In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan celebrate Christmas at The Babylon Bee Studio with returning guests Kira Davis, Kellen Erskine, and Greg Koukl. They debate what qualifies as a Christmas movie, wonder how great it would be to have a VeggieTales/Hallmark Movie Universe crossover, and try to rank International Ninja Day and Taylor Swift's birthday among other venerated December holidays. Merry Christmas! Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. Kellen has a podcast about books: The Book Pile Kira Davis has a podcast about her opinions and also another podcast about Hallmark Christmas movies: Just Listen To Yourself and A Very Merry Podcast Greg Koukl can be heard at Stand To Reason including #STRAsks. Topics Discussed New studio TikTok Coffee cup drinking style Short attention spans Red Pen Logic series Seeker friendly churches Bowling Parody in today's world Karaoke at old folks home Brave Ollie Possum Veggie tales Problem with slogans Hallmark Christmas movie What makes a Christmas movie? Tragedy of Kevin McCalister Scrooged Goonies Seeing movies as an adult Star Wars Ranking Christmas holidays Kwanzaa Dewey Decimal system day International Ninja day Celebrating Santa The Book Pile podcast Just Listen To Yourself Podcast A Very Merry Podcast Stand to Reason Podcast Subscriber Portion Christmas for Latter Day Saints Defending the virgin birth Faith above reason The Red Sea Best and worst Christmas gifts Conservative news outlets Trump's news network The War on Christmas The Nativity movie It's a Wonderful Life Ugly Christmas sweaters
In a world of fake news, we bring you up-to-the-minute factual inaccuracy, winning the war on Christmas, even though candy canes are gross.
With your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
This is the Babylon Bee.
Fake news you can trust.
Oh, very flowerbed.
What?
Wow.
It looks like we choreographed this just so awkwardly.
Welcome to Christmas time.
It was better when we were all just standing around the room talking.
We should just do that and have someone walk around the hidden camera show.
Yeah, something like that.
So if you're listening to the podcast, you have no idea what's happening.
We're sitting here with Kellen, Brett and Greg.
Yeah.
So we decided to have a special Christmas special.
It's really special.
It's really special.
Because we have all our special guests.
We have our comedian, Kellen.
We have our political writer.
What do you want to say?
Say whatever.
Say whatever it is.
Writer and personality.
Let's say that personality.
Yeah, personality.
I'm the personality of the show.
Pundit.
And then we have our Christian apologeticist.
Yeah, our non-personality.
And you've all been on the show multiple times.
Everybody loves you guys.
And so you're wearing.
So we just figured we let you guys talk and we just sit here and eat cookies.
How is that different?
It's like there's cookies.
There's usually not cookies.
This is the wrong time to start a low-carb diet.
I was also told not to actually eat the cookies because they're symmetrical.
Yeah.
So worked very hard setting them all up.
Yeah.
Are they in the shop?
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
Well, this is my first time in the new B digs.
So they got rid of the first palatial estate.
The moat's gone, which I'm disappointed in.
And no alligators.
I don't know what you did with all the alligators, but this place is nice.
This is nice too.
You donated them?
Good one.
Oh, that sucks.
It's good.
It's Christmas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the season for donating alligators.
Did you, all three of you came to our old studio.
That was the place I was at last.
Last two times.
Yeah, this is my first time.
Yeah, first time.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm kind of wondering what's going through your head when you're like, oh, the Babylon B.
I know that name.
You know, let's go.
And then you show up to this little like two.
Oh, this is great.
I mean, it's appropriate.
Well, now, I get that now, but I'm saying before when it was 200 square foot, you know, office.
It's a lot bigger than my studio.
I'll tell you that.
Yeah.
It was an upgrade from Kyle's garage.
It was.
Yes.
We never did have a guest in my garage, though.
Like, we never invited anyone in.
My studio is the closet because now everybody's home because of COVID or whatever.
So I had an 18-year-old son.
I still have him.
But he was supposed to go to college this year.
And it was going to be really exciting because, you know, he's going to start his adult life.
He's going to get off on his feet.
This is what we've been preparing him for.
But it also was going to be great because it was going to be my podcast studio.
My daughter's trying to convince me to make it into the TikTok room.
But that's not happening.
Yeah, what good happens to record Talk Time?
Yeah.
Sounds like a dark place.
To record your TikToks.
You'd have all your background.
You know, oh my gosh, Kyle, I can't believe I have to explain it to you.
But no, I don't know what a TikTok room is either.
But now, you know, he's home.
And so I don't have my podcast studio.
So I have to podcast from my closet.
So, thank you for hearing my sad story.
It's been really hard on me.
What's your position on TikTok?
Is there does any of our guests?
You've told us your TikTok position, Camel.
What's Kellen's?
Well, he did his.
I'm going to, you can talk.
Oh, my God.
I got.
You missed me.
I got 50,000 followers in like a month, and nothing matters.
That's the difference.
I haven't made more money.
It hasn't crossed over to other platforms.
It just isn't effective.
Yeah.
So that's my position.
Also, the weird thing he's talking about, people lip-sync your comedy.
Yeah, people get more views.
Yeah, audio.
It'll just be like some girl eating Chinese food in her living room, like doing my bits.
And then in her comments, people will be like, you're so funny.
And I'm like, no, she's not.
I'm funny.
I think it's really strange.
I think for me, one thing that I've had to learn about TikTok is how influential it is.
My son's 18.
He couldn't care less.
My daughter's 13 and it's very influential.
And we've taken the position over the years rather than limiting or rather than banning her from social media, we do limit it.
But rather than banning it, we will really get involved in it with her.
So we'll watch what she's watching.
We have all our account passwords so we can log in and see.
And what I find most interesting about TikTok is that she's getting a 13, she's getting a lot of her political opinions from TikTok, even.
Oh, that's healthy.
I am probably the odd man out here, odd person.
You know what we're talking about?
He's like, why are you talking about?
Well, I thought we were talking about clocks.
So, no, my daughter watches TikToks, but I've asked her half a dozen times to explain to me what these things were.
And it didn't make any sense to me.
There are short little video clips where people do something stupid.
Or lip sync something stupid or dance in a stupid way.
Yeah.
So what are the normal arguments?
What are the appeal, though?
I just don't get it.
I think the appeal is it's clips.
It's short clips.
It's like rapid fire, like boom.
That's funny.
It's like wiping face.
It's like YouTube if you don't have to click anything.
It's just, it's one more step removed.
The toilet paper.
It's like, you know, you just want to like hit that roll in this little paper roll.
A whole bunch of little ones go past you in a row.
And just one goes and the next.
Yeah, the next and the next.
My daughter doesn't watch TV.
She watches TikTok.
If the show comes on Netflix that she's been interested in, she'll sit down and watch that.
But otherwise, it's TikTok.
Seats are too long.
It's true.
I like that.
I know you're joking, but that is the truth.
TikTok really is a response to the shortened attention span of this new generation.
And I don't know that it's best to fight that.
I know a lot of people are like, this is such a shame.
And this is the cycle of, you know, technology and humanity.
I think the best thing to do with it is to try to understand it, try to understand how your kids are using it and respond to that.
You know, I always tell.
Do you work for Skynet?
That's what this is sounding like.
Computers aren't dangerous.
Embrace them.
They're your friends.
We don't want to take over.
I mean, they don't want to take over.
Do we need to teach you how to hold a coffee mug?
You know, I get a passion for you.
