Brian Earl
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Well, I think in general, the thing that fascinates me the most about Christmas is that it is so much newer than you probably realize. You think this is based on a 2,000-year-old religious story. It's filled with all kinds of candles and wreaths and Christmas trees, things that feel ancient, things that you think they must have been around for centuries.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
But most of how you experience Christmas are made up of things that were produced in the last century. decades. And on the one hand, that's really obvious, right? I mean, white Christmas was written in the forties. You know, my grandparents didn't grow up with that song, but even the Santa Claus that we know really came from the thirties. Again, like my great grandparents didn't know that.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And again, with the Christmas trees, again, They didn't really become especially common in American households until, you know, about the late 19th, early 20th century. Well, that's my great-great-grandparents for someone my age. It's not exactly ancient history. I mean, those are people, I know their names. I have pictures of those people.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
So, so much of Christmas is just brand new, and a great deal of the remainder isn't all that much older. And that even is true of certain Christmas songs. You think like Hark the Herald Angels Sing just kind of has this ring to it that it must be this really, really old song. But no, that was mid to late 19th century.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
The interesting thing about that is that it did not become an industry until about the late 1930s. And the logic was in the entertainment industry, why are we going to invest in creating a product that people are only going to be interested in for a couple of weeks out of the year? And so you notice there really aren't a lot of great American Christmas songs prior to the 1940s.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Now, Winter Wonderland was written in the late 1930s. The original version is no longer popular. You can find it online, but it just has too much of an old-timey feel. So what changed? Well, the movie industry came along, and a lot of songs were written for movies that either featured Christmas or were about Christmas. This is another interesting thing.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Even though a lot of our favorite Christmas movies come from the 1940s, there really weren't Christmas movies in the 1940s. It wasn't until television came along that you had this annual tradition of watching movies on Christmas. You have to imagine the same couldn't be true before TV came.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
That movie theaters would show the same Christmas movie every year and that families would have a tradition of going to the movie theater. That just doesn't make sense. So a lot of these movies like Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life actually premiered during the summer. But that's a bit of an aside. But it was really during the 1940s that...
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
A lot of these songs were written for movies. And then once that sort of proved the concept, you had a lot more of these Christmas songs being written. All of this, of course, coincided with World War II. And you notice the lyrics to a lot of these songs are like, I'll be home for Christmas. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
This nostalgia for the way things used to be and family gatherings and things. That music really, believe it or not, had a lot to do in shaping how we see Christmas today as this time for gifts and romance in the snow and homecomings and thinking about the good old days and all of that. They've made an enormous impact and had an enormous influence on shaping Christmas for this generation. Yeah.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Well, one of the probably the most interesting thing about a lot of our Christmas foods is that they didn't start out as Christmas foods. They only became that through a process of elimination. Fruitcake is a really great example. In Victorian times, fruitcake was just something you had. You might have it with your cup of tea. It was common to serve it at weddings.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And as a matter of fact, it was served at Queen Victoria's wedding. And she very famously saved a slice and didn't eat it to practice her restraint. There were all kinds of legends around fruitcake, where if you cut a slice and put it under your pillow, you would dream of your future love, things like that. But only recently has it sort of disappeared outside of the Christmas season.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
The same is true for gingerbread. Gingerbread for a long, long time was almost like the funnel cake of its day, the thing that you would go get at a fair. And then it's mostly been weeded out of the rest of the year. Eggnog or some version of eggnog, right? Eggnog is more like a family of drinks called posset, these milk and egg punches that are spiked with alcohol.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
You'd see those all over England. And they came over here, too. I think George Washington famously served something that we would recognize as eggnog to visitors. Martha Washington published a recipe for it. How these things disappear outside the Christmas season is really the story. And for each of them, it kind of just has its own little trajectory.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Gingerbread's an interesting one because I think it's mostly in America that we tend not to think of it outside of the Christmas season, whereas in places like Germany, you're more likely to find it throughout the year. Mince pies are a particularly interesting one. Because previously, minced meat was literally that. It was meat that was minced up.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And you would preserve it by adding sugar and dried fruit. Over the years, the meat was taken out and it was just the dried fruit and the sugar. And we now have the version that we're familiar with today, which is usually this sugar, fruit. Usually you preserve it with a little bit of alcohol so it has a bit of a boozy kick and then wrapped up in a pastry shell.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Well, word is that during the Puritans ban on Christmas in England, mince pies in particular were banned and that you could get fined for baking one. I did a chapter on this in the book where I interviewed this journalist from the BBC who said she looked into that in particular. And it turns out there's probably not a lot of historical accuracy to calling out mince pies in particular.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And it's more that a legend spread about the Puritans really being petty about mince pies, you know, as a way to sort of mock just how ridiculous the ban on Christmas had become.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
