of the good and the hard working and
the punisher of the lazy and deceitful. Yeah, pretty common
theme through all of the holiday figures that we've talked
about on the three episodes we've done on these for
(21:38):
they you know, reward the good and punish the bad.
And while Dead Motives is similar to Santa in many ways,
his style sets him apart a little bit. His great
fur coat is ankle length and it and his cap
are normally heavily embellished with white and metallic sort of
graphical scroll work designs that can range from like I
(22:01):
said that scroll work to uh, you know, a smattering
of stars. They often include pearl and crystal beating that
mimic sparkling snow. He also carries a magical staff that
helps keep sweet old father Frost as nimble as a
youngster as he travels through the cold winter night. In
the late ninety nineties, it was decided that Dead Moritz
Is home is a small town in northern Russia called
(22:24):
veliky Ustig, which is in the Vologodski region, and if
you like, you can get on a train and go
visit him there where he lives in a log cabin
that sits at the point where three rivers meet and uh.
Dead Bonots is fortunately a voracious reader because he spends
his non winter time pouring over all of the letting
(22:44):
letters that he gets from the children of Russia, carefully
noting what their New Year's gift wishes might be his. Uh,
but dead Moritz has his own dark past in his mythology.
While now he has known as his kindly sweet and
who spreads love and toys, he has been written about
as a much more terrifying figure. Nineteenth century poet Nicolae
(23:06):
necrosoft pen a poem called more It's Red Nose in
which father Frost was a cruel. It was cruel, freezing
people to death for his own amusement, and one particularly
horrifying even the story he freezes an impoverished widow and
then laughs at her orphaned children. That's not cool, not
(23:27):
nice at all. No, but eventually his image did soften.
But uh. What really ended up sort of changing things
for Dead Monos is the Bolshevik Revolution. It halted appearances
of this particular holiday figure for a time, So from
nineteen seventeen into the nineteen thirties, the sort of anti
religious movement made Dead Months who is seen as a
(23:49):
children's god and unwelcome cultural icon. But he did re
emerge in the mid nineteen thirties. His views shifted slightly,
and his benefit to the children of the country was
seen as more portant than the rejection of the bourgeoisie figure.
Although this is really when he kind of became solidified
as a New Year's visitor rather than a Christmas figure.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in variations on
(24:13):
Dead Morals developed in the various countries that had previously
been part of the USSR. Yeah, there are certainly similarities,
but some have even changed up the name to really
sort of set there's apart and kind of create their
own cultural traditions. But since two thousand two there's been
this other interesting tradition that Dead Moduts has been part of,
(24:35):
UH sort of an act of political goodwill. So every
year Father Frost has a holiday meeting with Finland's Santa
Claus at a spot on the border that the two
nations share and literally while border guards look on, children
perform songs and dances, and the two holiday figures exchange
gifts with one another. According to reports that I found
(24:57):
in Santa Claus gave dead Monot universal charger for mobile devices,
possibly to keep the elves charged up and ready. UH,
and dead Modots gave Santa Claus a picture book with
Vladimir Putin on the cover, and then in things became
a bit more traditional. Dead Monots gave Santa an ice
snowflake and Santa Claus in turn gave him a basket
(25:18):
of sweets. So no telling what this year's exchange might include.
Uh it maybe it will once again be traditional or
maybe ultra modern. We don't know. I'm not completely sure
why because it doesn't exactly add up, but Snega Rochka
really reminds me of Susan from the Discworld books, and
so now I want to go watch hog Father. Oh well, yeah,
(25:43):
there's also if you look at her, you can see
that there's uh to be very modern culture e. You know,
she is a snow princess, so she bears some resemblance
to things like Elsa from Frozen, you know. Any even
though Elsa is sort of a more Norway based idea,
they're still like the long blue, silvery robes that have
(26:04):
all of this sparkle and ice on them, So I
thought of that as well. Yeah. It it doesn't make
a lot of sense that she reminds me of Susan,
except that Susan is a daughter and is in Hogfather like,
which is also a holiday tradition in its own for
many people. Do you have a listener mail? I do,
(26:24):
and I decided to keep it in line with sort
of our lighter tone that we're having this time around.