Yeah.
I feel like there is a lot of people.
It's about the Mormon holding a coffee mug like this.
We're like, no, no, you, you.
For everyone listening, I just dumped my water.
It's not an inside job.
I'm holding a coffee mug right now.
Going to drink it like Trump.
Between the water bottles with the food.
Yeah, he always has one hand under his cup.
And then, again, that's how he drinks.
It's like the oddest thing in the world, but I guess whatever works for you.
Like a glass of water, and he would like do this whole like it's a process.
Maybe he's just doesn't have confidence in his right hand.
No, on a serious note, though, this TikTok thing and this short attention span stuff really makes it much more difficult for us to make a case that's even modestly complicated, which a lot of issues are nowadays because they're ethical things you got to think through.
And kids just don't have the attention span.
They'd rather get stimulated by an emotional feeling that sets their opinions instead of thinking through something that's really important that requires thought.
It just makes it a lot harder.
Yeah, I don't even know how you it feels impossible.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think you use what they have.
So I've seen some TikTokers who do things like they'll do faith-based opinion or they'll do even politics, conservative or liberal.
And they distill, there's it, there is almost an art to it of distilling down an idea to you can't, you're right, you can't convey a complete idea in 15 seconds or whatever, but you can convey enough to foster curiosity.
So I love, I'm homeschooling my daughter this year, and we are talking about the origins of the universe.
And we're using a Christian curriculum.
So we're talking about creationism alongside evolution.
And we talked about the Big Bang Theory and she wasn't very interested in it at all.
And I asked her one question.
I was like, I'm going to ask you this question and then you can go to lunch and we'll talk about it later.
Can something come from nothing?
And she thought it was the silliest thing, but it was one question it took me five seconds to ask.
And then later when we came back, we had like an hour-long conversation.
Oh, that's great.
Well, we're doing a thing.
We have a thing called Red Pen Logic that we just launched three or four months ago, and we got a really great response.
And Tim Barnett from our team, who's kind of a goofy guy with a real rubbery face, decided as a teacher.
What a weird assumption.
You know, I was trying to do that.
He did a lot of surgery.
Yeah, well, he just can make all these faces, but it comes in Jim Carrey-ish.
I get it.
That's the guy I'm figuring out.
He's like a Jim Carrey, but it's not a water.
Like it's a condition.
We have a fabric.
That's right.
What he does is he takes a something off the internet, like a tweet.
It's really short where somebody says something really bizarre against Christianity and then gets a lot of thumbs up, but it's silly.
And so then he red pens it and then does like a four or five minute video that goes along with it.
But the video is all these short little snappy parts.
It's all cut together.
So you get all this jumpiness to it.
And his funny faces and other graphics that are built into it get a lot of eye candy in it.
And those have been really popular.
It's no wonder if this whole trend about TikTok and the short things make a difference.
Oh, you're seeing some of them there.
Yeah.
They're coming up.
You describe that face.
Well, you're looking for his rubbery face.
Yeah, he's got a gay.
Notice how jumpy it is.
So it's like switch, switch, switch, switch.
I don't know.
Maybe that's like a Christian standard TikTok.
I don't know.
But they're a lot of fun.
Red Pen Logic on YouTube.
It is interesting to see.
Like we have TikTok on the one hot side, but then there's also Joe Rogan's three-hour podcast on the other.
So I'm not sure where stuff is going.
Yeah, it's one or the other.
Maybe, so maybe Greg could present a complex argument, and then Kira will distill it down into a TikTok page.
Oh, here you go.
Oh, no, no, I'm not the TikToker.
You're the ring.
It doesn't matter.
Just back to your big bag.
Big bang needs a big banger.
The kids will become a bad bag.
There you go.
Big bang needs a big banger.
The kids will just laugh at the word big banger.
Yeah, I know.
Well, that's why it's memorable.
That's the Kalam cosmological argument in one line.
But a little bit more titillating, I guess, after a fashion.
I have been working on apologetic, like a little apologetic study for the high school youth group at our church.
And it's hit bumps in the road.
We haven't ever started yet.
But that was one of the challenges I was having.
Like, how do you, because I go to like what we would call a secret-friendly church.
So the deep work gets done in the small groups.
So it's like these are kids that are used to going to a youth group where it's like lights, camera, action.
Like we have a smoke machine and we have lights.
It's crazy.
And everything is like, we're giving away these prizes.
I can't dusty.
It's just like that.
So how do you get those kids to like hone in on this on these very big ideas that aren't usually discussed?
And as I was going through the curriculum and just researching a lot of apologists and looking at YouTube, the one, and I use this technique all the time with my kids, like the one thing that I think is the most effective teaching tool with kids is asking questions.
You ask the question and then let them give their answer.
Yeah, you're like, what's the theory of relativity?
And then they tell you.
No.
Why do you bother answering questions?
Something to do with my 15-year-olds.
Hey, today, what's trigonometry?
Go.
Hour later.
Exactly.
I'll get what you're saying, I think.
Yeah.
This fight is going to break out on this podcast.
The smoke machine, that's funny to me.
I was just thinking about bowling, how we've had to make bowling seem fun.
You know what I mean?
Like, you have to add things to it.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's fun.
Like, it's a fun game.
I just don't think that, like, it's not a sport.
And don't hate me for thinking that.
You can still play it.
I just don't, I don't, I don't think that if you can accidentally do the best thing in that game, maybe it's not athletic.
Like, like a six-year-old.
You can't accidentally slam dunk about it.
Imagine like a five-year-old just stumbling into Fenway Park with like a bat and like tripping and hitting a home.
All right.
All right.
I'm lost again.
Back to TikTok.
The smoke thing I get, that's vaping.
All right.
I get that smoke machine.
But what's the bull-legged thing?
What?
Bow-legged?
Bow-bowling.
Oh, bowling.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
It's my fault because he had to turn his hearing aid down because of my cow.
I don't know so much hit his hearing aid down.
So now I'm not bowlegged.
No cackle mode.
But then I end up losing some other things too, like the K's and the B's and the whatever.
So this is bowling.
We should have just leaned into it like, yeah, these bow-legged people, it's time they stop.
I honestly, well, look at anything can happen nowadays.
I thought this was a new kind of game, the bow-legged game.
That would be politically incorrect, but that would not be nice to bow-legged people.
That's how ridiculous of it is.
I thought they are.
The smoke was to kind of cover up the bull legs.
You're crazy boy.
I'm just trying to put it all together.
See, this is the problem when you have bad hearing.
You just get little pieces and you're trying to do a strange world.
This is a metaphor for the current state of news and only getting bits and pieces.
A crazy ad that would be.
Hey, you know how, don't you hate it after you ride a horse for nine hours?
Isn't it embarrassing waddling home after that?
Well, introducing the portable smoke machine.
Hide those awkward knees.
I wonder if you guys run into this in Babylon B, though.
It'd be it's hard to parody things anymore because once you do a parody, a couple of weeks later, it shows up in a headline somewhere in a newspaper as an actuality.
It's true.
And I used to talk about, you know, people who had a gender dysphoria, which is a terrible situation, but now it's become a fad.
All right.
And I thought, well, what if I thought I was a rabbit?
Would you be required to feed me, put me in a cage and feed me carrots and treat me like I thought I was.
Yes.
Well, that was parody.
Then I find out there are people who believe they're rabbits.
You know, and there are all kinds of animals.
You can go online.
There's websites to it.
