Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. To hold us off until dinner, we have mince pies, cheese and crackers, pigs in blankets, mulled wine. All the favorites. So Sam, back home, what does Christmas make you think of?
Colonization.
Of course.
But I'm more than happy to celebrate the day with you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with everybody-- Fred Rascoe, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Marlee Givens. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it.
Merry LITSmas, everybody!
Merry LITSmas.
Merry LITSmas.
Yes, it's LITSmas, our annual Christmas show. We only do one a year. For past LITSmases, we have done an old timey radio special, A Christmas Carol, a kids storytime.
Library versions of Christmas classics, a survey of libraries and archives in the movies.
A trip through vintage Christmas literature. A sound collage about Christmas traditions.
And a show about ghosts and Christmas time. That is a lot of Christmas. So what shall we do for the eighth LITSmas episode? CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, I hope everybody is ready for a change of pace.
As long as it's a slower pace, I'm up for it. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Fred, you'll be delighted to hear that this year's LITSmas is called Christmas Island. Shall we spend the holiday away across the sea?
But the question is, which Christmas Island? There's one in the North Pacific, and there's one in the Indian Ocean. But as I looked at the playlist for today's episode, I get the feeling that our LITSmas island is actually a lot closer than the Australian territory or the Republic of Kiribati.
That's right, our LITSmas island is Hawaii. Mele Kalikimaka. It's a Hawaiian LITSmas.
All right. And our songs today are mostly about Hawaii or Hawaiian Christmas. There may be one or two that sneak in under the Christmas Island theme, like our first song, "Christmas Island" as performed by the Andrews Sisters-- wait. Nope. Not the Andrews sisters. As performed by Bob Dylan?
Surprise. CHARLIE BENNETT: Christmas surprise. Let's do it. This is "Christmas Island" by Bob Dylan, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Christmas Island," a 1946 song covered by Bob Dylan on his 2009 Christmas album. And yeah, I don't know what to make of that record, either. And from that song, we take our LITSmas 2022 title, Christmas Island.
Charlie, can you explain why we're doing a Hawaiian Christmas episode?
Well, I don't want to bum Fred out, but it's Bing Crosby's fault.
Ba ba ba ba ba ba.
Exactly. Your avatar, Fred. Now, so I have a deal with my wife. She loves Christmas music, and I could listen to it just a little bit each season and be OK. So we don't start listening to Christmas music until the trip back from Thanksgiving, but then all we do is listen to Christmas music. And since it's all like Spotify and Amazon playlists these days, a lot of programmed stuff, the algorithm telling us what to hear, I've been noticing songs that keep coming up.
Obviously, 1940 is well, well represented, but there's this song that I kept hearing, kind of for the first time this year. "Mele Kalikimaka" by Bing Crosby.
It cannot be the first time you've heard that song this year, Charlie.
It might not be literally the first time, but it wasn't until someone pointed out that last Christmas was George Michael's, you know, Wham Christmas song that I actually began to hear it and have it register, you know? But finally, this time it registered, this Hawaiian Christmas song. And I started listening to all the Christmas music coming at me. I couldn't hear another state Christmas song. Certainly, there's a lot of New York-ish Christmas, like "Christmastime in the City."
But even that's not specifically it's a New Christmas, y'all. So I started to wonder, what is going on with "Mele Kalikimaka?" What is Bing Crosby doing singing a song about Hawaiian Christmas? So I had to start looking things up. "Mele Kalikimaka" was written in 1949 when a Hawaiian songwriter named Robert Andrew Anderson was told in his office at Von Hamm Yung, which is a Hawaiian textile company, someone said, there are no Hawaiian Christmas songs, Andy. Have you ever noticed that?
And Andy said, well, I'm a songwriter. I can fix that. And of course, he knew Bing Crosby. I guess everybody knew Bing Crosby back then. And it says-- I don't know if this is true. It says that Bing Crosby then surprised Andy with his recording the next year. So some songwriter whose day job was in a Hawaiian textiles company wrote the song "Mele Kalikimaka," and then Bing Crosby recorded it. And that's how that song came to be. But then, why is that still around?
