Part Two: Keep the Yuletide Gay examines medieval pagan roots in Christmas rituals like ritual transvestism and the chaotic Lord of Misrule, contrasting them with Puritan bans in 1640s England and Massachusetts that sparked "plum pudding riots." While Stalin later co-opted the holiday into a secular New Year's celebration featuring Grandfather Frost, the hosts argue these bans merely sanitize rather than eliminate inherent midwinter needs. Ultimately, modern conflicts over drag shows mirror historical struggles to control ritual transvestism, revealing that the true war is against tradition itself. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roald Dahl's Secret Spy Life00:01:27
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You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
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Was this before he wrote his stories?
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What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
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I was a spy.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lindsay McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lindsay McGuire and I'm like.
Wild magic away.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like...
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Hi, I'm Iris Palmer, host of the Against All Odds podcast.
Every week, I'm sitting down with exceptional people who have broken barriers even when the odds were stacked against them.
Like chef Victor Villa of VS Tacos.
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Wild Magic and First Closet Moments00:16:02
It was great.
It was a big moment.
It was special.
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I was representing all taqueros, not only of like, you know, the U.S., but of Mexico and beyond.
All the taqueros of the world.
Listen to Against All Odds on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
It's a podcast.
The guest is Garrison.
The producer is Sophie.
Garrison, how are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
Excellent.
Sophie, how are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
Everyone's feeling so festive and cheery.
I'm festively jovial.
Let's do this.
All right.
Very Saturnalia chaos pilled.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And our audio is done by Ian.
Our music is done by Unwoman.
In part one, we learned all about the pagan shit Christmas borrowed from.
Today, we're talking about my favorite Christmas, which is medieval Christmas.
Medieval Christians had not forgotten their pagan roots.
They were, again, this is purely from my point of view, basically just pagans who like crossed themselves and went to church sometimes.
Because otherwise people were just talking to them at Latin and they just kept being doing whatever they wanted to do.
That is my totally historical.
I'm an anthropologist.
Anyway, Christmas in medieval England was a lot of fun.
For starters, there's 12 days of it, like the song.
On Christmas Day, there are church services.
Then there was drinking, feasting, and games for about two weeks.
The 12th day of Christmas was called Epiphany, or sometimes just 12th day, and is more important than Christmas Day in medieval Christmas.
It represents when the three wizards we talked about last time who totally belong.
It's like, it's like if you're reading a story where there's only one wizard, and then all of a sudden there's like a reference to three other wizards and they're just never talked about again.
Because like in like Christianity, no one can do magic but like God, right?
But then there's just some fucking wizards.
Yeah.
I mean, there is a few other other, there is a few other people who do magic in the Old Testament, but it's like, oh yeah, that's true.
If you do it, you're basically working with demons or Satan.
So like you can do it.
It's just evil.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then of course, like in Gnostic Christianity, everyone can do magic because everyone is Jesus.
All right.
What's that meme?
I would like to know more about your religion and please give me a pamphlet.
There's like a meme where people like someone says something that you think is cool, and it's not like a meme, like an image meme.
It's like a thing people say on the internet.
Maybe I'm the one who says it.
Where someone says something, you're like, ah, I would like to know more about your religion.
Please give me a pamphlet.
Anyway, Epiphany represents when the three wizards showed up and were like, damn, this kid is important.
I think his dad is God.
And a couple hundred years from now, there's going to be a big fuss about whether that means it literally or not.
Because spoiler, early Christianity spent a lot of time getting into very heated debates with some death involved about whether or not Jesus was the son of God or God literally or whatever any of that shit means.
And unfortunately, the Catholics won that debate and the Gnostics didn't.
Boo.
Boo.
Although, would we be sitting here like right now, 1700 years later, if the Gnostics had won?
The Gnostics would have come into power.
The world is a different.
But they would have been just as shitty.
I don't know.
I, I, because like the Gnostics are way less hierarchical than the Catholics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Catholic, maybe like Catholicism is so built on hierarchy.
Like they build like the hierarchy of angels.
They build the hierarchy of like, of, of, of like hell, church and shit.
Reality.
Um, whereas the Gnostics are like, everyone can be their own savior and we should all and we should all fight the demiurge.
Like we, we need to fight God and become our own savior.
Generally, way more decentralized.
Right.
But the Protestant Revolution was also the decentralization of religious authority.
And it did not, it was at best a lateral move in terms of actual liberation for the world because it made everyone cops instead of one cop far away that you can ignore.
Yeah.
I mean, Protestantism.
I'm not sure to come for the Gnostics.
I'm just like, I just think it'd be really funny and interested if like the Gnostics had won that fight and then the Catholics have been like the cool underground one that like people were totally possible.