So it's just hard to keep up with the changes now because what was weird and unthinkable a couple of years ago or a couple of months ago, people are now actively promoting seriously.
For sure.
Crazy.
Now what's weird and unthinkable is like, oh, I'm just going to be married with two kids and going to live my life peacefully and have a middle-class job and then die a quiet life.
And I was like, what?
That's crazy.
You only have two kids.
definitely don't think you're a rabbit now I can't I can't stop picturing you doing it like a comedy set at an old folks home where you keep having to shout the or they just keep mistaking the punchline You don't understand this bow-legged disc.
No, I said that you're at an old folks home.
I'm just disimplying.
Have you ever done any old folks' home gigs?
Uh-huh.
How'd those go?
Exactly how you think.
You mean casinos, right?
No, it's just, yeah, it's just a sea of faces.
And at that point, you know that you're just donating your time well, like you're doing as a service if you're good.
Pro bono.
Yeah.
They probably just think this is like the karaoke machine is broken.
So this guy's just talking stuff.
Talking stuff.
Fantastic.
Ethan, I just remember my son, my nine-year-old and my four-year-old, they watch Veggie Tales and they're so excited now because after reading Brave Ollie Possum, which you wrote, which you can find on Amazon.
Backslash Kellen Erskine.
But he's so excited.
Like yesterday, he told me they watched an episode and he saw Ethan Nicole.
He saw your name.
Yeah.
That you wrote on it.
And then my four-year-old said, what does that mean that your credit is on VeggieTales?
And I said, that means that's when Ethan peaked.
What episode?
I have no idea.
I was like, what does that mean?
I was like, well, now it works with a Babylon B. What's that?
And I said, well, you know, like, it's like if the onion was run by Chick-fil-A.
That's it.
And he goes, and he says, that doesn't make sense.
I've ever heard in my life.
He says, that doesn't make sense.
And I said, neither does celery with invisible arms.
So we debated that.
Back to watching your vegetables.
I told you this.
This is why my daughter refused to watch Veggie Tales.
My son, Veggie Tales from birth, obsessed with it.
My daughter could not get her to watch it.
One day I was like, why don't you like it such a sweet soul?
She's like, I'm uncomfortable that the tomato doesn't have arms.
She just really doesn't appreciate the fact that the vegetables do not have arms.
So that sparked a conversation because, as I said, I like to ask questions.
Well, what would it look like if the vegetable had arms?
Would you feel more comfortable with the arms?
And so we sat down and drew some things, and the arms were creepier.
So she's just, she just decided to say that.
The eyes are creepy, too.
Yeah, she just put veggie tails away.
You know what the creepiest thing is?
They eat French fries.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, they eat, like, we actually have a shot where Bob is eating a sandwich with a slice of tomato.
Flower bed.
He's basically just decided that there's a different world of other vegetables that aren't alive.
Yeah.
They just don't talk about it.
They don't talk about it.
We always had the theory because they live in a house, but there's never any humans there.
So we were thinking it was a post-apocalyptic thing.
In certain rooms, there might be some dead bodies.
Oh, how great would that be?
Yeah.
They go outside one day and it's just giant skeletons.
So you the post-rapture song.
The rapture happened.
Everybody's dead.
Is there a Mormon equivalent to VeggieTales?
Like, Christian culture just knocks off secular culture.
Like 15 years later, do Mormons then all own like 15 years?
We watch it.
No, I know.
Yeah.
So I'm wondering if you have your own organization.
Like we've made our own.
Yeah, just throw a Mormon Veggie Tales.
No, we're just writing your curtails.
I guess it's the Aquabats, huh?
I don't know.
That's for sure.
That's true.
Aquabats.
So, Greg, can you analyze the Veggie Tales slogan from a theological perspective?
What's Veggie Tales?
God made you special and he loves you very much.
Accurate or not?
God made you special.
He loves you very much.
Well, I'm not a real fan of slogans, except for ones like a big bang needs a big banger.
You know, those work for me.
So probably a lot of slogans.
I call them pastorisms.
You know, God loves the sinner, but he hates the sin.
They sound there's a measure of truth in some of this, but there's also, it's not entirely truthful because God's pretty mad at the sinner, too, you know, and that's also in the Psalms and a lot of other places.
And so, you know, these things only communicate half-truths, and that's part of the problem with the slogans, in my view.
A lot of the pastorisms, you know, and that's like some of them.
I'm not a Veggie Tales fan because you're an adult.
Because I eat broccoli, you know, and cucumbers and tomatoes and stuff like that.
But Veggie Tales was very good.
Like, for instance, in this case, this is distilling the message for kids.
So you would think a slogan, like, how would you have these conversations with children?
Like, deeper kind of introducing deeper concepts of what of the nuances of God to a well, what I want to do is I want to communicate two things that are true: God is good and we're not.
And God cares enough about us to provide forgiveness when we realize we're not good.
So it's the good news and the bad news.
And a lot of these kinds of things, they just invest all the good news, So everybody feels good.
And then nobody ever needs, feels a need to come before God in a repentant attitude and say, yeah, man, I'm a mess.
And we are.
Look at here, right?
Look at this road.
That's right.
That's a critical part of it.
That's a critical part of the whole message, you know?
And that, I think, gets left behind in a lot of these vacation Bible school kind of approaches.
You know, just all how wonderful.
God loves you.
And you're going to really catch hell if you don't straighten out or something like that.
You don't hear that hard.
Yeah.
You know, but that's part of the message, too.
Is there Calvinist ciders like God made you for destruction?
Or I mean, he despised you from the beginning.
Like, what's the Calvinist Veggie Tales?
Calvinists.
He despised you from before you were born.
God made you and you have no choices on earth.
Well, that's probably the kind of thing that can't be unwrapped very carefully in a comic situation.
It's complicated.
There's no Calvinist TikToks to help you search.
Yeah, that really bothered me.
I know there are Calvinist TikToks.
We'll make the first one.
Somebody find it now.
In Veggie Tales.
Did you ever bring up like heaven and then like, was hell the food process or like the garbage festivals?
No, yeah, anything like that.
Nothing.
No, no, no sad things or bad things.
Yeah, that was hard.
I've told this story before, but like, because you have to, our show was very limited.
It was more like a sitcom.
So we couldn't go on Noah's Ark adventures and things.
We had to just have like, they learn a lesson in daily life.
So they would have to do something wrong to learn to do the right thing.
And they really didn't like that.
Whenever the characters did something wrong, so we had an episode where they get angry at each other.
And the episode is called Bob and Larry Getting Angry.
The producer's big note was, can they not get angry?
Mildly upset.
Bob and Larry get mildly upset.
And it's not entertaining if they don't get really mad.
Yeah.
Throwing things at each other.
And there's weird theological rules.
Like the vegetables don't actually accept Jesus.
Like they're not.
Yeah, they don't even talk about Jesus because Jesus didn't die for vegetables.
There's no like celery Jesus that died for them.
I always noticed that.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
That is the thing I always say.
And there's really like 12 Bible verses you can use.
We just keep cycling through them.
Basically.
Be nice.
Don't kill people.
But you know, it's a formula.
I do think the same.
That sounds like if Moses went up a second time because he broke all the commandments, he's like, what were those again?
And he's like, look, be nice.
Don't kill people.
It's the Moses TikTok version of the babies.
It's two of them and then, et cetera.
It's the same kind of concept.
This is why I love Hallmark Christmas movies.