I want to ask you all, are there any state Christmas songs besides "Mele Kalikimaka's" Hawaiian Christmas song? Can you all help me out? And I don't mean, is there a single state Christmas song. I mean is there one that you think of? Because there's a Colorado Christmas somewhere, but that's like a B-side on someone's album. No one can even name the artist. What do you think?
That ragtime jazz revivalist band, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, they wrote and recorded a song called "Carolina Christmas," so I know that one. That's back in the '90s.
Which state is that, Fred?
One of the Carolinas. They live in North Carolina, so I'm going to say North Carolina.
OK. That's one.
And there's that "No Place Like Home for the Holidays" that mentions there's a man who lives in Tennessee, and he's heading for Pennsylvania. But it doesn't say that in the title, I guess.
No.
Well, beyond that, it doesn't even say, here is the Tennessee Christmas tradition. We're going to lay it out for you. Are there traditions in the "Carolina Christmas," or is it more like Christmas from a drunk tank kind of song?
Well, one of the lines is "it's a Carolina Christmas, we're chilling in our underwear," so maybe that's what they do. I never did that growing up in North Carolina, but, you know, I was an immigrant.
Wendy? Marlee?
No. You got me.
Yeah.
Yeah I can think of anything but home for the-- there's no place like home for the holidays, specifically by Perry Como. The recording came to mind when you asked it, which Fred already mentioned. And it's just like home is anywhere in the US, particularly Tennessee and Pennsylvania and Atlantic and Pacific, wherever the traffic is terrific. Home is a state of mind, right? At Christmas.
There you go. I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams. So Hawaiian Christmas. I got stuck on it. And then the Bob Dylan song, "Christmas Island." Again, another song that I never heard until this year, "Christmas Island." If one is somewhat bummed out by Bob Dylan singing "Christmas Island," you could certainly look up Andrews Sisters version. It's much smoother. So yeah, "Christmas Island." Hawaiian Christmas. Of course, Christmas Island is not Hawaii. It's somewhere else.
But it's Hawaii in this show. And now I want to ask you all another question. How much does winter matter to you when it comes to Christmas? Is a white Christmas all that important? Should the weather outside be frightful? Dum da dum, delightful?
Not anymore.
Not anymore?
No. CHARLIE BENNETT: Tell me about before. Oh, you know, I grew up in Augusta, Georgia, and we never had snow at Christmas. And I remember feeling a little left out when I would watch a holiday movie or read a book that took place during Christmas time, and it was always magical and snow covered everything and sleigh rides and all of that. And then I moved to a somewhat snowy area in my late 20s. I got very disenchanted with the winter snow, which is gross.
And now that, I don't know, now that I'm in my 50s, I've met people who live in the Southern hemisphere. You know, I feel like this whole idea of winter being tied to it. I mean, it's very much having to do with the pagan yule tradition, I think, and all of the traditions coming out of the British Isles. But it's not like that in a lot of the rest of the world, so I feel maybe a little more open-minded and a little less connected to the wintry aspect.
If you're offering to take us to Hawaii for Christmas, Charlie, in other words, we accept.
Mm hmm.
Wendy, I want to give you the last word and recreate a quick exchange we had. So hey, Wendy. Tell me about California Christmas. How was that?
I mean, normal, right? Like, yeah. I think there's something about Christmas that's about the gap between what you have and what you wish you had. It's like this longing, which kind of ties into you need to buy more stuff to fill that gap, or you just need to grieve and cry a lot to fill that gap. But there's something about the weather-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Christmas disease. Oh, the disease is real.
If the weather doesn't match, it just fits that sort of ennui anyway, that mismatch between reality and fantasy that comes with the season.
Perfect. We'll be back with more from LITSmas Island after a music set.