Uh and this also will come with kind of a
hilarious lost items confession. So uh, hey, it's no secret
that I'm really shrimpy. I'm a short person. And we
have a group printer in our office, and you know,
(26:48):
sometimes you'll print something and you'll forget it's on the
printer and are I don't know if it's our wonderful
office manager Tamika or our wonderful I T person is
he put up this kind of like, uh, you know
a little slot on the wall where you can put
people stuff that you find off the printer. But it's
up way high and I've never looked in it until today. Whoop,
(27:09):
when I found these two emails that I meant to
read forever ago. Uh and there they were, and I thought, oh,
these are light and their fun and uh, it will,
you know, be a nice way to talk about something
that's not quite so heavy. And the disparity in our
heights has indeed gotten comments from people when we put
(27:30):
up pictures of ourselves. Sometimes yeah, like the people are like,
it's Tracy standing on a box. No, Holly is short
and tallish. Yeah, you're on the tall sign. So these
actually referenced in older episode, which is The mong Golfier Brothers,
which was also not too crazy heavy, So that's delightful.
The first UH is from a listener who I'm going
(27:52):
to guess on her name's pronunciation as Tonia, but I'm
not confident, so I'm sorry if I did that wrong.
She says, Hi, thank you your excellent podcast. I always
enjoy the episodes and they helped me get through my housework.
On the subject of the Mongolfier episode, I've been moving
some stuff from storage to my home and I found
this watercolor pad. She sent us a photo. No, I
(28:12):
did not buy it. It belonged to my grandfather. Here
you can see the Canson logo as the mongolf ye
a balloon. If you check out more recent Cants on paper,
you won't see this. So as a reminder to our
listeners in case they do not recall, the Mongolfie has
owned a paper company which eventually changed hands a few
times and then became known as the Canson Company, so
that is why she's referencing this paper company. I just
(28:35):
thought it was funny that this should turn up just
after I listened to this relevant episode and one of
you mentioned buying art supplies without using them. I am
also guilty as charged, but I think my granddad is
a record holder here. For example, I have no idea
how old this paper is, but he died sometime in
the eighties, so it is quite old. Uh. This cancel
paper is quite good. But I like paper that's either
(28:56):
very smooth or very thick, and this is neither. So
I will see if I can find a way to
use it. As we also mentioned that cancel on paper
is not like an office paper supply, they'd like self
fine art paper. So uh. Fun one. And this was
the other one related to the montolf Ye episodes from
our listener Melissa, and she says, if you recall in
that episode, I was like, they put the duck in
(29:17):
the balloon to test it in the balloon basket. Why
didn't it just fly away? Oh? Yeah, we had we
had some questions about the logistics of that, and I
think I know what you're about to read. Yeah, yeah,
I have a fair dose of chagrin. So Melissa's subject
line is the mont golf y a duck didn't fly away,
And then the actual body copy of the email says
(29:41):
because they were in a cage at least that's how
it was illustrated. And who invented it and what makes
it work? By Sarah Leslie, A favorite book from my childhood,
published in nineteen seventy six. I dug get out of
my son's bookcase and snapped a picture of that page
for your enjoyment. Thank you for making my commute so enjoyable.
Long time listener, Melissa, Yeah, that makes total and they
would put it in a cave things. I feel foolish
(30:02):
for having not even thought of putting the duck in
a cage. Yeah, duck in a cage. That makes all
the sense in the world. It did not occur to
me for one second, which is very funny because I
think I've mentioned on the show before that when I
was fairly young my parents had a farm and we
(30:23):
had ducks. I would have seen birds in cages. I
don't know why my brain could not walk down that
short little walkway to get there, but there it is.
If you would like to write to us. You can
do so at History podcast at house to works dot com.
You can also find us across the spectrum of social media.
Is at missed in History. That means on Instagram, We're
(30:44):
at mist in history. On Twitter, We're at mist in history,
Facebook dot com slash missed in history. There we are
uh missed in history dot tumbler dot com and pinterest
dot com slash missed in history. If you would like
to learn a little bit more about holiday figures, you
can go to our parents site, how stuff Works. Type
in the word crampus. You're gonna get some interesting stuff.
(31:04):
You can also come and visit me and Tracy at
our site, which is missed in History dot com. You
can find show notes for every episode that she and
I have worked on together, as well as an archive
of every episode of the show. Ever so, please come
and visit us at how stuff works dot com and
missed in history dot com for more on this and
(31:31):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. H and Tracy.
We've had a lot of heavy episodes as of late.