So I'll take a moment to plug my Hallmark podcast, a very merry podcast with Kira Davis and Millie Hampton, available wherever you find your podcast.
But we break down Hallmark Christmas movies.
I love them.
And everyone always says, how can you watch it?
It's the same thing over and over again.
But to me, that's what I like.
But that is, there's a whole list of rules for writing those movies.
And one of them is nobody has anything too terribly tragic happen to them.
You know, you don't, there are widowers in the Hallmark universe, but it happened a long time ago.
It's not recent.
There's usually not.
There's a Hallmark universe, like a whole.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a Hallmark universe.
Yeah, the Hallmark universe.
There's no bitter divorces.
There's very few divorces, but the few divorces that there are are very affable.
They're very, they're best friends.
They're co-parenting.
Amazing.
There's rarely any babies in the Hallmark universe because babies are too close to the actual act of making babies.
So you don't have really babies.
They're also really messy.
Yeah, they're messy.
That's right.
And you can only have one kid.
Typically, more than one kid would denote that you're maybe a little stressed or a little, but one kid, you need a precocious kid.
There's got to be one in every script, but only one.
Two precocious kids is over there.
That's a fight.
Do the vegetables talk?
Hang on.
Wait a second, Kellen.
We need a Veggie Tales Hallmark Christmas movie.
This is happening.
We need to make a Christmas movie.
What are some titles of these movies?
Of the Veggie Tales Hallmark.
Hallmark movies.
Hallmark.
Oh, they're all the same.
They must have some kind of generator.
So, for instance, there's a movie called The Christmas Miracle, but it should not be confused with Miracle at Christmas, which are two different movies.
Also, there's Time for Us to Come Home for Christmas, but please don't be so stupid and naive as to mix that up with Time for Me to Come Home for Christmas.
Those are two actions.
Those are two movies that are different Hallmark movies.
Once Upon a Christmas miracle, A Royal Christmas is one of my favorite.
I love a good, a little small town girl.
Prince Leopold, heir to the throne of Cordinia, wishes to marry his young love.
So I'm curious, humble seamstress from Philadelphia.
The episode of our Hallmark podcast this year is called Revolution in Cordinia because she comes and she's the plain American girl that marries the prince.
And then I posited that the whole country fell into revolution because she just destroyed thousands of years of tradition in one movie.
So this is every Hallmark movie, right?
I'm going to try and do it.
I'm going to try and do it in TikTok length.
Okay, I better watch it.
A man and a woman meet each other, but they really don't match up.
But then they get together almost, and then they totally don't get together.
And then finally, they really get together.
I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.
That's exactly it.
That's exactly it.
And you're always left to wonder.
Are they going to make it?
Are these two crazy kids going to fall in love?
How great would it be if like the president or the producer or whatever on like somebody's getting fired, the editor right before it goes out?
Like they break up at the end.
One of them falls off a building.
The end.
Like how what would that do?
That goes to life.
Lifetime does like the women who murder their husbands, abusive husbands.
I've often said threatened to write a sequel Hallmark sequel script to all the Christmas movies that just follows the divorced partners of these people.
You never know that story.
Like, I want to know what Bob's ex-wife thinks about his idyllic life in Pine Cone Valley, where he meets this beautiful, idyllic woman and they settle down for a beautiful, idyllic life.
Meanwhile, the ex-wife's like strung out on drugs.
She has on skin row.
Like, I think there's a darker story in the Hallmark universe to be told.
That would be a different card company.
Would not be Hallmark.
So, Greg Kochol, noted apologist.
You've debated huge people, huge names.
Do you have an opinion?
Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
Well, I love Die Hard, man.
And it happened at Christmas.
So I think we even have.
You have like the five points of the diehard argument.
Yeah, I guess the first question: what is it?
What makes a Christmas movie?
It just happening at Christmas time.
No, I think it's got to have more than that.
It does.
But, you know, I like diehard, you know, and like the whole deal.
In fact, I saw it again about six months ago, and that spawned a whole series of movies.
Did they also happen at Christmas?
All the other ones?
The second one did again.
Yeah.
I think somebody got a big icicle to his head at that one.
That was cool.
The icicle in the head would improve its quality as a Christmas movie, I think.
Well, it's a great murder weapon too because it disappeared.
That's right.
That's right.
It's going on my murder list.
I had a very strange friend about me because you know what the best murder weapon is?
Icicle.
I do have a murder list, actually.
Sounds like another Hallmark movie.
But I just saw Home Alone again, too.
It's on your list.
And that was a fabulous movie.
I even watched Home Alone 2 because it's kind of the same deal.
It's almost the same movie.
The other New York one.
Yeah, but in the same cast and everything.
So it was great.
We started watching Home Alone 3, and it was a totally different thing.
I couldn't even get through the first one.
The third one, a different kid.
I don't even know what it is.
Yeah, it's all everything's different.
Maybe they did.
It's just some kid around Christmas time who gets involved in some spy ring or something like that.
So I don't know.
As it goes on, the kid gets younger, but he's still Kevin McAllister and he still has the history of the older Kevin McAllister in the previous movies.
He still refers back to it.
Yeah.
He's a different, younger kid.
Holy cow, what a traumatic childhood.
The Benjamin Button.
Also, these things are like happening So basically, that would mean like within two years, he's had like five traumatic experiences where his parents have blacks.
By word traumatic.
They were great adventures to him.
He loved it.
It was trauma to his mom.
That's traumatic.
Well, she's the one that left him, though.
The next time you watch it, pay attention to the dad because he couldn't care less the entire time.
His mom's like, Kevin!
And he's like, Would you keep it down?
I'm trying to sleep.
We're flying to Europe.
The whole time.
Even when they come home, he just walks in and he's like, Kevin?
Like, he doesn't even know.
John Hughes directs Home Alone or write it?
Chris Columbus.
Directed.
Directed.
He was.
So that's John Hughes.
He also wrote the third one.
Right?
Like, a grandfather, like parents who are completely clueless.
That's the John Hughes.
He was working out some script writing it.
Definitely.
I want to see the Grown-Up Home Alone where he's like, he's realized that he has some kind of genetic predisposition for criminals to come after him.
And so he just sets up these traps around his house.
No, that's people just waiting.
He's like Rambo 5.
That's Saw.
Yeah, right.
I was going to say that a grown-up Home Alone is just Macaulay Culcan's life.
Don't life.
He seems to Straw Dogs or something.
Was that the movie?
I can't remember what it's called.
Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
I watch it every Christmas while I'm decorating my tree.
It takes me exactly the run time to decorate my tree.
Opening scene, first ornament goes on.
Closing scene, that is when the Christmas topper goes on.
It is precisely time.
And my kids complain about it every year.
And every year they still sit and watch it and listen to me quote all the lines and roll their eyes.
It's a Christmas movie to me.
All the lines?
I'm not like you, Kyle.
Well, I'm thinking of some particular lines.
That was my first Alan Rickman movie, too.
I really like it.
Oh, he is.
It was Alan Rickman's first movie.
But I'll tell you one that the one that got a saucepan in my eyes.
He'd done some TV before.
That was the very first time.
Was Scrooge.
Oh, that's a great movie.
I love that movie.
You've never seen Scrooge?
No, I've never seen it.
I've just briefly seen it.
Watch it.
I watched it with the kids a while back, and I kind of regretted that.
I don't think so.
Yeah, I had forgotten.