It's that is that is that is definitely completely possible that the world would have been just as shitty, but there's no interest in it because it's it's such a different theology.
Yeah.
Anyway, uh thanks for going down that with me.
So Midnight Mass has been part of Christmas since basically forever, starting around 400 AD, because Christ, who's totally not the sun, was born at exactly the darkest time of the darkest night of the year, just when the sun starts returning.
Totally unrelatedly.
It's just a weird coincidence of when he, when his mom got knocked up by an angel.
Funny how that worked out.
Yeah.
Saint Nicholas got attached to Christmas when the Protestants, who were trying to phase out all the pagan holidays and fun in general, they uh, especially the Puritans, they crammed him into Christmas instead of his traditional day, December 6th, which is the day that everyone used to give people presents.
People gave each other presents a lot during a lot of these times, but like giving kids presents was like a St. Nicholas Day thing in some place, I think it still is.
And then they were like, no, it needs to be like the presents need to somehow be like God presence, not saint presence.
So it got moved to Christmas so we could put the Christ in Christmas, you know.
And Saint Nick himself was kind of interesting in his own right.
His whole thing was that he like gave shit away to people.
Just like, all right.
It seemed like he was kind to sex workers, which is nice, I guess.
That's the main way to judge someone, honestly.
Yeah.
Anyway, medieval peasants, they remembered some of those pagan roots.
And because of that, there was ritual transvestism as part of Christmas.
Continuing to be extremely based.
And there was feasting and merriment, etc.
And the church didn't like this.
They just couldn't do anything about it.
They tried.
They tried two different things.
It's the same two things that everyone uses to try and stop the power of Christmas.
First, you try repression.
And then when that doesn't work, you try co-option.
If you can't beat them, join them.
Yeah, basically.
That is what happened, is the Catholic Church didn't steal Christmas.
The Catholic Church acquiesced and joined Christmas, is how is my reading on this?
Yeah.
In seven, the year 742, a bishop wrote to complain about the quote singing and dancing in the streets in pagan style, heathen acclamations and sacrilegious songs, banquets by day and night, the wearing and selling by women of phylacteries and ligatures, which I think means like sex charms and love charms.
Okay, okay.
They did better with co-option and they really worked on the sanitization of Christmas.
And that's the real war against Christmas, is the sanitization of it.
The gift giving got replaced, as you pointed out, by gifts of the magi, and the whole thing was treated as if it was about Christ or whatever.
But the cool shit continued to filter through.
Take Christmas carols.
The medieval versions of Christmas carols were based on a pre-Christian style of singing where a leader sang a verse and then a crew of dancers sang and danced the chorus together.
And this got lewd.
And I am so annoyed that I could not find more information in history besides it got lewd.
Okay.
Okay.
I would, I would love to see.
Yeah.
What?
The two things in all of the history shit I read, the two things that are written out of it is fucking sex work and drugs.
Like any hedonism and sex.
Yeah, exactly.
Sex more broadly.
All the people that write this stuff down are all nerds.
No, the wrong kind of nerds.
Yeah.
None of them actually do the cool stuff.
They're all like, yeah.
Yeah.
They're like, tee, hee, hee, it got lewd.
I'm like, does that mean they showed their ankles or were there orgies in the streets?
Yeah.
Because both are entirely possible.
I know.
People did weird shit.
People still do weird shit.
Right now, in any given town, you could go to a club where people are like, Tee, hee hee, I can see that person's ankle.
Or you can go join a weird public orgy.
Like it still happens.
So then there's the Feast of the Innocents, which is a feast day that gets a it gets assigned to a bunch of different days in different traditions and calendars and shit.
It's usually December 28th and the current tradition, whatever.
But I'm going to call it December 28th.
And the Feast of the Innocence is weird.
It's about when King Herod of Syria killed all the boys under two years old, like tens of thousands of kids.
This is probably folklore.
It probably didn't happen.
I don't know.
Like the Bible, I guess.
And these kids are seen as the first martyrs of Christianity.
And I've read two versions of what happens on the feast day of the Feast of Innocence in the medieval tradition.
They are very different takes on what happens on this day.
One is sick.
It's a role reversal for kids and adults.
You go, there's like just, it's just a chaos day.
Yeah.
Kids run around.
The kids like run the Catholic Mass.
They tell everyone what to do.
The parents have to listen to the kids.
And there's another version of the Feast of the Innocents, which is like this shitty game of hide and seek where all the kids hide and then the parents try to find them.
And if they find the children, they beat them.
What the fuck?
Whoa, whoa, those are so different.
They're so different.
What is going on?
I don't know.
I, the subtext of the beat the kids one is a little bit like the parents might not have tried to find the kids.
It might have been like, get out of our hair or we'll hit you.
Okay.
We want to have like mommy adult time or whatever.
I don't know.
I can't.
