From the Vault: Goblet of Eggnog

keep going as it would be to turn back. So once more, we have a holiday episode for you. It's actually going to be our third installment in our Holiday Invention series, where we more or less give the invention treatment to various holiday decorations, traditions, and toys. This year, we're going to be looking in earnest at eggnog.

customs and cultural details surrounding it. Now, Joe, I'm not sure what your relationship with eggnog happens to be, because I don't know that we've ever really spoken about this. I don't think we've had eggnog together before, not that I recall, but my family's general approach is originally buy a carton of almond nag each year, largely for our

son because he gets super into it. And if I have a chance to visit a like an upscale cocktail or a nice restaurant, then I will jump at the opportunity to order an eggnog if they have one on the menu. In the past, I've made it down to New Orleans for the start of Beach Bumberry Sipping Santa

festivities at Beach bumb Berry's Latitude twenty nine. They also have pop ups all over the place, and they'll generally have at least one holiday tiki beverage on there that is at least eggnog esque in form.

enough for me. Before we came in here, though, I mentioned to my wife that I was about to record the eggnog episode, and she was kind enough to provide me with an entire glass of eggnog here for me to consume during this episode. The listeners at home, You'll have to take my word for it, Joe. I think you can see it on the video feed here.

about them when I was a kid. So the idea of drinking a sweet egg based beverage was absolutely vile to my brain.

a great book. It's cites, among many others, the legendary professor Jerry Thomas who lived eighteen thirty through eighteen eighty five, the New Orleans bartender who wrote the seminal Bartender's Guide and helped popularize cocktail drinking in general. We're go into more depth on this in an older episode episodes that we did together on Mixology.

put them in his own book at the time. This particular recipe from Jerry Thomas calls for sugar water, brandy rum and shaved ice. A little nutmeg goes on top, and wondridch includes a quote from This is an eighteen seventy three quote from the Brooklyn Eagle that states that this punch was quote the surest thing in the world to get drunk on and so fearfully drunk that you won't know whether you are a cow yourself or some other foolish thing.

Thomas was very much of the opinion that eggnog was quote a beverage of American origin, and Wondrich states that quote the drink's earliest mentions come from a seventeen eighty eight Philadelphia newspaper, and all the other mentions are American and if early European travelers to the United States viewed it as one of the novelties Americans were inflicting on the art of drinking. By the eighteen sixties, it was a drink of comfortable middle age with a wide, if

strictly seasonal popularity. When Thomas added that in the North quote it is a favorite of all seasons, he was certainly overstating the case.

Any nogs? My source here is a December two thousand and nine article called the Origins of Eggnog Holiday Grog by the American Linguist and Language columnist Ben Zimmer, who is brother of the excellent science writer Karl Zimmer, who's been a guest on the show before Huh Crazy. So

here's what Ben Zimmer says about nog. The word nog first shows up as a regional term in England, specifically in the region of East Anglia, so it's the eastern part of the country containing Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and it referred that term. They are referred to a type of beer. We know this because of a letter written from the County of Norfolk in the year sixteen ninety three by a man named Humphrey Priudeaux, who described quote a bottle of old strong beer, which in this country

they call nog. So nog is high gravity beer, it's strong stuff. But to take one step back, why would the East Anglians call strong beer noog? Zimmer identifies a couple of hypotheses here. One is that it comes from the word noggin, which we today think of as antiquated slang for head for your head. But before that nogin meant a small mug or a small drink of spirits. So perhaps noggin was shorter was shortened to nog, and it came to refer to the beer inside the mug

instead of the mug itself. And we do that kind of metonymy with words today like did you have wine? Oh, I drank two glasses. You're not saying you literally drank the glass. The glasses mean the wine inside the glass, right.

But another idea is that the word noog for strong beer comes from a Scottish word nug or nugged ale, which means ale that you heat up by sticking a hot poker in it, which is funny enough to imagine in itself, but I can also see how that would correspond to a drink with strong alcohol alcohol content, because drinks with higher alcohol content are often said to taste warm or even to burn.

We don't know for sure, but the link in the chain seems to be alcohol, because while you can buy kid friendly nog in the dairy isle these days, everything I've been reading suggests that early eggnog was boozy. That was a primary characteristic of what the noog was. It had a lot of alcohol in it.

at mid day grog my palette can regale. So you see the The context here is fully alcoholic grog refers to a spirit or alcoholic beverage. Then there's that line fog DRAMs in the morn or better still eggnog. A dram usually refers to a small drink of whiskey, and according to Miriam Webster, fog DRAMs are quote DRAMs resorted to on the pretense of their protecting from the danger of fog. I'm sorry, boss, I had to have another whiskey before work, or the fog could have killed me on the way here.

what some newspaper articles consisted of at the time. It says, a young man with a cormorant appetite meaning like gluttonous. A young man with a cormorant appetite voraciously devoured last week at Connecticut farms thirty raw eggs, a glass of eggnog, and another of brandy sling.

the young United States in the late eighteenth century. But Zimmer also documents how an early example of eggnog was associated with Christmas celebration by citing a piece in the Virginia Chronicle from January seventeen ninety three, which reads as follows. On last Christmas Eve, several gentlemen met at Northampton Courthouse and spent the evening in mirth and festivity when eggnog

was the principal liquor used by the company. After they had indulged pretty freely in this beverage, a gentleman in the company offered a bet that not one of the party could write four verses extempore, which should be rhyme and sense. Okay, he's like, we're so drunk, I bet none of you can write four lines of poetry that will make sense and rhyme. So what do they come up with? While one guy belts out the following, 'tis eggnog now, whose golden streams dispense far richer treasures to

the ravished sense. The muse from wine derives a transient glare, but Eggnog's drafts afford her solid fare. So move over, wine. The muses are no longer interested in you now they will only be singing to people who are chug and agnog.

an Irish writer and explorer named Isaac Weld. And this passage actually reminds me of earlier when you were citing I think David Wondrich who said that sometimes people from Europe might encounter egnog and think, oh what what you know, what crimes they're committing against a drinking culture here in the Americas. And I wonder if there's a little bit of that kind of raised eyebrow going on in this passage.