We sure have, which is great, but we are heading
(00:25):
into the holiday season and sometimes you want to have
a little frivolity. Ye. Last year we did two episodes
about holiday figures from around the world, where we talked
about the many non Santa Claus figures that are celebrated
during the winter season. So we talked about Crampus, Laba,
Fauna Center, Claus Varta, Pete Gorilla. When Tracy went on
(00:47):
her honeymoon, she brought me back a lovely grilla ornament.
We talked about Bell Nickel and Pare Futard and TiO
di Natal. But there are more than that. Uh So
today we're going to add a third installment. This will
be the edition of the Crampus and Friends Holiday Power Hour,
although right out of the gate, there's no Crampus in
this one. We're just using that that naming convention to
(01:08):
continue the series for continuity, but you can always go
back to that previous episode and it's not really an hour,
so we're fibbers as well in that regard. But but
it is intended to mostly just be a fun way
to think about the holidays. From some other perspectives, some
of it is very kookie, and you'll be like, what
that's a Christmas or New Year's tradition? Yeah. Uh. One day,
(01:33):
I think you were out of the office for for
some reason, and I put a little thing on our
Facebook that that was like, Okay, what sorts of winter
slash Christmas slash yule tide topics do folks want to
talk about? Because sometimes it feels like we are nearing
the end of seasonal topics. Um and two of the
(01:56):
stranger from my point of you, uh figures we will
be talking about came directly from the folks suggestions. Yeah,
and I'm you know, we we love more. So if
you want this to happen again a year from now,
feel free to keep sending those. We'll keep a list.
(02:17):
Even though Holly just beautifully pronounced so many names, we
do want to say, well, there are a lot of
different languages represented here. We don't speak any of them.
We are gonna make our our best heavily researched effort
to try to say all of these right, but please
(02:37):
forgive us when we don't. And I would say, I
think Tracy is probably being very kind when she says
how beautifully pronounced those, because I'm confident there was some
butchering taking place as we were reading them, though I
was like, oh, those sounds so lovely. We're going to
begin with Frau Perta, who was a holiday figure associated
(02:59):
most with the Alps. She's common in Austrian and Southern
German folklore, although she's certainly not confined exclusively to that area,
and she's been part of the lore in other places
as well. And there are also some slight variations to
her name, which generally correlate to how she is represented
in different geographical areas, and there's a bit of debate
(03:22):
around parts origins. Scholars who link her to Paganism suggests
that she was originally a goddess figure that then became
twisted into a more sinister hag character as Christianity enveloped
cultures that had pagan roots and kind of tried to
adopt and adapt those those ideas. So her name, according
to Jacob Graham's Deutsche mythology meant shining one. But it's
(03:44):
also suggested that her name was potentially originally a completely
different word, which is stamp Uh associated with stamping, sort
of a more violent, angrier kind of idea and the
darker parts of her mythology. And she's also sometimes associated
with a figure called frau Holda or fraud Hola Uh.
(04:04):
Sometimes they're kind of represented as sisters or cousins, or
one is the northern version, one is the Southern version,
and that's a figure of possibly Scandinavian origin who's also
associated with agriculture and the arts and has parallel festival timing,
which is why they're often linked together. But much of
PETA's origin story is a mess of speculation and piecing
(04:26):
together puzzles which are missing really big pieces. This is
one of those cases we often find where one writing
in this case Grim's asserts some things and it gets
picked up and repeated as fact without any actual substantiation
for those claims. Yeah, that happens a lot, particularly in folklore.
I'm sure anybody should we have any folklore scholars listening,
they know that this is a big part of picking
(04:48):
apart and teasing out the truth of any given origin story,
so away from the paganism interpretation. There is a folklore
scholar named J. B. Smith, and he spoke at a
conference in tooth Holes in where he described her more
as the folk gloric personification of Epiphany. And this was
as he put it in a paper that he published
(05:08):
later quote in harmony with a general medieval tendency to
personify feast and fast days. I'm just gonna take a
moment to say, I really miss La Bafana, the Epiphany Witch.