I'm so annoyed.
I, you know, like, sometimes I, sometimes in these episodes, I wish I had like months per episode, you know?
Yeah, because that is that was.
I mean, is it likely that just like both happened at different places?
Honestly, that's my best guess.
Yeah.
Because we're talking about like medieval England.
I'm talking about like 500 to 1500 in the entire continent of Europe.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
Because it's like one of those is much more similar to like the Saturnalia role reversal thing.
Yeah.
And the other one is just child abuse.
Yeah.
Totally.
And there's more role reversal.
That's a hard serious thing.
That is hard to say.
That is a hard thing to say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In medieval England, and again, medieval, oh, actually, well, this one I can give you a specific country, England.
A random peasant would you draw lots again, and instead of being the king of Saturnalia, you are the Lord of Misrule.
Okay, which still sounds pretty cool.
It is the single best title that one could possibly have, I believe, is the Lord of Misrule.
And they were in charge, and their job is to make sure the revelry was fucking chaos.
Eat dinner at the altar of the church, fucking drink.
People would complain because random strangers, I think like random richer folks coming town, but I don't know.
Maybe that's like me trying to be like, oh, it was like based, but who knows?
It might have sucked.
Who fucking knows?
It was chaos.
Random rich strangers coming into town might get spanked and robbed.
And everyone is, and people are, of course, cross-dressing all over the fucking place.
There is a chance that at the end of his reign, the Lord of Misrule was sacrificed, just like might have happened on Saturnalia.
And it's an interesting image, and it's presented by like a bona fide folklorist and anthropologist who should know what he's talking about.
A lot of people are real skeptical.
I'm skeptical.
I'm more skeptical about medieval England human sacrificing the Lord of Misrule at the end of their week.
But, or at the end of the 12 days of Christmas.
That'd be a funny one.
On the 12th day of Christmas, I gave you just literally, you're dead now.
Just fucking killing you.
A lot of the like neat stories about weird, wacky ways that people killed themselves and each other from like ye oldie times turn out to be just stories.
Like the thing, the like Scandinavian thing or like the Swedish thing about like old people have to throw themselves off of cliffs in order to die in order to like not take up resources from the community or whatever.
I can't remember.
It's used in that movie Midsommer.
Spoiler, I guess.
That's not real, as far as anyone can tell.
That's like a story.
It's a story, yeah.
Yeah.
Whereas on the other hand, most of the stories that hint about fucking and drugs seem to actually usually be true and are never more people fucking do drugs.
Yeah.
It's more sustainable than murder.
Yeah, like you can, you can fucking do drugs more than once during your lifetime.
You only die one time.
Yeah.
Typically, unless you are, again, Jesus Christ, the son of God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or that guy, the first zombie.
Who do he summoned back from the dead?
Oh, Lazarus.
Yeah, that's it.
And then also, one of the reasons I sort of doubt this is that for all of the, I really don't want to be like for good things that Christianity culturally exported, but overall Christianity cut down on human sacrifice a good solid amount whenever it was around.
And then they found their way to do killing in other ways.
Oh, yeah.
No, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God, maybe that's just all maybe the Crusaders pent up.
Whatever.
Anyway.
So the Lord of Misrule ties into, but is distinct from the Feast of Fools, which started probably in Central Europe.
And all of these names are so good.
I know.
And they're all fucking cool things.
It started in Central Europe.
It's January 1st, Collenz, which is still part of Christmas, if you're doing the 12 Days.
And it was a day of the Feast of Fools was wildness and folly and role reversal and lewdness, and like everything is permitted.
Very like actually kind of like Mardi Gras is the sort of modern thing that people would sort of tie this into.
And it's all happening like in the name of God, but the priests are sitting there being like, fuck, How do we stop this?
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
And everyone's like, in the name of God.
And they're like doing everything that Christianity normally says not to do.
As they're having like a transgender orgy.
Yeah.
And it took a couple hundred years for the church to successfully stomp out the Feast of Fools.
Unfortunate.
Unfortunate.
I know.
It's like, to me, it seems like maybe how like a person who lives in England is ostensibly ruled by the English king and a Catholic is ostensibly ruled by the Catholic Church.
But really people are just people and doing their own thing.
And these authoritarian structures are just trying to claim authority that they only somewhat have.
And that's how I feel about the like folk Catholicism of this time.
Catholicism is this type of Catholicism is at odds with the church rather than being in like obedience to the church.
And this seems to be the Catholicism that was actually practiced by a lot of Catholics instead of what people claimed they should be practicing.
So, wasailing.
So, wasailing is when you demand stuff from people.
And do you know who else is demanding stuff from us?
Economic Folk Catholicism Explained00:04:23
From you, the listener?
Me.
Sophie Lichterman.