When I got older and with kids, it seemed more crude.
It was a bit more mature, yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, it was PG and one of the cleverest adaptations.
We also smoked with our kids in the cars in the 80s and smoked on airplanes.
Yeah, Scrooge is a great movie, though.
Billy.
Who wasn't that up there?
Yeah, you guys failed.
So these are supposed to be debatable.
I don't know what that was.
Debatable was Scourged.
Gremlins.
Really?
Yeah.
I guess.
They're attacking a Santa Claus.
Is that what makes a Christmas movie?
Santa's in it.
Is that what makes a Christmas movie?
If Santa's in it.
Oh, we need to decide what makes a Christmas movie.
That's what I said.
We need an automatic.
I hardly definitely hear what a Christmas movie.
I think Christmas has to be integral to the plot.
I do too.
Which would integral to the movie.
Why is Lord of the Rings up there, though?
Yes, thank you.
Why is Lord of the Rings up there?
There's elves.
Debate elves.
Some people say they always watch Lord of the Rings at Christmas.
So Gandalf looks kind of like Santa.
I think it's because Sauron is like, I'm taking over the world.
Merry Christmas to me.
He's like the Grinch.
He's like the Grinch.
Okay.
He's like the Grinch to myself.
He's like the Grinch.
Sure.
And then who would Santa Claus be?
It has elves.
Gandalf.
There's elves.
There's elves.
I already said that.
Talk about the difference between Lord of the Rings elves and Santa's elves.
They're not.
They both have pointy ears.
So in The Hobbit, they were closer to Santa.
They were like Keebler elves.
And when they show up in Rivendell, they're all dancing, going, and then by the time you were Lord of the Rings, he's like, oh, that's lame.
And he makes them like these warriors.
So it develops shorter.
I loaded a bit of Peter Jackson ruin Lord of the Rings by everything is great.
But then once they get to Rivendell, they're like making wooden ducks.
They live in cookie trees.
I'm trying to imagine that scene with Kate Wetzerface and she's the queen when she gets all ringy.
Like, ah, it's a good idea.
I mean, the queen of Toofi.
You will fear me.
You will fear me.
Sean Bean is trying so hard to be serious.
Like, one does not just.
And then in the background, there's like, cookies?
I'm trying to make a point.
Okay, well, you can't just go to Batman Returns cannot be a Christmas movie.
I don't think Christmas is central to that movie.
What?
Well, it's bizarre.
I re-watched it recently.
I was like, this is a strange, yeah, mess of a movie.
I loved it.
Penguin Cat.
I think it's one of those things.
If you grew up with it as a kid, the first time I watched it, I was an adult, and it is bizarre.
For me, Goonies is the same thing.
Like, they don't Goonies holds up.
Goonies.
But you never didn't see it as a kid and then only first saw it when you were 25.
I could kind of, I hardly remember it as a kid.
I took my kids to see it in the theater.
Remember when we used to be able to go to the theaters?
Yeah, I remember that.
And I took my kids to see it last year, I guess it came out.
And I loved it.
I thought it was fantastic.
My daughter, who at the time was about 11 or 12, really enjoyed it.
And my son, who's in his late teens, was like, this is lame.
But to me, I still thought it was a great adventure and really clever.
And I don't know.
It held up for me, even a lot of the silly effects.
And it didn't rely on us.
That was one of those movies that I just got on Netflix about four weeks ago and I ran because I thought my kids would like it.
And I ran it in.
And in 15 minutes into the movie, I couldn't take it anymore because these kids were so.
They cough all the time.
Yeah, they are so completely it's every 80s movie the kids are always jerks I don't know I wasn't allowed to watch Goonies I watched it in an adult and yeah, I didn't get it so yeah I wasn't in the 80s so yeah it's just one of those things like I loved Willow as a kid and now when I watch it I can only see it as I did as a kid but it's probably a really weird horribly done movie but um Goonies, I realize watching it.
There's one part when they're like they're underground and they're messing with pipes or something and then it's like it's making toilets above ground.
And just as an adult sitting there, I was like, that's not how plumbing works.
Stitching out a diagram.
So you have to see those things as a kid.
I guess you're right.
Like Star Wars, Star Wars is another one that I can only see innocently.
But if you watch it now, you're like, yeah, I mean, how did the Death Star in the first Star Wars, how did it follow something that went light speed?
But once it gets to the planet, it takes like 35 minutes to get to the other side of it.
But I'm glad I didn't think that way, you know, as a six-year-old.
There's an in-universe exclamation for that.
Yeah.
Oh, I'll do tell.
We're fascinated to know.
I don't know what it is, but I know I've googled it before, and there's people that they will write whole, you know, massive horror responses on it.
Exactly why it couldn't warp around the gas giant.
Yeah.
But maybe if I had saw that for the first time, when I was 30, I would be like, what is this?
Goonies?
None of these make sense.
So everyone always talks about Iron Man 3 as being a Christmas movie.
I don't even.
I try to put Iron Man 2 and 3 out of my memory.
Yes.
And 3 must take place during some Christmas stuff in there, I think.
Well, Shane Black wrote it.
Every Shane Black movie has Christmas.
It's a good little plot.
Weapons, which is another Christmas movie.
Iron Man 3 is the sequeliest sequel ever.
Because Iron Man 2, they're like, what if there were two Iron Men?
And Iron Man 3.
They're like, what if there were 50?
There's a kid.
Well, it takes the specialness out of it.
And I hate the part where he runs out of gas when he's flying across the country.
He lands in a random town.
And then the first just garage he breaks into happens to be a kid who likes to tinker with stuff and has all the tools that he needs.
One of the goonies.
Chinese.
Yeah, Dana.
That's how I felt about Rise of Skywalker.
Like, they're like, okay, Death Star 1, Death Star 2.
They get to, the Force of Wagons are like, what about giant Death Star?
And then they get to Force Awakens, what about a thousand?
What about 11 million extra million with Death Star?
Really run out of Skyrim.
We'll give you the same destructive weapon, but we'll rip away everything else you love about this.
Not bitter.
Not bitter.
He has strong opinions.
You never know when Kira has a strong opinion.
No, you never say anything about it.
I love the idea of the ammo, too.
Like, if you were going to destroy a bunch of grenades, they would all explode with grenade force.
But when they go in Rise of Skywalker, when they go to the Star Destroyers that have planet-killing guns, they blow them up.
They're just like, there's an N-Universe explaining.
Pull that article up to you.
Well, we want to rank the December holidays.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, let's do that.
Let's do it.
Why not?
So I googled a list of December holidays, and here's what we got.
Oh, God.
Giving Tuesday.
Wow, there's a lot.
So Giving Tuesday is the one that they do after you buy all that stuff for yourself, right?
Yeah.
Like you have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then oh my god, I guess we'd better, I guess we'd better have a giving day.
Well, because here's another way for corporations to get you to give them money, donate to our fund, and we write that off on our taxes.
Black Monday, Giving Tuesday.
It's just another.
Well, there's Cyber Monday.
Like Black Friday.
Black Friday, right?
Sorry.
My bad.
Black Friday.
Cyber Monday.
Giving Tuesday.
I like Giving Tuesday because standard reason asks for money on Giving Tuesday.
And we got some.
Tears like, oh, these corporations.
Give us money.
So what's that?
What tier is that?
What are we ranking?
Do we have to do that?
Hey, today is winter solstice, isn't it?
So today is the winter solstice.