You don't have to miss her. You can have her
in her home. This holiday season where so fraud Practa's
role as part of a holiday celebration has evolved, just
(05:29):
the same as many many other holiday figures. She shows
up during the twelve days of Christmas, and in modern
traditions she has come to be known as sort of
a behavior barometer for keeping children in line. Good children
are rewarded and bad children are punished, and lying makes
her especially angry. She's kind of a grumpy protector, taking
care of people and wording off evil, but really ready
(05:52):
to dole out penalties if she thinks you've misbehaved. But
earlier incarnations of practa were much dark her in the
judgment of good versus bad behavior, So she would punish
people who worked, specifically those who worked at spinning, which
is a task she's very closely associated with, who did
that on holidays or did not participate in community feasts
(06:16):
and celebrations. So she's often referenced as like the keeper
of an enforcer of taboos. So like you do not
work on holiday, you take that time to be part
of the community and feast at times and her mythologies,
she's taken on some truly gruesome characteristics. She would seek
out the lazy members of a community and then punish
(06:36):
them for their lack of motivation by cutting open their bellies,
removing their viscera, and then filling them up with garbage.
There are some lines that can be drawn from all
of this belly splitting and her connection to feasting and
making sure that people observe the holiday calendar. Yeah, there
(06:57):
are some kind of theoreticals where people say, oh yes,
because they're they're not taking part in the feast. She
will fill them with things that they don't like if
they're not willing to be part of that meal in
celebration and community moment, but her sinister holiday dealings were
not just about dolling out consequences for the lazy. Greed
was also a target and even being too inquisitive. So
(07:19):
you can see how this kind of uh gets really
to the heart of that whole community thing, like, basically,
don't be a troublemaker, do your work when you're supposed to,
take breaks, and be part of the community when you're
supposed to h And there are even some less common
variations in her lore in which she finds children who
have lied. We mentioned a moment ago that she really
hated it, and she scrapes their tongues with glass. In
(07:42):
some places, her legend extends beyond winter and the winter
holidays and crosses over with other mythical figures. She said
to live in lush wooded areas and in lakes in
the summertime, and to bless flocks of sheep for shepherds
who brought her flax when it was warm. She was,
in some places so associated with this more agrarian spinning
(08:03):
culture that it was said that she could sometimes be
seen wandering the green slopes of mountains and twilight carrying
a golden spindle. And then she moved into the more
mountainous caves in the winter, which is where she would
make snow just sort of lovely and nicer than her
cutting people open and stuffing garbage in their abdomens. There
(08:24):
are some really specific folklore stories about Perkra, and there
are three that we're going to mention. These were referenced
again in that longer paper by J. B. Smith, and
they feature traveling with sort of a band of ghosts,
and those are those of unbaptized children who could not
travel to their afterlife. So she and this group of spirits,
and sometimes these spirits are characterized in this benign way
(08:46):
as sort of these orphans and unbaptized children, but at
other times they're depicted more as a collection of demons
that travel with her, and those are referred to collectively
as Perkton. And in these tales, which are more modern,
she serves in a role which rewards good for the
most part, rather than her more terrifying belly slitting, tongue
scraping incarnation. And one, while she's traveling with her party
(09:09):
of unbaptized children in a carriage over reugh terrain, a
wheel falls off of their ride and a kind passerby
makes a new lynch pin by carving it from wood,
and she tells him to keep the wood shavings, which
then turned into gold in his pocket. Sort of a
much nicer version. In another story, an impoverished man goes
(09:29):
looking in the night for a godparent for his newborn child,
and this baby in the story is a fresh addition
to an already large family that he is struggling to
provide for, and when he happens upon Pecta and her
destitute children in the woods, he shows them compassion, remarking
to one who looks especially poorly clothed. In some stories,
this child is wearing only their undergarments. I'm gonna butcher
(09:52):
this word, so I apologize you, poor little Zoda Vasher.
And in addressing the child with a name which apparently
translates rough lee to ragged little might and showing kindness,
he earns Peracta's blessing, and good fortune soon comes to
him in the form of a wealthy benefactor. The last
of the park to stories that Smith recounts features a
(10:13):
farm hand who hides in a stove to spy on
Peracta and her children after his employer prepares a room
for them in their farmhouse for twelfth night. When the
travelers arrive, she tells one of the children to plug
up a hole she sees in the stove, and that
was the one that the farm hand was looking through.
He waits out their stay and when he's when he
emerges after they've left, he realizes that he is blind.
(10:37):
He returns to the stove the following year, and this
time Pta tells her child to unplug the hole. In
his state, his his sight is restored. I made a
note that it's like mythical lazing um. So while parks
modern incarnation follows the frequent theme of holiday figures designed
to encourage good behavior in children during the holidays, she
(11:00):
has throughout her years been many things too many people,
but always with a touch of magic, and of course
including some of those dark things like being a belly slidter.