Sophie Lichterman is demanding that in order to continue to eat food on a radio.
And pay us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That we should shift over to hearing different voices, a diversity of opinions.
I have these opinions about cool people who did cool stuff.
Whereas you might be about to hear an opinion that says that you should become a cop.
Hopefully those ads are gone now.
Yeah, I mean, we really don't have control over most of the ads.
Yeah.
So we don't endorse them.
Yeah.
Here's some non-advisors.
They do make it so we can do our shows and pay people and eat food and have homes.
Yay.
Here's some ads.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
There's this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
And at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
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Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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We are back.
Wasaline, traditionally done on the 12th night.
Wasaline probably gets its name from the Norse.
It basically means like hail, as in like hail and well met, or like, hey, what's up?
Yeah.
It means, it means be in good health.
And it's what predates modern caroline.
It basically means go around and make the rich people give you nice shit by singing songs.
It gets referred to as recipient-initiated charity, which is my favorite euphemism in the world.
Math Magic Marketing Frontiers00:11:38
That's great.
Because I would like to present a spectrum of ways of engaging in power.
You have top-down charity in which the rich give to the poor, usually in ways that maintain the power structure and, you know, not based, make them feel good about themselves.
Then there's mutual aid, which is people giving freely amongst equals.
And then there's recipient-initiated charity.
AKA, give me your shit.
Unfortunately, I mean, there's a kind of a way of seeing all of this like revelry, this sort of negative interpretation of all of this stuff that I really like.
I don't subscribe to this belief, but it is the danger of all this revelry is that it lets out pent-up aggression.
If you get to be in charge, if you're in ancient Rome and you're enslaved and you get to be fed by your master for a week, a year, you're less likely to revolt.
Yeah, this is the same type of thing we see a lot of the time.
And like it's the recuperation of like anti-capitalist resistance and selling it back to you in a way that is palpable.
But by doing that exchange, you feel like you're living in a world where there actually is actual resistance, but a lot of it is paid for.
One of the few good jokes from Rick and Morty is the Simple Ricks wafers and how they start selling the Simple Ricks Freedom Wafer Selects.
How you can buy this wafer and it gives you a taste of what it's like to be actually truly free.
And so like it's it's and it's and this wafer flavor was was designed by like studying the brain of someone who just laid like a revolt against a factory.
And it's like getting this, getting the getting this taste into the wafer.
And this person worked at the wafer factory.
So it's this company that is like using this revolt to make more of their products.
And you can engage with it and it gives you a taste, but then it's actually, it's just going to prolong the amount of time that you're living under this because now you have this little bit of the taste.
And what I would argue is that when the government or the forces that be or whatever the fuck do this kind of stuff to us, it's dangerous for them.
It's not as completely under their control as they would like to claim.
You know, like sometimes these things, these things that to them are like controlled burns get out of control.
And I would argue that as they like let the steam out of the pent up, I mean, how many metaphors can I possibly use here?
But, you know, as they let the steam out or whatever, right?
Let out the pent up energy or whatever, so that the whole thing doesn't explode.
It still sometimes is like actually teaching us.
Like sometimes you get that taste of that wafer in your mouth and you're like, you know what?
What if we had the whole fucking factory?
What if we had that all the time?
Yeah.
No, yeah, like that's the same thing.
I like, I was talking with this with people when the TV show Andor finished coming out, which I love.
How did how did Disney allow them to make this thing that's showcasing how to do all these various forms of resistance?
And there's a part of it that's like they're selling you back this version of right of uprising for us to consume.
And maybe if we just consume that, we'll be happy enough that we're able to consume this thing that we'll forget that you can do this in the real world.
But I don't, I think that is a position worth considering.
But I don't think it's, it has the full picture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think what happened there is that you have people who actually, it's less that Disney was like, ha ha ha, this is our big evil plan.
I mean, like, like, what if there was like a single radio conglomerate that controlled like half of podcasting and all the radio stations?
Imagine.
Wow.
And then people got paid to talk about rebels on their network.
Right.
Yeah.
I would argue that they would be doing these hypothetical people would be doing it to make use of a power structure that exists like rather than like for the sake of that power structure.
And it's a dangerous and complicated game, but the old cliche is that the last capitalist will sell you the rope with which to hang him.
Yeah.
And that doesn't mean he doesn't.
He still gets hanged.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is why I like that saying.
And people use that saying like to mean the opposite.
And I'm like, no, that's fine.
The Catholicist is still dying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And anyway, recipient initiated charity.
Big part of was saline.
It's like the role reversal thing.
So peasants would go to their feudal lords or just like rich people and they would sing and demand good food and booze and sometimes just straight up money.
And this looked lots of different ways.
Sometimes it's like you show up and you're like, give us your figgy pudding or we won't go away.
And they're like, ha ha ha ha.