This was back in the 1930s. The Montgomery Ward department store would hand out little booklets to shoppers. So parents would come in, they'd give something to the kids to keep them busy while the parents shopped. And what they did is they tapped a copywriter named Robert L. May.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
and said what we'd like you to do is come up with something for this year's christmas season and so he had a daughter who really loved the reindeer exhibit at the zoo and the legend goes it's probably a mixture of fact and legend that he got the notion when he was driving home one night and it was very foggy and he kind of put two and two together he wanted to do something his daughter would like he wanted to make a story about a reindeer who gets caught in the fog
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
So he wrote up the story and he worked with the commercial artist there to kind of do a little bit of a mock-up. And he took it to his bosses and they just rejected it. They said, no way. I don't want to do this. This doesn't work. He tweaked it a little bit.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
and part of the feedback that he got was the red nose this was a time when wc fields was really popular in the 1930s and they said well i think the red nose people are going to associate that with with um alcoholism or someone being a drunkard we don't want that but anyway he eventually got them to to agree so they printed up a bunch of copies of this booklet which it's a story told in rhyming verse you can find it pretty easily online and eventually it just sold out
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Or not sold out. They gave it away. They ran out. And then something really interesting happened where Montgomery Ward gave the rights to the story over to Robert L. May, which is really unusual. He was just a copywriter who worked for the company.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
But anyway, Robert L. May's brother-in-law was a guy named Johnny Marks, who, if you know the song Silver and Gold and Holly Jolly Christmas, he wrote those songs. So he asked Johnny Marks to write a song based on Rudolph, which he did. And it came out, I think, in 1934. And then the following year, Gene Autry's version came out, which was a number one hit.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And then eventually he sold the rights to it to make that Animagic movie that came out in the 1960s. And during all of this, Robert May was, again, kind of a work-a-day copywriter. He was writing catalog copy for Montgomery Ward, just things like about buying this sweater and things like that. But during all of this, his wife was dying of cancer. And so he was in financial straits.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
He was raising a young daughter who's still alive today, by the way. But after all of the success with Rudolph, he died a very wealthy man in the 1970s. And Rudolph, for all practical purposes, should have been just an other annual leaflet handout for Montgomery Ward. But it really caught on. And now it's just an essential part of the Christmas season.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Well, the short answer is that we used to say Merry Christmas, and then a lot of people wanted to move away from doing that. In England, when the Puritans were in power, they banned Christmas. And then after the Restoration, it came back in. It kind of came limping back into public consciousness. It was kind of getting wiped out, and it worked its way back into the culture slowly.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And up until around the Victorian period, Christmas was something that we celebrated kind of like the way we celebrate, say, Halloween or the Fourth of July or Mardi Gras, meaning an external and outside kind of celebration for communities to celebrate in the streets rather than ones that families celebrate in their homes. And
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
It had sort of taken on a reputation of being kind of a drunken, carousing kind of holiday. Anyway, the upper class, when they decided they wanted to domesticate Christmas, if you like, they wanted to move away from saying Merry Christmas because it was associated with that merrymaking, that kind of, you know,
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
celebration style of the common people and wanted to add the high class touch of happy christmas and indeed in george iii's radio address he started using happy christmas at the end of that as a way to socialize that idea but it's interesting that the word merry at least in the english language it seems to exist only to continue wishing one another a happy holiday season like when else do you use that word unless you're describing a merry-go-round or saying the more the merrier
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
It's one of these antiquated, fossilized words that we trot out for six weeks out of the year, and that's pretty much all it's good for.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I like the way you frame the question, what we think of as Christmas, because Christmas isn't one thing. It's kind of it's gone through so many different versions. And this Christmas we celebrate is just the current version. It won't be the last. And it certainly wasn't the first. It all started to gel around the middle of the 19th century before the Civil War.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
One in every three Americans was a farmer. Right. And then as we became more industrialized. Just the economy was changing. More goods were being made in factories and shipped to stores. Store-bought items became a big thing, as did the print media. The number of daily newspapers, something like tripled during the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Now that rail travel was not only possible, but also pretty affordable to most people, Christmas was instantly rebranded. If you moved to the city for a job, you could come home for Christmas. If you lived in the city, you could have goods shipped in from the farms for Christmas. That changed everything.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And that created new avenues for advertising and also an avenue to socialize an idea about Christmas. Because prior to, certain communities didn't celebrate Christmas at all. Or if they did, it was highly regionalized and very specific to that area. The idea of Christmas is just one thing that we all kind of understand what it is and how you celebrate it.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
That could only be true if there was a mass media to propagate ideas like that. And as a matter of fact, in 1849, it was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who were shown in Godey's Women's Magazine as celebrating Christmas around a Christmas tree. Now, Christmas trees have been around for a long, long time, but they were never popular until that point.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And then it was the next year that it became the must-have Christmas accessory on that side of the Atlantic. Over here, Franklin Pierce was our president during that time. He had the first national Christmas tree. And then it was several decades later when Christmas trees were grown as a commercial crop that they truly became as ubiquitous as they are now.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