There are also areas where a modern pecton celebration takes place,
and it's kind of like Crampus knocked where her demons,
which are young men in scary wooden masks called shia Parton,
(11:20):
run through the streets of the town, and in some
places this happens twice. The scary version comes first, and
then later when they run through the streets again, they
are in handsome, non demonic forms, uh, which sounds kind
of fun to me, but also exhausting if you have
to do it twice. So we're gonna pause in the
festivities here for a little break from one of our sponsors.
(11:48):
So next up is the Welsh holiday figure Mari Luid,
and this name translates to gray mayor. You'll sometimes also
see it as Holy Mary or ray Mary, and it
can be to foreigners sort of equal parts festive and frightening.
It almost seems, if you are not familiar with this custom,
more like a Halloween celebration, because while the Mighty Luid
(12:11):
is a character of sorts, it's really an act of Mary,
though maccabre puppetry. The Marie Luid tradition is believed to
bring good fortune, and it all starts with a horse
skull on New Year's Eve. That skull is then adorned
with decorative ears and eyes and dressed up with accessories
like bright ribbons and bells, and that's carried around on
(12:32):
a pole, usually with a sheet wrapped around it to
conceal the person who's carrying the pole, and traditionally the
Mighty Lud was carried door to door by merrymakers who
would sing. They would challenge the occupants to verse battles
and ultimately, if the Mighty loud Bearers were the winners
of those battles, would ask to be invited into the
home they were visiting. And there's actually a really fun
(12:55):
BBC film from nineteen sixty six of this call and
responsive song that goes is on that's available on YouTube,
and we will have a link to that in our
show notes. Once inside the home, the visitors would be
treated to refreshments and sometimes would receive small gifts of cash,
and in exchange they would entertain for a bit before
moving on to the next hound. To have Marie Luid
(13:17):
in your home was believed to bring with it good
fortune and to clear the home of bad spirits. So
really this whole horse bearing visitors are always invited in
for some hospitality. Yeah, they always win in the battle,
whether no matter how it plays out, they're always kind
of the winners, and so they get to come in.
And this is actually, if you really want to trace
it back to its most basic roots, a very very
(13:40):
old tradition and it's certainly not exclusive to Welsh culture. Certainly,
performing with animal masks and singing and call and response
style as part of a cultural tradition, and sharing food
and drink have been parts of very ancient customs that
built community and marked the changing of the Season's way
way back into mankind's history is for the origins of
(14:01):
this particular tradition. Because of how old it is, things
a kind of nebulous really quickly, but piecing together the ingredients.
The horse and Celtic Britain represented fertility and strength. And additionally,
the idea of passing back and forth from the living
world to the underworld is one that held a lot
of power and this is the horse's skull. So the
(14:22):
horses deceased. Yeah, so the horse is doing that passing
back and forth as part of this New Year's celebration.
But this old form of caroling turn friendly competition has
also had a really pretty active revival in recent decades.
There are a number of small groups that like to
perform the Mighty Luid in various Welsh towns as well
(14:42):
as bigger regional gatherings where the horse skull puppet comes
out and this old ritual is enacted really with great glee.
This is another thing you can find videos of online
and they're really quite fun. In addition to all the
New Year's appearances, it's also sometimes there are appearances in
the spring. You Yeah, and there's also for people who
are curious what this actually looks like, there is a
(15:04):
really interesting flicker group that we will link to in
the show notes so you can see photos of some
of these decorated horse skull puppets. They're really quite fun.
It sounds a little weird and creepy if you're not
familiar with it, but it seems so joyous and delightful
when you actually get to watch it. Our next holiday
figure is from Basque Country and it's sort of a
(15:24):
Santa Claus variation, or Lanzero is an old man, grubby
with smears of coal dust and has a pot belly,
and that may initially sound similar to Santa but lanzero
is not dressed in red for trim suits. He wears
more standard clothing, usually that of a peasant, a peasant farmer,
and he has a big red nose. Yeah. I was
(15:44):
reading a translated page about him where that there was
a significant hint that his nose suggested that he had
some pretty chronic drinking habits. But I don't know if
you if we should include that because it was just
in the one spot. Uh. And following the theme of
many of these holiday characters, Olentzero's origins are not entirely clear.