Here's your figgy pudding.
And then you're like, thank you, sir.
And everyone feels really good about themselves.
And sometimes there's all these like people writing, complaining about being like, the rich people are afraid to leave their houses because gangs of youth are outside station to rob them.
So there's like a whole spectrum of wassaling.
Sometimes people would curse the rich people, but you know, totally not pagan, just regular curses, good Christian curses.
Yes.
Yes.
All of those Christian curses.
Yeah.
Sometimes they would vandalize the place.
And this is actually the rick, the root of trick-or-treating, as far as I can tell.
Trick-or-treating.
Yeah, that's what it was reminding me of.
Yeah, it's give me some candy or I'll egg your fucking house is like the once you're like 12 or 13, you know, that's the level of trick-or-treating or whatever.
Maybe that was just me.
Uh, a clergyman from the time said, quote, men dishonor Christ more in 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides.
Great.
People would drink and gamble and feast, and probably they fucked, but you know, the history books won't say plus they fucked.
Instead, they say they engaged in licentious behavior.
Cross-dressing, big part of it.
And a big part of it was sailing.
So every single fucking little bit of tradition has people cross-dressing as part of it.
There's this book that rules.
It's called Witchcraft in the Gay Counterculture.
And it was basically a love letter written to me and you, Garrison.
Okay.
It was by Arthur Evans.
Probably Robert's dad.
I'm not.
Can neither confirm nor deny.
And it talks about how everyone kept dressing up as weird shit.
Quote: So common was the practice of animal masquerades in the Middle Ages that detailed condemnations were issued against them.
Theodore, a 7th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Centerberry, maybe I wrote that wrong, might be Canterbury, wrote, If anyone in the Calens of January goes about as a stag or a bull, that is making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd and putting on the head of beasts.
Those who in such wise transforms themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because this is devilish.
And the same book, Witchcraft in the Gay Counterculture, says, links between witchcraft and transvestism appear regularly in early Christian Europe.
In the sixth century, the Christian writer Cesarius of Ares denounced the pagan practices of ritual transvestism and the wearing of animal costumes.
Sixth and seventh century synods repeatedly condemns transvestism during the popular New Year's holiday where men dressed as women, quote, a masquerade probably originating in a fertility rite of some kind.
In the 9th century, a Christian guidebook prescribed penance for men who practiced ritual transvestism.
A 13th century Inquisitor in southern France denounced female worshipers of the goddess Diana along with male transvestites.
This is all super fascinating because I just for the last episode of the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch series, I was writing about there's been these attacks on drag shows by these Christian far-right groups.
And particularly this past month, there's been multiple attacks on Christmas-themed drag shows.
Which is just fascinating because like these these Christmas-themed drag shows are more like traditionally Christmas than all of these Christians who are attacking them.
But it's also this interesting look on like this exact scenario isn't new.
This has been going on for thousands of years.
As long as there's been Christmas, it's the same thing.
They're doing the same thing.
We're both following into our traditional roles.
Yes.
These Christians are attacking these other Christians who are these holiday drag performances in the same way that these Christians are attacking this ritual transvestism.
It's the same shit.
Yep.
And I love that the church has multiple times over the years needed to say, please stop cross-dressing and or dressing up like cows.
And people just kept being like, no, no, no.
No.
We're going to do it.
Can't stop me.
And I'm doing it in the name of God.
And there's also something in the last line from that last quote about the Inquisitor in France coming after female worshipers of the goddess Diana along with male transvestites.
And there's a bunch of things there.
One is that, like, there were a bunch of women worshiping Diana, including cis women and trans women, is more or less what that's saying.
But also, that like the modern turfs who want to like separate cis and trans women, like the enemies have been demanding we burn together for a very long time.
Yes.
Okay.
More cool shit about Christmas.
The Welsh tradition.
Have you heard of Mary Lud?
I don't think so.
It's not actually lewd, like lewd.
It's L-W-Y-D.
Okay.
Okay.
So you take a horse skull, right?
And you put the horse skull on a stick.
You make like a hobby horse out of it, you know, like a little kid's toy with a horse in the stick.
Yeah.
And then you drape a sheet sort of over it, like kind of on the neck so that you can hide under the sheet.
And so it's just a horse head on a stick with a person underneath it.
And that's that's your Christmas Wasailing thing that you bring around.
And so Wassailers would take this horrific, awesome horse skull around them with them as they were fucking up the rich and getting drunk.
And historians have no idea whether this Welsh tradition, the Mary Lud, is the gray mare, I believe, is what it translates to.
They have no idea if it's pre-Christian or not.
Or rather, lots of people have ideas about whether it's pre-Christian or not, but no one can like prove it.
The records of it go back to about 1800, but they talk about it being a thing from before then.