File this set under DU 625.L8.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You just heard Honolulu, How Do You Do? By Sol K. Bright and his Hollywaiians. Legendary Hawaiian artist there. And before that, we heard-- let me attempt this one-- "Oli Oli Makahiki Hou" and "Hape Nu La," happy new year, by Noelani Kanoho and the Leo Nahenahe singers. Phew. Those are songs from and about Hawaii. This is Lost in the Stacks, and we're celebrating LITSmas, our annual Christmas show.
This year, our LITSmas is called Christmas Island, and we don't mean the Christmas Island with all the red crabs.
Almost 44 million red crabs.
But instead, Hawaii. Mele Kalikimaka. WENDY HAGENMAIER: We should point out that the strawberry crab is native to Hawaii.
Not to be confused with the strawberry hermit crab.
Sadly, for our Christmas theme, green crabs are not common in Hawaii.
We are a research library rock and roll radio show, which means that if one of us gets curious about something, we start looking up facts, as the crab dialogue should have pointed out. So let's think about Hawaiian Christmas, and why it has its own Christmas song.
Hawaii. It was most likely settled 1,000 years ago, give or take a couple centuries, and Europeans showed up there in the early 1800s, bringing Christmas with them, which was coincidentally around the same time as the festival Makahiki, Hawaiian new year. Timed out with the cooler weather in December, the rainy season, and the rising of the constellation Makaliki, a.k.a. Pleiades.
Makahiki included feasting, celebration, the God Lono, and the classic peace and goodwill toward all people in the form of a prohibition on fighting between the various Hawaiian chiefs.
And then by the end of the 19th century, Christmas was an official holiday in the kingdom of Hawaii.
Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898, probably, quote, unquote, officially there. And the Hawaiians voted in favor of American statehood in 1959, and around that time, jet airliners transformed air travel, which made flying to Hawaii from America a much more manageable trip financially and temporally. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Cheaper, faster travel is why tourism became the biggest industry in Hawaii, more than pineapples and sugar. In 1960, around 300,000 people visited Hawaii.
In 1970, it was 1.7 million.
It's the 1960s tourism boom. When the boomers-- the baby boomers-- were in their teens, it was a nostalgia-cemented time of plenty. Elvis in Hawaii, Tiki bars and the Kahiki Supper Club, surf culture, all wrapped up with the Christmas songs of their youth. That wave of secular Christmas celebration that included "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Santa Coming to Town," a "White Christmas," "Chestnuts Roasting," "Sleigh Ride" "Let it Snow," and many others.
So of course, "Mele Kalikimaka" has survived. Remember the immortal words of Randall Monroe. Every year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmas of baby boomers' childhoods.
Now don't forget the '60s was also the time when if you were a television show in need of a scenery change or a plot booster, you'd send the cast to Hawaii. Brady Bunch in Hawaii, Flintstones in Hawaii.
The entire run of Gilligan's Island.
Right.
How did they land such a big plane on such a small island? I loved the old television show Connections with James Burke. And he had a way of really, like, he would say things like, and thus, because we started making underwear out of cotton, we have nuclear weapons. And then he would follow through and explain the sort of butterfly effect of all these little things. I feel like the butterfly effect here is jet travel. Hawaii was a luxury spot.
It was part of the American consciousness for 100, 150 years. It was annexed. It became the place everybody went if you were rich and could spend a month in transit. But then finally, post-war, economic boom, technological boom. Almost anybody could go. That "almost" is doing a lot of work, of course. But it happened just at the right time for all the people who are defining Christmas now-- the baby boomers-- to start attaching Hawaii to Christmas time, to luxury, to Elvis, all that stuff.
So I'm going to say a very loose conclusion, I heard "Mele Kalikimaka" this year because of planes.
I follow it. And I think you're right. It made the luxury affordable for the post-World War II rise of the middle class that coincided with jet travel. So jet travel made that affordable. Middle class is a little bit richer than they used to be before World War II. So I follow. It all came together.
Absolutely.
I thought you were leading up to an argument there, Fred.