I said yesterday, driving home with my daughter and her girlfriend, tomorrow's the longest day in the year.
And I thought, wait a minute, every day is the same length.
Then I realized I got the whole daylight thing upside down and backwards.
And so my daughter's friend had to tell me, no, it's the shortest day in the Christmas.
How did I do that?
It was a real journey.
It's old timers to see.
Well, every day that you're at the Babylon Bee is the longest day of the year.
Destroy it.
The onion chick-fil-a-brand it.
I'm trying to figure out that means.
You need to put that on a shirt.
We're going to be lying in bed tonight and just like.
It was such a funny moment because I thought I was so clever, but my kids obviously didn't.
But that's everything.
You don't know, but that was really good.
That was a good one.
You're too stupid to know, but that was an amazing joke.
Someday you'll understand.
No, I think Giving Tuesday should be last just because I think it is, it's a generated holiday.
And in December, we have Christmas, which is literally about gifts and giving.
So it just feels a bit redundant.
And frankly, I think it's an attempt to erase Jesus.
I don't like it.
Whoa, there you go.
Giving Tuesday is an attempt to erase Jesus.
I feel like an old lady, but I've been noticing a lot this year.
It's more Christmas.
No, but it's still in December.
And the whole month of December is about Christmas, and Christmas is about Jesus.
But we do all this stuff that has nothing to do with Jesus, even though the Christmas season is about Jesus.
Because dare I say it, Jesus is the reason for the season.
Yeah, I think I was going to say they are trying to get rid of him, sort of like VeggieTales did.
Dang.
Hey, I was a good paycheck.
We got rid of Jesus, but I was paid well.
Once we start seeing commercials, Christmas commercials with people with no arms, then we know.
Yeah.
You see all these holidays that are always like, you know, talk like a pirate day or, you know, and it's like anybody who just invents a holiday doesn't understand like how a holiday comes about.
A holiday is literally a holy day.
And there's like always thousands of years of history that lead up to, you know what, we're going to start celebrating this day.
And so like December 13th is Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift's birthday.
Okay.
That's above Giving Tuesday.
Are you a Taylor Swift fan?
Well, no, but I think she's very, you know, she's very influential and she has a lot of fans.
And birthdays are great.
I mean, December is a month about a very important birthday.
So, you know, let's put Taylor Swift at least.
She doesn't deserve to be last.
She's released two albums since COVID hit.
He's putting the corner.
Kwanzaa really like a genuine holiday or did somebody just in the that would happen in the 60s spokesman on the show.
Would you like to speak about Kwanzaa?
As the representative, as the person who makes up 100% of the diversity in this meeting today, I will say two things.
Kwanzaa is a real holiday.
People celebrate it.
I had to celebrate it when I was a kid.
My stepdad, my stepmom, and dad went through like a phase where we were, we're not doing Christmas, we're doing Kwanza.
Yeah, but wasn't it invented in the 60s?
It was invented in the 60s, yes.
And it, but people still celebrate it, and it sucks.
Yeah, what do you do?
That was a goal.
I always hated it.
It just was, it's, there's a lot of print.
It really mirrors Hanukkah in a way that every day is a different principle.
Some of the ideas are cool.
Like, here's a day where you do giving.
Here's a day where your family creates something together.
You make something.
There's different things, but you get one gift on each.
You open one day.
It's a weird combination of the Harvest Festival and Hanukkah and like general December holiday season.
I, oh, me and my brother and sister hated it.
Like, we always hated it.
We celebrated it for five, six years in a row.
And it just was like a big want to Christmas.
It was, I would never put anyone through it, but there are people who celebrate it.
It's a real thing.
And there are people who take it very well.
I loved Greg's response to it because you were like, you get together with family, they teach you principles.
And Greg's like, ugh, sounds like a Mormon.
I didn't quite put it that way, but I get the deal.
Mormons always getting together.
Kwanza, I'm going to give y'all permission to put Kwanza towards the bottom of the list.
Because also, Kwanzaa was made up by a convicted murderer, so we don't need to.
Yes, the guy that invented Kwanzaa murdered his girlfriend.
Like Earth Day Guy?
Earth Day Guy did that too.
Yeah.
Isn't that the same guy?
I mean, two things.
Invent holidays.
Kwanzaa.
I always heard Kwanzaa was invented by like white liberal college people.
No, but this guy was a college professor and a liberal, but he was an activist in the 60s.
And he had been, he has quite a violent history, actually.
If you research, he's been arrested multiple times for domestic violence, but was a revered professor.
And I could just say, so wait, this is the same guy who did this family Kwanzaa thing.
You do nice things for six days in a row.
Yeah.
Yep.
On the seventh murder.
Murder.
Yeah.
So what would you guys give?
How long does a holiday have to be around to be legit for you guys?
Really good question.
Why not?
What makes it legit?
So saying like 2,000 years, yes, 50 years, no.
What's the cutoff?
How did Halloween squeak by?
How long's Halloween been going?
That's pretty long.
I mean, the way that we celebrate it, it's a little different because I think Snickers have only been around since like the 1600s.
But there's like a history to Halloween and all that that leads up to.
And then it just involves how you celebrate it.
But the devil has always been around.
That's true.
So Halloween's been around since the beginning.
I forget.
You probably do.
We don't have a holiday for him, Lud.
The Halloween.
That's the devil's holiday.
It's Halloween.
All Halloween.
We did not sell.
We were from a very traditional, or my husband.
We have two different my parents were hippies, and his parents were pastors.
Oh, wow.
And so, but they were very traditional.
And when I married, you know, it was like, and in most black communities, too, you just, you really don't celebrate Halloween because this is a devil's holiday.
You have Harvest Festival or what they make, or they do like a caution party where you dress up as your favorite Bible character and everybody comes in and she's a hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah party.
And then we moved to Orange County.
And not only were we the only black people around for miles, but we were the only people who weren't celebrating Halloween.
And our kids were like, we're the only lame people.
So after a while, we talked about it.
We were like, is this really gonna affect our eternal soul if we let our kids put some costumes on and go celebrate?
We decided after our first year of being complete outcasts, we decided we could do Halloween.
So we do it now, but we do come from a tradition where it's like, oh no, that's that's Satan's holiday.
We do not celebrate that.
You celebrated Satan's holiday because you didn't want to be thought of as weird.
Exactly.
Is that worth it?
It was worth it.
Lots of candy.
I should make a Kwanzaa Halloween.
Seven days.
It all depends on the candy cake.
They just make it.
I do like the idea that if Satan was going to create a holiday, if he was sitting in a board meeting in hell, some guy's like, how about this?
Children dress up as their favorite superheroes and then get as much free candy as they want.
The devil would be like old scratches.
I just did that so you could bleep it up.
The edgy.
Yeah, it's a great divorce.
No, not great divorce.
It's a screw tape letters chapter.
The whole creation of Halloween, right?
No, it's not what I'm like, he's mistaken.
It's not.
We don't joke about C.S. Lewis on this podcast.
What is Boxing Day?
I don't, I don't know.
Oh, I'm a Canadian.
I know this.
All right.
It's a TVs thing.
Canadian is a climbing all the intercepts.
Kwanzaa.
Everything.
I think it's a box of rebellion.
That's no Boxing Day is actually a holiday in Canada.
It's a real day.
And I think in Europe too.
And it's the day you box up all your Christmas stuff.
Oh, that's why it's called Boxing Day.
And it's actually a day off.