(16:08):
His name may suggest the idea of calling or asking,
related to an older Basque tradition where children would go
from house to house sort of singing for their supper.
They would entertain in the hopes of getting food or money,
but this was not like trick or treating. They would
actually collect these things, and then they would go back
to their own home and and that food and money
(16:29):
that they had gathered would be used to assemble a
feast meal. In writings dating back several hundred years, olentzero
appears as a member of a race of giants who
lived in the Pyrenees. According to this legend, these people
saw a glowing cloud in the sky, so bright that
it was painful to look at, and a man who
was partially blind could look at it. So the giants
(16:52):
held him aloft so he could get a closer look.
When they put him back, he said the sign was
He said this, that the cloud was a sign of
the birth of Jesus. Okay, so this may sound sort
of nice and kind of an interesting and variation on
this story up to this point, but brace because things
are about to get really really weird. Uh So, fearing
(17:12):
the changes of the world that the arrival of the
Son of God might hearken, this old, partially blind man
wanted to die, and he asked the giants to throw
him off a cliff. And they walked up a mountain
and fulfilled this wish. But then as they descended, they
all fell to their deaths save one survivor, and that
was Oleno. Now, according to this about to get grizzly legend,
(17:37):
Alonzo continued down the mountain into the villages below, and
they got there and punished people who were eating too
much on the day before Christ's birth by slitting their throats.
There's some irony here, and that Alonso was something of
a glutton and a little too fond of drinks. So
that's a little dark. Yeah, that's maybe not the most
(18:01):
merry Christmas story ever, And that is not the story
as it's told today. So now uh Ano is not
a giant but a regular human man who spreads love,
and in this version of the story. He was adopted
by a fairy after having been found in the woods
as a baby, presumably abandoned, and as he grew up
he became a charcoal maker, and then he would carve
(18:23):
figures out of the charcoal to create toys for children,
and he would visit villages and distribute these toys every
time he had filled his sack up with them. And
on one such toy distribution visit, he was trapped while
saving Sometimes it's one child, sometimes it seems like it's
several children from a burning house, and he became trapped
in the house and it looked like that was his end.
(18:43):
But his fairy mother came to him in that moment,
and to reward him for his bravery, she not only
saved him, but made him immortal so he can make
and share toys with children forever. Now, life size figures
of Aalencio are made with wood or paper mache, and
then they're carried to the streets on Christmas Eve. Yeah,
I read in one spot, but I couldn't verify again
(19:05):
because most of this is foreign language and I'm reading
interesting translations. Um. Sometimes he is set on fire as
part of the festivities to kind of represent that story.
Uh so, again an interesting twist on the Christmas story.
And I need some eggnogs. So let's pause for a
sponsor break. Does that sound yah me to you, Tracy? Okay,
(19:28):
let's have a sponsor break. We'll get some magnaga and
then we'll get to our next holiday story. Dead Motives
or Father Frost is a Slavic variation on Santa Claus
and Dead Motives is an icon of Winter, and he
and his granddaughter or daughter or possibly fairy god daughter
(19:50):
depending on your source, bring New Year's gifts as they
ride in their sleigh, which is drawn by a trio
of horses and also includes a beautiful evergreen tree as
its cargo. Snegoka is often mentioned is the thing that
sets dead morals. Apart from other Santa like figures, which
there are many, none of the others travels with a
(20:12):
female counterpart. Snegor Rochka is also called the Snow Maiden
or just Snowy, and as we just mentioned, she has
a number of different roles because her origin story really
varies quite greatly. She maybe Father Frost's daughter with the
Snow Queen, or she might, as one legend tells it,
be a girl made of snow by a couple desperate
for a child, and then brought to life by their
(20:33):
love in a legend. Because she cannot withstand the transition
from winter to spring without changing form, she sometimes becomes
a cloud after the warmth melts her, and so she
represents the changing of the seasons and when she appears
with dead mottos. However, Snegroa is a gorgeous, glamorous creature.
Her long winter robes are always bejeweled, and she helps
(20:56):
deliver gifts to good children. She also serves as sort
of this breed edge between Father Frost and the children,
because she'll play with the kids and she'll get Father
Frost to join in from time to time. Dead Moros
has roots in the St. Nicholas story, of course, as
well as the Russian hero figure of Morotsko, who is
similar to Jack Frost, sometimes described as a demon of
(21:17):
snow who can freeze water with his cold iron fists.