Another thing that predates Mary Lud is the concept of advertisement.
The Ban on Christmas History00:15:07
So true.
So true.
Yeah.
We can all make it through it together.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
Yeah.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
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They do not have homes.
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What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
He's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it was the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Blah blah proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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We are back.
You could also wassale an orchard.
In case you were ever wondering, you were like, could I wassale an orchard?
Well, the answer, Garrison Davis, is that you could, if you would choose.
What type of things would be at the orchard in the end of December?
So I think this is wasaling now taken out of Christmas time.
I can't.
Okay.
I can't tell.
It still might have been because you're not like going and getting the apples at this point.
You're blessing the orchard for better harvest in the year to come.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so it actually still could have been midwinter.
I really kind of like, I don't know.
I spent a while trying to figure out exactly when they were wasaling orchards.
Okay.
So yeah, you can wassale orchards, which even up into the 17th century was really fucking pagan.
I mean, folkloric or superstitious.
People would march from orchard to orchard, led by the wasail king and queen, to the orchard and drink to the health of the trees and scare away evil spirits in order to bring about a good harvest.
They would lift the wasail queen up into the boughs to place booze-soaked bread in the branches.
Yeah, totally Christian.
Yeah, this is, yes, this doesn't sound like folk paganism at all.
No, no, just a Christian thing.
Other wassaling traditions included drinking mulled cider and various types of booze from a wasail bowl, which is a big communal bowl that everyone drank from.
And the drink was called Wassail because they're really original namers.
Nice.
And it's been a bunch of different drinks at different times.
For a while, it was mead with crab apples.
Later, it was cider, like what people drink Christmas now.
Other times it was like ale with baked apples in it.
Basically, it's like some combination of like apples of some variety and alcohol.
I mean, and stuff like this has continued on today.
Yeah.
This style of tradition.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I really like it.
This is like one of the things that I'm not talking about that in the script, but I still genuinely like, like the real at my heart, the reason that I never actually like, didn't like Christmas, even when I was like a baby anarchist and spent all of my time railing against consumerism and shit like that.
And I still believe the same shit I believed, but I know it's quite a noted, noted fan of consumerism.
Yeah.
But like the idea of gathering together with your family in the darkest day of the year and like at the darkest time, like, and it's not just that the light is returning, but it's that the cold is setting in and how hope returns even as things get worse.
And I think about this a lot with the current rise of fascism, right?
Even when we turn the tide on fascism, things will continue to get worse for a while, but we can't lose hope.
We know that as the light returns, eventually delayed, so will the warmth.
I really care about both solstice and Christmas.
And I like, I really, I'm very blessed in that I come from a wonderful family and enjoy gathering with them.
And so I feel like I need to like shout out that like another important part about Christmas is something that does get held on to through all of it, which is fucking family togetherness and tradition and all that shit.
Anyway, that's my little earnest moment for the week.
Medieval Christmas.
I'm all for it.
Medieval Christmas is the best of all Christmases.
A lot of people weren't for it.
The real war on Christmas is the war to sanitize it.
It's a war that's been mostly won.
The middle class in the U.S. in the 1800s was a big part of the war against Christmas.
For some reason, they didn't like drunken poor people showing up at their house, demanding shit and vandalizing their houses.
Overall, the U.S., started by fucking Puritans, kind of missed out on spicy Christmas.
Yeah.
Which is a shame.
The traditional Christmas of, as we've discussed, be gay, do crime, cross-dress, be a furry, worship the old gods while pretending like you obey the church and the Christian God of your Roman conquerors.
And now I want to talk about the first real, I mean, I've been talking about the war on Christmas being the 1700 year long thing.
I want to talk about the first time that Christians almost got rid of Christmas.
The war on Christmas of the 1640s.
In the 1640s, England, they had this whole fuck off Civil War thing.
It should have been cool, but it actually sucked.
It should have been cool because it was a Commonwealth wresting power away from a monarch, but it was also, they were Puritans and they deposed a slightly more religiously tolerant king.
And then they turned around and genocided the shit out of Ireland.
I have some bias against Cromwell that will work its way through anything I talk about history.
When the Puritans took over England in the 1640s, they didn't like fun.
That was kind of their whole thing, not fun enjoyers.
And so Christmas became a culture war issue during the lead up to the Civil War.
The middle-class parliamentarians opened their shops on Christmas to say fuck you to the holiday.
Christmas was clearly a holdover from Catholicism and therefore a holdover from paganism.
And the Puritans don't like paganism or Catholicism, plus revelry and gender bending.
No fucking good.
Am I right?
So true.
Yeah.
For the most part, commoners wanted nothing to do with either side of this war.
They were like, the king of the rich people, I'm good.
Oh, I forget the name of it.
In my English Civil War episode, I think I talked about them.