It's actually a day off work.
You get Christmas off, you get Boxing Day off.
It's the one thing I was always really annoyed after I became an American.
Like, nobody does Boxing Day.
Like, we're supposed to do Boxing Day stuff.
That's when you kind of go see your other family that you didn't get to see on Christmas.
The second stringer.
Yeah, the second lineup.
Yeah, that's Boxing Day.
Okay.
Not what I thought it was.
You boxed it.
Utilitarian.
Like, it's not like back in this day when Sir Joseph Buckingham was murdered.
It's like, well, we need a day to pack some stuff up.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a lot shorter than take all the broken crap back to Walmart Day.
Well, you kept the receipt day.
Well, yeah.
Is it International Mutt Day?
What?
See, these are the made-up ones.
Yeah.
International Ninja Day.
That shouldn't even be on there.
Just take it off.
We're not even going to recommend it.
Dewey Decimal System Day.
Do we need a day for that?
We really do these days.
I don't think that I think the Dewey Decimal System has lost a lot of appreciation.
We could use, in fact, we should make this day as big as Christmas.
Do you have strong opinions about everything?
Yes.
Here's the thing about the Dewey Decimal System.
I literally get paid to tell people what I think.
It was my dream job and I made that happen.
So what do you do on that day?
On Dewey Decimal System Day?
Yeah, what's the...
You've got to go to the library.
Okay.
You go to the library and you use the Dewey Decimal System to manually look up where the books are.
Right.
And then you also give each other books.
Wait, and today is supposedly the longest day of the year.
What are you saying?
That that's not fun?
You know how it usually takes five seconds to find a book at a library?
Let me tell you about this holiday.
You know what?
I think it's brilliant.
And I don't think it's any less torturous than me having to leave here and go straight to Walmart so I can buy stupid freaking stocking stuffers for a million people and spend money that I could be spending on myself on socks and candy.
I don't think it's any more of an inconvenience.
Let's bring back the Dewey Decimal System.
Let's do it, you guys.
I do like how Amazon wish lists make Christmas just like, you buy me off the stick and I will buy the exact same thing.
And it's not like you used to get weird stuff you didn't want and you'd buy people gifts they didn't want.
And now it's just super efficient.
And it's like, we'll get a box to show your house and who's there.
It's not round.
I streamlined it one more.
Instead of putting it on a wish list for me, I just hit buy.
Next day I got it.
Big surprise, right?
Yeah.
But absolutely.
I love International Ninja Day.
I don't even know if that's real, but I'm going to just bring it up now to people like, did you know that yesterday is International Ninja Day?
And they'll be like, I had no idea.
And I'll be like, that's the book.
I guess you wouldn't know, right?
Why would they announce it?
International Ninja Day.
5th of December.
5th of December.
Yeah, they have the big parade that goes through town.
Ninja Burger created it.
What is Ninja Day?
Espionage, assassination.
These are the things you do on there.
Looks like a guerrilla warfare.
These are the skills of the name of the.
There's a lot of those guys around nowadays.
Yeah.
Now, this is the holiday Satan should have created.
That was celebrating, right?
There are thousands of movies about ninjas.
Ninja movies.
That counts.
Do you give gifts?
You order takeout.
You could cook a traditional Japanese or Chinese meal.
A white guy definitely wrote this.
Japanese or Chinese, you know, wherever ninjas are from.
This is terrible.
Never forget that ninjas were oppressed, hungry commoners before they were the most feared warriors in the world.
Oh, yeah, a white guy definitely wrote this.
And he probably got a sword for Christmas.
Well, these are modern ninjas, it says there.
So you could watch three ninjas and cover your bases.
That's an accurate depiction of ninjas.
International Ninja Day.
It's like, I think it goes over Giving Tuesday, but beneath Taylor Swift's birthday.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
That's my opinion.
We didn't even talk about Christmas.
Yeah.
But you know why that's my favorite day?
Christmas?
It's the last one.
It's the last day of the season.
Once you have Christmas, it's over with.
Unless you're Canadian.
I mean, that's right.
Fill the wall.
Fill the wall.
I just started hearing Christmas music this year like two weeks before Halloween.
couldn't bear it and by the time it gets to christmas with all the stuff it's like all right i'm i'm ready to move on to do i feel the same way and actually this year maybe because covet has got me feeling all kinds of way this year but this is the year where i have felt most convicted about how material usually i'm just like hey it's america we're materialistic get over it but to this year i just feel like I should not be feeling this stressed about celebration.
But that's why Boxing Day is so good.
Because then you got a day just to close it all up and put it on.
I agree.
Yes.
It was always an extra day to remember.
Sad memory.
We've got another 12 months.
We have to do this.
I like that as children.
We're like, I can't wait for Christmas, my favorite holiday.
And you're like, I love Christmas because that means it's over.
I do like Christmas, but it is still like Christmas.
Kids don't have any responsibilities, right?
The parents do everything.
Yeah.
And so you got a lot of kids.
You got a lot of friends.
You got cards.
You got parties.
You got all kinds of stuff.
And by the time Christmas is over with, you're thinking, all right, great.
I got 11 months to recover before the next year.
Well, but this year, all the parties got canceled.
So that's actually been nice.
I've only had to go to like one or two things, which I don't mind that.
Because I do find the obligations of Christmas season to be a bit overbearing.
And again, it makes me feel really guilty because I'm like, we're supposed to be celebrating Jesus.
And all I'm worrying about is like, did I get enough pairs of socks to go around this day?
I don't know.
I'm feeling guilty about it.
Reminding me I have to buy my wife's stocking.
Yeah, I'm literally stopping at Walmart.
I get like a few whatever presents.
Don't get a nylon.
It takes forever to fill it up, man.
That was a dad joke.
That was an ultimate dad joke.
Do kids listen to this?
Some people, parents listen with their kids.
Yeah.
Well, I just mean that.
Maybe throwing a contracts out with me to Santa.
Santa?
Yeah, you can.
Are we going to talk about Santa?
Is it a sin to since Santa's real?
I have opinions on Santa.
Do you?
Surprising.
Might surprise you to hear that.
Can I plug my podcast before everyone skips forward?
Yes.
I'm just kidding.
You ahead.
I thought it was like a Santa podcast.
I'm like, I've got to hear what to say.
It's about Hallmark.
I will subscribe right now.
No responsibility to have other kids watching this podcast anyway.
So what's your take?
Oh, no, I don't think, are we supposed to talk about Santa?
People listen to it.
Well, I just blew it.
So I think we're.
We're talking about Santa now.
If you'd like to fast forward or pause while we tell some secrets about Santa, then maybe now is the time.
Some spoilers.
But Santa is sacrilegious.
And no, I do not teach my kids.
No, I actually don't have a moral issue.
I was raised with Santa.
I thought I would do it for my kids.
But again, my husband's family is a traditional church family and they never did it.
And so when I got married, because we lived near them, that was our main family was his family.
It just seemed easier not to do it.
And frankly, it's been great.
I like not.
And I asked my daughter the other day if it bothered her.
Because I have a friend who thinks I'm the worst parent in the world for robbing her of the magic of Christmas.
And she was like, no, I never think about it.
I know a lot of people are like, well, what if your kids tell other kids?
And I'm like, well, I tell my kids.
Well, I don't get that.
I tell my kids not to do it and then they don't do it.
Like, tell, like, be a parent and tell your kid, don't do something.
And then they won't do it.