Morotsco and in turn Dead Moros as a duality of nature,
a protector of the good and the hard working and
the punisher of the lazy and deceitful. Yeah, pretty common
theme through all of the holiday figures that we've talked
about on the three episodes we've done on these for
(21:38):
they you know, reward the good and punish the bad.
And while Dead Motives is similar to Santa in many ways,
his style sets him apart a little bit. His great
fur coat is ankle length and it and his cap
are normally heavily embellished with white and metallic sort of
graphical scroll work designs that can range from like I
(22:01):
said that scroll work to uh, you know, a smattering
of stars. They often include pearl and crystal beating that
mimic sparkling snow. He also carries a magical staff that
helps keep sweet old father Frost as nimble as a
youngster as he travels through the cold winter night. In
the late ninety nineties, it was decided that Dead Moritz
Is home is a small town in northern Russia called
(22:24):
veliky Ustig, which is in the Vologodski region, and if
you like, you can get on a train and go
visit him there where he lives in a log cabin
that sits at the point where three rivers meet and uh.
Dead Bonots is fortunately a voracious reader because he spends
his non winter time pouring over all of the letting
(22:44):
letters that he gets from the children of Russia, carefully
noting what their New Year's gift wishes might be his. Uh,
but dead Moritz has his own dark past in his mythology.
While now he has known as his kindly sweet and
who spreads love and toys, he has been written about
as a much more terrifying figure. Nineteenth century poet Nicolae
(23:06):
necrosoft pen a poem called more It's Red Nose in
which father Frost was a cruel. It was cruel, freezing
people to death for his own amusement, and one particularly
horrifying even the story he freezes an impoverished widow and
then laughs at her orphaned children. That's not cool, not
(23:27):
nice at all. No, but eventually his image did soften.
But uh. What really ended up sort of changing things
for Dead Monos is the Bolshevik Revolution. It halted appearances
of this particular holiday figure for a time, So from
nineteen seventeen into the nineteen thirties, the sort of anti
religious movement made Dead Months who is seen as a
(23:49):
children's god and unwelcome cultural icon. But he did re
emerge in the mid nineteen thirties. His views shifted slightly,
and his benefit to the children of the country was
seen as more portant than the rejection of the bourgeoisie figure.
Although this is really when he kind of became solidified
as a New Year's visitor rather than a Christmas figure.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in variations on
(24:13):
Dead Morals developed in the various countries that had previously
been part of the USSR. Yeah, there are certainly similarities,
but some have even changed up the name to really
sort of set there's apart and kind of create their
own cultural traditions. But since two thousand two there's been
this other interesting tradition that Dead Moduts has been part of,
(24:35):
UH sort of an act of political goodwill. So every
year Father Frost has a holiday meeting with Finland's Santa
Claus at a spot on the border that the two
nations share and literally while border guards look on, children
perform songs and dances, and the two holiday figures exchange
gifts with one another. According to reports that I found
(24:57):
in Santa Claus gave dead Monot universal charger for mobile devices,
possibly to keep the elves charged up and ready. UH,
and dead Modots gave Santa Claus a picture book with
Vladimir Putin on the cover, and then in things became
a bit more traditional. Dead Monots gave Santa an ice
snowflake and Santa Claus in turn gave him a basket
(25:18):
of sweets. So no telling what this year's exchange might include.
Uh it maybe it will once again be traditional or
maybe ultra modern. We don't know. I'm not completely sure
why because it doesn't exactly add up, but Snega Rochka
really reminds me of Susan from the Discworld books, and
so now I want to go watch hog Father. Oh well, yeah,
(25:43):
there's also if you look at her, you can see
that there's uh to be very modern culture e. You know,
she is a snow princess, so she bears some resemblance
to things like Elsa from Frozen, you know. Any even
though Elsa is sort of a more Norway based idea,
they're still like the long blue, silvery robes that have
(26:04):
all of this sparkle and ice on them, So I
thought of that as well. Yeah. It it doesn't make
a lot of sense that she reminds me of Susan,
except that Susan is a daughter and is in Hogfather like,
which is also a holiday tradition in its own for
many people. Do you have a listener mail? I do,
(26:24):
and I decided to keep it in line with sort
of our lighter tone that we're having this time around.