department store shopping where you take things off the shelves and bring them up to the register. That was new. Before that, things were behind the counter. You'd go into the shop and the shopkeeper would get things off the shelves behind the counter.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
But now that we have these enormous department stores and the perfection of plate glass, which created an avenue for having these beautiful storefront windows and the Christmas displays that introduced the notion of window shopping. and walking down the city streets and just seeing Christmas as just part of your atmosphere, all of that came into being right around that same time.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
So many factors converging at just the right time.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
It was, yes, it was right around then. You know, again, Christmas had kind of gotten beaten up a little bit and was working its way back into the culture. Certain things couldn't have become popular until we had all of those conditions coming together.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Another one of them is right around the mid to late 19th century, lithography, a printing technique, was coming into its own, which allowed pretty cheap and efficient color printing. And that's right around the time there were certain postal reforms in the UK. The invention of the postage stamp, a uniform price to send things to and fro, coincided with the creation of the first Christmas card.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And you have to think before that, communicating across long distances wasn't really a big part of life for most people. The other thing that happened in the 19th century in America and in England is rail travel. Now that rail travel was not only possible, but also pretty affordable to most people, Christmas was instantly rebranded as a time where you can have a homecoming.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
If you moved to the city for a job, you could come home for Christmas. If you lived in the city, you could have goods shipped in from the farms for Christmas. That changed everything and really made Christmas what it is today.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
If you remember the poem, Twas the Night Before Christmas, that came out in 1880 in a newspaper. There were no illustrations, but the words are really interesting if you pay attention to them, where he rides in a miniature sleigh with eight tiny reindeer. He has a little round belly. He's an elf in that poem. He's described as an elf.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And Houghton Mifflin did an illustrated version of that that you can find online pretty easily. That was in 1912, I want to say. And the pictures of him show that he's, yeah, he's about three feet tall. So shortly after that, we start to have a bunch of different artists creating their image of Santa Claus.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And where Thomas Nast was doing things for Harper's Weekly, Norman Rockwell and JC Leyendecker were doing covers for the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1920s. And we're starting to see in those images Santa shifting toward more of the notion that we have today, that he's not an elf. He's not this gnome-like little creature. He's a six-foot guy. He's fully human grandfather.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And then it was Haddon Sundblom, who was a commercial artist who worked for Coca-Cola, same guy who did the Quaker Oats guy, started doing Santa Claus in the early 1930s. And he would do at least one or two of these paintings every year. And then it was Coca-Cola's massive marketing budget that allowed them to just propagate this one image of Santa really far and wide.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
So there's kind of one of those internet rumors that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus. I think it's more, there's a little bit of truth to that. It's more accurate to say that that's, The work that Haddon Sundblom did is kind of the point that we stopped iterating on our notion of Santa Claus. So it's more like they finalized our image of him.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Well, giving gifts at Christmastime wasn't always a huge deal. I mean, it was in as much as it's common to give gifts on almost any kind of celebration. But Christmas wasn't a major gift-giving holiday until a couple of things were true. Number one, until we started getting the notion that it is, and that was really a matter of there being more goods to sell, right?
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
You think as we become a more industrial society, you're going to have the media giving merchants an avenue to advertise through that media. And also the merchants and producers themselves saying, oh, this Christmas thing is another way that we can get people to buy goods, right?
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
so it wasn't until we get to this period of the late 19th early 20th century that christmas became a major gift giving holiday prior to this christmas gifts were something that would be very very small children would get gifts in their stockings that they leave either at the end of their beds or on the mantle adults would give each other gifts to some extent but maybe not much they'd usually be handmade items and they'd almost never be wrapped you'd always just give it over to the other person
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Gift wrap, as we know it, can probably trace its roots back to the early 20th century. Merchants would sell tissue paper. They used to refer to it as gift dressings. It was usually plain white. And it was often if something came in a box, if it was a product that you bought from a store, it came in a box, you'd want to wrap it up. Smaller gifts would typically be hung in the tree.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
You'd either hang them, stick them in the branches or hang them from something. And it wasn't until an article that came out in Good Housekeeping, and I want to say this was in the early 20th century, that actually recommended putting gifts under the tree.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
And in the 1920s, there was an incident at the stationery store in North Carolina where they were selling their tissue gift dressings, but they ran out. So it being a stationary store, one of the owners ran into the back and found some spare paper that they were going to use as envelope liners. It was this bright yellow paper and said, well, I guess this will do. It's better than nothing.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
Put it out on the shelves and the stuff just flew off the shelves. They couldn't keep up with the demand for it, even though it wasn't intended as a gift dressing. And most people would say that that is the point where this idea of brightly colored or ostentatious decorative wrapping paper really got its start from that one mishap at that store in North Carolina that was run by J.C.
Something You Should Know
Fascinating Stories of Christmas Customs & The Art of Talking with Children - SYSK Choice
and Raleigh Hall, who are the brothers who are famous for creating Hallmark.