Do whatever, man.
Understand this thing where, like, oh, my kids are just maniacs running around doing and saying whatever they want.
Uh, no, yeah, are you doing that anti-Santa tick-tock dance again?
So, Santa's another satanic deception, that's another one they came up with in the giving day in the boardroom.
I mean, you rearranged the letters of Santa.
What did you get?
There's this fat man, and he goes around.
Well, we didn't make a big deal about it with our girls, but they still believed it anyway.
You know, yeah, I've had friends that are, yeah, my mother-in-law said that too.
She said, We were dirt poor, like literally, dirt poor, where you got an orange for Christmas.
She's like, I still believe in Santa.
I don't know, I never figured out why he never came to our house, but I called it all you were sponsored by a family in Haiti.
That was my mother-in-law's family, yeah.
She was, they were, yeah, rural Michigan grew up.
If all of this stays in the podcast, I do want to say I think the best time to tell your kids about Santa, you couple it with the birds and the bees, so that way you can be like, So, this thing doesn't exist, but let me talk about this other thing.
That's disappointing, but have I got a surprise for you.
Maybe this goes on the Patreon section.
This goes on our OnlyFans.
Fantastic.
Well, are we already in subscriber portion, or can we do a transition into oh man?
I wanted to plug my can I talk about my podcast, please.
Dewey Decimal System podcast, too.
Even better, it is funny because it is a book podcast.
It's called The Book Pile.
We started it a month ago, and things are going well.
We want to keep those ratings and everything going.
You don't even have to listen to it.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Subscribe, subscribe, like rate it.
And that's uh, Merry Christmas for me.
No, it's a we have a lot of fun with it.
We cover a nonfiction book most of the time.
Every episode, we just try and be funny the whole time, but we also taking like the biggest ideas out of interesting books.
So, we've so far we've done like tidying up with Marie Kondo on writing by Stephen King.
We actually just did Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
We'll do fiction every once in a while.
And I do realize that at first, I was like, some of your listeners might not like Stephen King, but then the same ones will probably also think that J.K. Rowling is even more evil.
Love Stephen King.
But even if you don't like it, like his book about writing is one, it's the mess.
So that's what happens.
That's kind of raw, though.
His autobiography is a bit.
If you don't care about Stephen King, skip the first half.
Yeah.
He is an interesting guy.
That's awesome.
Book pile.
The book pile.
The book pile.
I will look it up.
So I'm going to plug mine since Callan got to plug his.
Let's go down the road here.
I know I published mine isn't as nearly as interesting or fun as his, but my podcast is: if you like opinions, if you like my opinions, now that I've scared away all potential listeners by calling them terrible parents for telling their kids about Santa.
No, I do a podcast called Just Listen to Yourself with Kira Davis, of course.
And that is a podcast where I take talking points on hot topics and hot button issues and I draw those talking points out to their logical conclusion.
So it's an exercise in critical thinking and persuasion.
I think people don't really listen to the things they're saying.
Sometimes you're making a point and the talking point sounds really good, but it's like I'll give you an example.
Yesterday, some some woman, very nice, she seemed nice, tweeted out this cute little story about my seven-year-old looked at me and said, Mom, war is dumb.
And I said, Yes, it is, son.
Yes, it is.
And that sounds really nice.
And I get that it was just a seven-year-old saying it.
It's a nice tweet, but this is an idea that a lot of people have.
War is so dumb.
We should just not have war.
But it's like, I don't know, the Civil War was probably like a really worthwhile endeavor at the end.
And that the war thing that we did for Hitler, you know, that war thing.
That is.
We do it for you.
A little ripping.
A little late in the winter.
That to me was like probably a good idea.
Like, you know, it's just stuff like that where we say, we always say things that seem like they sound good on the surface.
But if you dig a little deeper, the logic isn't there.
And I think we're missing a lot of logic and critical thinking these days.
And then the other seasonal podcast I do, which I've already basically pitched as my Hallmark podcast, which we will break, we break down the tropes of every Hallmark movie and we talk about our favorite, the best and the worst of the Hallmark universe.
We have fun.
That's a very merry podcast.
Very merry podcast.
Just this seasonal this year.
Well, I'm glad I didn't wear my war is dumb t-shirt.
I'm going to have my way with you.
Greg.
Well, we had a podcast before there are podcasts.
We used to have to, when I did the radio show here in Southern California, three hours Saturday, three hours Sunday, then that got converted to real media.
That was before they had podcasts.
It's right at the beginning of the internet age or whatever.
And then it eventually became a podcast.
Now we're just two hours a week for my show.
And basically what we try to do is we try to train Christians to think more carefully about Christianity and to be able to defend their convictions.
And there's lots and lots of challenges now more than ever before.
And so I like to say sometimes things are caught better than taught.
And so on the show, I open up with about 15 or 20 minutes of the commentary or whatever.
And then we take calls.
And interacting with the callers is the kind of catch portion of the program.
And they see how I get back and forth with callers.
Sometimes they disagree with me.
Most of the time, they're people who are having trouble with other people who disagree with them on Christian stuff.
So we try to work through some things there and bring the kind of things that we normally bring to the table at Standard Reason, which is thoughtful analysis and strategic and tactical approaches, using questions a lot.
You brought that up earlier.
That's central to the tactical approach.
We talked about that before.
And then we also have two other podcasts that per week that Amy Hall and I do.
And those are, it's called hashtag str ask.
And it's, it has actually taken me months and months and months to figure out what the hashtag thing is all about.
And I'm still not sure I get it.
But if you put a hashtag on something like STR ask, it goes somewhere that someone else can find when they're looking for it.
That's right.
You got it.
The first time Greg heard it, he's like, what's a flashback?
I know what a flashback is.
It's the hashtag part.
Flashbags you use for something else.
Anyway, so this is called hashtag str ask.
So if somebody wants us to answer a question that they have, they just can put that somewhere in online in a tweet form or tweet length.
And then Amy and I will deal with those in our 25-minute segments.
So we have two of those a week as well.
And those are the major ones.
Some of the other guys on our team have their things.
I mentioned Red Pen Logic, which is only five-minute segments, but they are so much fun.
There's lots of, it's really, there's an analysis of the challenge, which is usually pretty lame, though a lot of people like it because they don't understand how lame it is.
But we're not trying to make fun of anybody, we're not trying to be snarky at all, but we are trying to assess this and have a good time at the same time.
And so that's another thing kind of in our digital universe that we're doing that's been really successful lately and a lot of fun as well.
So str.org, you can get them.
Awesome.
Well, do it.
Here's some jokes.
Here's some opinions.
Here's a joke.
Intellect.
Here's some truth.
Yeah.
All right.
Merry Christmas, everyone, from the Babylon B.
And our guests.
And we're going to go to our subscriber portion.
We're going to get down and dirty.
How are you doing?
I don't know what we're going to talk about.
We'll find out.
We'll get Kellen to say some more cuss words.
Here we go.
I'll have opinions there, too.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
All right.
Well, we have individual questions for each of these guys.
Yeah.
So, hey, Callan, how do you Mormon folks celebrate Christmas?
That seems odd in a naturalistic realm.
It's not in a supernatural world.
And so the question is, what kind of world do we actually live in?
I like how you're this brilliant mind and we waste your time talking about diehard being a Christian.
So we're on Christmas, real or not, great insight.
That is great.
I hate it.
It's a long story.
Oh, God.
Oh, man.
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