Uh and this also will come with kind of a
hilarious lost items confession. So uh, hey, it's no secret
that I'm really shrimpy. I'm a short person. And we
have a group printer in our office, and you know,
(26:48):
sometimes you'll print something and you'll forget it's on the
printer and are I don't know if it's our wonderful
office manager Tamika or our wonderful I T person is
he put up this kind of like, uh, you know
a little slot on the wall where you can put
people stuff that you find off the printer. But it's
up way high and I've never looked in it until today. Whoop,
(27:09):
when I found these two emails that I meant to
read forever ago. Uh and there they were, and I thought, oh,
these are light and their fun and uh, it will,
you know, be a nice way to talk about something
that's not quite so heavy. And the disparity in our
heights has indeed gotten comments from people when we put
(27:30):
up pictures of ourselves. Sometimes yeah, like the people are like,
it's Tracy standing on a box. No, Holly is short
and tallish. Yeah, you're on the tall sign. So these
actually referenced in older episode, which is The mong Golfier Brothers,
which was also not too crazy heavy, So that's delightful.
The first UH is from a listener who I'm going
(27:52):
to guess on her name's pronunciation as Tonia, but I'm
not confident, so I'm sorry if I did that wrong.
She says, Hi, thank you your excellent podcast. I always
enjoy the episodes and they helped me get through my housework.
On the subject of the Mongolfier episode, I've been moving
some stuff from storage to my home and I found
this watercolor pad. She sent us a photo. No, I
(28:12):
did not buy it. It belonged to my grandfather. Here
you can see the Canson logo as the mongolf ye
a balloon. If you check out more recent Cants on paper,
you won't see this. So as a reminder to our
listeners in case they do not recall, the Mongolfie has
owned a paper company which eventually changed hands a few
times and then became known as the Canson Company, so
that is why she's referencing this paper company. I just
(28:35):
thought it was funny that this should turn up just
after I listened to this relevant episode and one of
you mentioned buying art supplies without using them. I am
also guilty as charged, but I think my granddad is
a record holder here. For example, I have no idea
how old this paper is, but he died sometime in
the eighties, so it is quite old. Uh. This cancel
paper is quite good. But I like paper that's either
(28:56):
very smooth or very thick, and this is neither. So
I will see if I can find a way to
use it. As we also mentioned that cancel on paper
is not like an office paper supply, they'd like self
fine art paper. So uh. Fun one. And this was
the other one related to the montolf Ye episodes from
our listener Melissa, and she says, if you recall in
that episode, I was like, they put the duck in
(29:17):
the balloon to test it in the balloon basket. Why
didn't it just fly away? Oh? Yeah, we had we
had some questions about the logistics of that, and I
think I know what you're about to read. Yeah, yeah,
I have a fair dose of chagrin. So Melissa's subject
line is the mont golf y a duck didn't fly away,
And then the actual body copy of the email says
(29:41):
because they were in a cage at least that's how
it was illustrated. And who invented it and what makes
it work? By Sarah Leslie, A favorite book from my childhood,
published in nineteen seventy six. I dug get out of
my son's bookcase and snapped a picture of that page
for your enjoyment. Thank you for making my commute so enjoyable.
Long time listener, Melissa, Yeah, that makes total and they
would put it in a cave things. I feel foolish
(30:02):
for having not even thought of putting the duck in
a cage. Yeah, duck in a cage. That makes all
the sense in the world. It did not occur to
me for one second, which is very funny because I
think I've mentioned on the show before that when I
was fairly young my parents had a farm and we
(30:23):
had ducks. I would have seen birds in cages. I
don't know why my brain could not walk down that
short little walkway to get there, but there it is.
If you would like to write to us. You can
do so at History podcast at house to works dot com.
You can also find us across the spectrum of social media.
Is at missed in History. That means on Instagram, We're
(30:44):
at mist in history. On Twitter, We're at mist in history,
Facebook dot com slash missed in history. There we are
uh missed in history dot tumbler dot com and pinterest
dot com slash missed in history. If you would like
to learn a little bit more about holiday figures, you
can go to our parents site, how stuff Works. Type
in the word crampus. You're gonna get some interesting stuff.
(31:04):
You can also come and visit me and Tracy at
our site, which is missed in History dot com. You
can find show notes for every episode that she and
I have worked on together, as well as an archive
of every episode of the show. Ever so, please come
and visit us at how stuff works dot com and
missed in history dot com for more on this and
(31:31):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!