Well, it's not the reason that "Mele Kalikimaka" lives in my heart. But I agree with everything you said.
You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll be back with more of LITSmas 2022 on the left side of the hour.
All right. I'm going to try one more, and this time, you say it.
Hi, my name is Kieran. You are listening-- wait.
You're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
You are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
This is WREK Atlanta, and it's LITSmas. Almost every year, we do a Christmas show on Lost in the Stacks, and this year, our LITSmas is Christmas Island. Maybe it's about Hawaiian Christmas. Maybe it's about curiosity. Maybe it's even colonization. In fact, I think we have to reflect at least a bit on colonization.
And to do so, I'd like us all to read to you, the listener, from an article called "What Christmas Means in Hawaiian Kindergartens" by Frances Lawrence from the journal Childhood Education published in 1927. And you know it's going to be a humdinger. Please note, we replaced an outdated and offensive adjective with the word "Asian" in this reading.
December days in Hawaii are as warm and balmy as are the days of June in Wisconsin, so Christmas comes in the midst of green foliage, bright, colored flowers, purple mountains, and warm, blue skies. In our kindergartens, Christmas follows all too quickly upon Thanksgiving with its abundance of fruits and flowers.
Three short weeks must suffice for our Christmas program, and into no other weeks of the year are crowded so many experiences and emotions. While this program reaches its climax in the closing day of school, it does not stop then, but carries over through many days and even weeks of the new year.
Over half our children are of Asian, non-Christian ancestry, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, so Santa Claus is known to them only as the hideous, masked, red-coated man of commercial life. His incongruity in a land of perpetual summer has undoubtedly been one factor in his degeneration from the good old Saint we knew and loved as children to a ridiculous clown or a source of fear.
Under these circumstances, we have grown more and more to feel it undesirable to introduce Santa Claus into our kindergarten programs. And of so little interest is he in Hawaii that once left out by the teacher, he is scarcely ever mentioned by the children.
And so let us hear at Lost in the Stacks leave behind the hideous, red-coated man of commercial life and file this set under DU 627.4.E192.
I have to say, that took an unexpected turn for me.
It's a great line, though.
I love LITSmas.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Mississippi Luau" by Charlie McAlister. Before that, "Kona Coast" by the Beach Boys, and we started with "Aloha, Steve and Danno" by Radio Birdman. Those were all songs about appreciating Hawaii from other places in the world.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. It's LITSmas, and this is Christmas Island. Charlie, tell us a little bit about Hawaiian Christmas.
I, of course, have never experienced Hawaiian Christmas. But luckily, I found on the website IslandEssence.com a few descriptions of Hawaiian Christmasy things. They point out that palm trees, not pine trees, are the local Christmas tree. Santa. Well, we just heard maybe that Santa is not so important, but he has come back since those days when he was the hideous, red-coated man. He is now Shaka Santa. This is in reference to the hang loose hand signal, Shaka.
Also, Santa does not have a sleigh and reindeer in Hawaii. He has an outrigger canoe and dolphins that bring him to the island. And at its heart, turning Christmas into Hawaiian Christmas, it really doesn't change all that much. As we've pointed out, it's just Christmas in another place, and a bunch of people really got into it in a certain period of time. But one thing that they do point out is that instead of a Christmas party, there's going to be a Christmas luau. And I want to read this one.
Feasts are still a staple for a Christmas in Hawaii. Families and communities gather together in the backyard or the beach for a Christmas feast or a traditional luau. A Hawaiian Christmas feast is never complete without the kalua pig. Kalua is a traditional cooking style in Hawaii, where they cook the food with an imu-- I-M-U-- or an underground oven. They bury the pig with hot rocks and banana leaves.
After much patience, the result is a deliciously cooked pig with incredible texture and a flavor that is definitely worth the wait. I have had one of these pigs. If you like pork, it is definitely worth the wait. So Hawaiian Christmas became much less interesting to me than the idea of nostalgia and how Christmas was sort of taken as a colonizing agent and then brought back to the coast, sort of remediated.