There was this whole group that was basically the band of brothers from Game of Thrones.
There's this whole group of people who were like, we're just going to defend our fucking towns from both armies because both armies are fucks.
Yeah.
The commoners, they didn't want anything to do with the pissing match between the royalists and the parliamentarians, and they didn't want to lose Christmas.
So in 1643, a bunch of apprentices rioted and smashed up the shops that were open on Christmas because they were trying to deny society its weeks of feasting and merrymaking.
Based.
You have to fight for your right to party, which is the only Beastie Boys reference I will ever make in the entire run of this podcast.
I do love a riot to ensure the continuation of Christmas.
Yeah.
So the Puritans came out ahead in the Civil War, and they had King Charles I in jail in 1647.
They banned Christmas in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
No mince pies.
Like literally, they banned not just Christmas, but they banned mince pies, plum pudding, no hanging holly, no excessive drinking or parties, and you're required to keep your shops open.
No fucking free commerce here.
You have to keep your shops open on Christmas.
This didn't go well.
No, this doesn't sound like people would respond to this very nicely.
No, there were demonstrations and riots all over England and probably Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
Well, Wales, Ireland was busy, some other shit around this point.
In London, armed soldiers had to break up an unruly crowd to stop the crowd from hanging Holly.
In Norwich, 40 people were killed when the city's ammunition stockpile caught fire in the rioting.
Oh my gosh.
In Ipswich, which is totally the name of a town and not whatever.
Supposedly a protester named Christmas was killed, which then got turned into propaganda, which the history book I read was like, and then this happened.
I don't believe it.
I straight up don't believe it.
I know that propaganda was made about it, but I don't know that there actually some protester named Christmas was murdered.
I am at the very least skeptical.
Yeah.
People in Canterbury, which is actually a city in England and not just the name of a book I was supposed to read in high school, they rioted.
These are called the plum pudding riots.
The mayor went through the market and forced everyone to open their stalls for fear, or like he would throw you in the stocks if you wouldn't open your stalls at the market.
So an angry mob followed behind, trashing every shop that opened.
So these shopkeepers, they're just fucked.
If they open their shop, it'll get trashed.
If they don't, they get thrown the stocks.
The crowd caught up with the mayor and threw him down into the mud, but he got up and he managed to order the crowd to back off.
And then in a move that sounds like someone making fun of England, the crowd produced some footballs and started this massive game of football across the whole city with no rules that dragged everyone into the game or to hide in their houses, which was basically a Christmas tradition, was Calvin Ball.
Okay.
Puritans who tried to stop them were pelted with mud, and the pro-Christmas rioters took their city back from authorities for the day.
Later, some instigators were rounded up, but the grand jury refused to indict them.
So the Christmas rioters got off scot-free.
Again, all for traditional Christmas.
Seize your city, party for 12 days, cross-dress, drink other people's wine, play sports that don't have rules.
The main fallout for the canceling of Christmas was pretty much the end of the religious component of Christmas.
People were like, all right, we just won't go to church on Christmas.
We'll do all of the other stuff, but we won't go to church.
They also canceled Easter, not the protesters, but the Puritans.
I don't really care as much about Easter.
Cancel culture strikes again.
I know.
Eventually, you've got the Reformation and people got a king again, which was once again a lateral move.
Should have been a make things worse, but fucking lateral move.
And they also got Christmas back.
It wasn't as cool anymore, though.
The Lord of Misrule was gone and forgotten.
Lord of Misrule was a died in the Puritan War on Christmas.
What a loss.
I know.
It's funny to me because it's the exact same sorts of people in the 17th century England banning Christmas that are so adamantly defending it today, right?
But the thing that they're not defending Christmas.
They're just Christofascists trying to defend Christian hegemony.
Yeah, they're trying to set up a Christian Dominionist state.
Like that's what they're actually doing.
Yeah, totally.
Anyway, later in 1659, the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, they banned Christmas too.
Quote, whoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, had to pay a five-shilling fine, which was about three days' wages for the average skilled laborer.
So it's like, oh, what, like 300 bucks today?
I don't know what skills are.
Yeah, a few hundred dollars.
Yeah.
Christmas was functionally banned in Massachusetts until the 1800s.
When I was a kid learning U.S. history, I always heard about the Puritans as this like poor oppressed minority that fled England, presumably fearing for their lives or some shit.
They never taught us how Puritans in England soon took control of England, or the fact that one of their sticking points had been the reason they felt oppressed is that they didn't tolerate other religions.
And literally, one of their problems with the king is he was fairly religiously tolerant.
He was even married to a Catholic.
The religious freedom that the Puritans were fighting for was the religious freedom to not allow religious freedom, which I don't know, might sound familiar to the modern listener.
All right, one more group that tried to get rid of Christmas: Stalin.
Really?
I didn't know this.
In 1929, the USSR banned Christmas.
They banned it in the same way that the Catholics banned Saturnalia and Yule and tried to ban Christmas, which is that they tried to ban it, and that didn't work because people just kept celebrating Christmas.
So then they co-opted it.
The ban lasts from 1929 to 1935 when they realized what everyone has always realized: people need a fucking holiday in the middle of the goddamn darkest time of the fucking year, especially in Russia.
Defending Traditional Values Against Banning00:03:51
I know.
I know.
Those poor Russians.
So the Christmas trees got rebranded New Year's fir trees.
Gift giving was moved to New Year's 2.
And then that totally materialist, absolutely rational figure, Grandfather Frost, was the one to bring them.
Okay.
People feasted, people dressed up in costumes, totally secular fun times for all the non-religious people in the non-religious country.
It was probably a little bit bland, a little bit sanitized, like the U.S. version of the holiday.
And I totally get why revolutionaries came for institutions of power, which include the church.
Yeah.
And I get why people wanted to destroy the vestiges of religion, but people want midwinter celebrations.
And frankly, it's going to feel religious, whatever fucking religion.
People don't care.
It could be Sol Invictus.
It could be the Horned God.
It could be Odin.
It could be Yahweh.
It could be Marx.
Who fucking ever give us our figgy pudding or it'll break your fucking windows?
And that, Garrison Davis, is the true meaning of Christmas.
Give us our figgy pudding or we'll break your fucking windows.
I've never had figgy pudding, but I'll take your word for it.
Yeah, I don't know what figgy pudding is.
I assume it's pudding made out of figs.
That actually sounds good.
Now that you mention it, that probably that does make sense.
I looked up a thousand things for this episode because I didn't grow up in a very religious household.
And I didn't look up figgy pudding.
I looked up what was in was sale, but I didn't look up figgy pudding.
Figgy pudding does indeed have figs.
All right.
Well, that makes sense.
Is it a pudding?
Because it's also blood pudding.
No, it's a pudding in the sense of like a British pudding.
So like it's like a dessert.
It's like a more congealed bready type thing.
All right.
Yeah.
You know, I would say it probably tastes good, but I've had some British food.
Yeah, I'm going to, it doesn't look great.
Okay.
Everyone Google this on your own.
It looks like meatloaf.
That is nicer than what I thought it looked like.
It's kind of like it's kind of fruitcake-esque.
Yeah, Exactly.
Ah, that thing that no one eats.
Essentially, it is a fruitcake, but with like, there's usually figs and like a lot of times there's Margaret.
Many people are saying this to me.
A lot of times they put like brandy in it.
Okay.
Okay.
Sometimes there's other dried fruits and stuff.
But, you know, figgy pudding.
That's cool.
And on that note, that is the Christmas Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, in which we talked about Christmas, which is the cool.
The cool people are the people who party no matter what.
Whatever they get told to do or not do.
Yeah, the people who are going to be throwing hardened figgy puddings through windows.
Yeah.
If they if they don't get allowed to take their tree up three flights of stairs and shove it in their apartment.
Yep.
Because if it's cold, they're cold.
Bring the tree spirits inside.
Which is like a very like a Miyazaki type vibe there.
And if you want to save money on candles, you can also just sacrifice people and leave the bodies in the window.
I'm not sure if that's going to catch on anymore.
I don't know.
We're past that.
That ship sailed.
We're having to fight for Drag Queen Christmas.
I'm not sure if we're ready to fight for the dead bodies in the window.
Okay, we're ready to fight for a thousand-year-old Christmas, but not ready.
Fighting for Drag Queen Christmas00:02:46
We are going to defend our traditional values.
All right.
All right.
Go out there, everyone, and defend your traditional values of people's.
This part's not sarcastic.
People should be allowed to have fucking drag shows.
Jesus fucking Christ.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
Yeah.
That's what I got.
End of your plugs, anyone?
Or fuck it all.
Fuck it all.
Lord of Misrule.
Declare yourself the Lord of Misrule, but survive the week.
That is your duty.
Each and every one of you.
Bye, everyone.
See you next year.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lindsay McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lindsay McGuire and I'm watching.
Wild, wild bad way.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
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You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
He thought up Willie Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
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Hi, I'm Iris Palmer, host of the Against All Odds podcast.
Every week, I'm sitting down with exceptional people who have broken barriers even when the odds were stacked against them.
Like chef Victor Villa of VS Tacos.
You know the taquero from the Bad Bunny halftime show?
It was great.
It was a big moment.
It was special.
And I felt like I was really representing my family, you know, my brand, my city.
I was representing all taqueros, not only of like, you know, the U.S., but of Mexico and beyond.
All the taqueros of the world.
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