And Fred found something about that, about the remediation of Hawaiian culture in America.
Oh, yeah. You're talking about the stuff like Martin Denny's music.
I'm talking exactly about Martin Denny.
Oh, yeah.
Tell us about that dude.
Oh, well, we were talking about the '60s, you know, and that kind of explosion of Hawaiian culture. And in the late '50s, early '60s, Martin Denny released a whole bunch of instrumental music, and a lot of it was about Hawaii, but most of it was about tropical locations in general. Jungles, desert islands, you know, islands like Hawaii.
And this kind of music got really popular among the up-and-coming jet set crowd, people that would have very Guggenheim-looking houses and would come home and play space age bachelor pad music on their HiFi stereos while having cocktails with their houses that were, like, in levels. Remember those, or seeing those in, like, mid-century houses.
But it was very much music for its time, but kind of putting this veneer on it, like, oh, we're taking you back to, quote, unquote-- actually, he called his first album Exotica, as if it was-- it was like it's very these exotic lands of this music. He was making very good music, and I love Martin Denny.
But it was definitely in the vein of I'm presenting this foreign or this maybe savage music, but in a palatable format so that you can sip your cocktail in your living room of your Frank Lloyd Wright home. CHARLIE BENNETT: I should point out that Martin Denny was born in New York, raised in Los Angeles, and he died in Hawaii.
This is Lost in the Stacks, and let's get a last bit of Christmas Island music before the end of the show.
File this set under M 1844.H3E4.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was a version of "Mele Kalikimaka" by Dead Meadow. And we started off with "Broadcasting for Jesus" by Sol Hoopii and his Novelty Four, songs about Christmasy communication in Hawaii.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Happy LITSmas, everyone. Thanks for joining us on some version of Christmas Island.
And don't worry about the hideous, red-suited figure in the chimney or the balmy Wisconsin summer weather.
In fact, you don't even have to worry about Christmas if you want to miss it this year. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Wherever you are and however you celebrate this part of the year, we wish you peace and happiness.
And with that, let us roll some credits like waves upon a shore.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier.
Today's show was edited and assembled by Charlie, with a drink in his hand and his toes in the sand.
Sort of.
Legal Counsel and a perfectly ripe pineapple were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks go to our listeners. You are the reason for every season on Lost in the Stacks, each and every one of you.
Find us online at LostInTheStacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Next week's show is a rerun, as is the one after that. We're replaying the last two New Year's episodes as we build up to our 2023 opening show, which just might be back in the WREK studio.
Ooh, fingers crossed.
Looking forward to that. It's time for our last song today and our traditional LITSmas ending song. It doesn't really fit in with the island theme, so I think we might go with--
Hold on, Fred.
Yeah?
We can make this work.
OK. I'm listening.
Consider our traditional closer for LITSmas. I see that while the band has Ohio roots, the song itself is about Christmas in New York City, recorded in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan, which is a what?
Which is-- oh, it's an island. Well, all right. Works for me.
Bring on the new wave Christmas delight.
It's the only way to end a LITSmas. "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses. Chris Butler, Patty Donahue, RIP. Right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great holiday, everybody.
Merry libraries. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Happy archives. CHARLIE BENNETT: Happy LITSmas to all.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You know, my very first Christmas was in Hawaii.
Really? We didn't even get that little fact in. Tell them why, Fred?
Oh, because of colonization. There was an army base in Honolulu, and the army base has a hospital. My dad was in the Air Force while my mom was pregnant with me, and they got stationed in Hawaii. And so the Air Force didn't have a hospital there, but the army did. So I was born at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu and spent my first Christmas there in some military housing apartment. I don't remember any of it.
Do you feel like a part of you belongs there, in Honolulu?
Not really. It's only useful in that it's a-- I was telling Charlie this. It's only useful in that it's a cool fact, if I'm ever in one of those group situations where someone says, tell us something interesting about yourself. I can say, I was born in Hawaii. And then people go, huh. And then that's it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say--