But we'll see what you think. So Weld is writing about a stop at an inn near Baltimore, Maryland, where he writes, quote, several travelers had stopped at the same house that I did the first night I was on the road, and we all breakfasted together preparatory to setting out the next morning. The American travelers, before they pursued

their journey, took a hearty draft each. According to custom of eggnog, a mixture composed of new milk, eggs, rum, and sugar beat up together, so eggnog it should be heavy, sweet, exploding with alcohol. Drunk in large quantities in the morning before setting out on a long journey.

you like. But this that the historical truth of eggnog is no, this is the thing that the really drunken adults are having sometimes first thing in the morning.

this famous recipe goes as follows. It's one quart cream, one quart milk, one dozen tablespoons sugar, one pint brandy, half a pint rye whiskey, half a pint Jamaica rum, and a quarter pint sherry. And then you mix the liquor, separate the yolks in the whites of twelve eggs, add sugar to the beaten yolks. Mix well. Then you add milk and cream, slowly beating. Beat the whites of the eggs until stiff peaks form, then fold slowly into the mixture. Then you let it sit in a cool place for

several days. Then quote taste frequently. And I could be wrong, but I believe this is the recipe that our colleague, our colleague Alex Williams uses when he makes his famous eggnog for all of our coworkers.

that up. Yeah, though we will have We will touch on at least one former US president who did have a recipe for eggnog and did serve it and drink it. All right, all this being said, before we proceed with eggnog, I think we can at least consider the possibility of predecessors. That, Yes, even if egnog is something that emerges in North America, there are at least things not unlike agnog that one can encounter, say in at least late medieval and post medieval Europe.

traditions as well as caroling and was sailing. Wassaile, of course, is a door to door ritualistic and communal hot drink that typically contained mold cider ale or wine and spices. But then there is the tradition of the posset, posset

the passet. Yes, the Smithsonian Magazine website has a nice article about this, titled Past the Posset colon the Medieval Eggnog by Lisa Braman, And according to this article, it apparently dates back to late medieval Europe, and it looks like some of the examples come to us from the

post medieval world and beyond. Anyway, the passet itself is a drinking vessel, as Brayman points out, and you see mention of it even in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which Lady Macbeth poisons the possets of the guards outside Duncan's quarters.

my head. But this is a If you can actually look up examples of this vessel online, the pauset this P O S S E T, and you'll find that some of the main examples of this it looks curiously like an ornate teapot with handles on both sides, a wide lidded aperture at the top, with a with a with a lid on top, and the stem for it, you know, like that like a te kettle. It feeds from the bottom of the vessel rather than from the

middle or the top of the vessel. The reason for this design, according to brain And, is that you can drink directly from the stem to get at the liquid contents of the of the of the liquid it contains, but also you can take the lid off the top and go at the top of it with a spoon, because basically you're gonna have a mixture of things. You're gonna have a fluid beneath and kind of a chonky chonky creamy perhaps cheesy layer at the top.

we have today. I think about certain milkshakes, certain smoothies, certainly especially the older school cappuccinos, where the foam cap on top was maybe a little firmer, and you might have to go at that with a spoon as opposed to drinking it. So I kind of reject the idea that this potential hygiene issues aside of late medieval ages. I don't think this is necessarily that gross of an idea that you could have some sort of like a thick portion on the top of your beverage that requires

a spoon. It's just like a little different to imagine this bizarre container for its consumption, though nowadays I do want to point out we do have things like the spoon straw, which is like a plastic usually like a plastic straw and spoon combined so that you can do both. They did not have this technology in the late medieval period to my knowledge. Therefore they had to use a poset.

almond paste. In some cases, the upper portions are said to take on a cheesey quality, which actually brings to mind modern cheese milk tea drinks, which are quite delightful if you haven't had one, I know, this is something that can be kind of hard to imagine. Why should my milk tea taste like cheese. Well it's it's not what you're imagining if you're imagining something that turns your stomach. It's not like cheddar cheese on the top of your tea.

It's something sweetier and creamier, but with that slight cheesy twist.

something you spoon out of a dish. But is it eggnog? Well, in many ways, if not most ways, no. But it also sounds like the sort of thing that if you were a time traveler from an eggnog having culture and you went back to the late medieval ages and you're like, where's my eggnog and people are like what are you talking about? You might discover the posset and be like, oh, well this will work, this will do. Now my holiday is complete.

that few survive today. This kind of comes back to your example earlier about egg nog for breakfast, Why not perfect, keep the fog away, et cetera. Now, now I should point out this is the two thousand and seven books, so I'm not sure if we've seen anything in the

way of a resurgence of egg drinks. It might be the case, though, you know, given the spirit of cocktail making and it's tend to re explore older fashions and even remake them with modern twists, I don't feel like it's tremendously uncommon to find at least a single egg drink on a fancy cocktail menu, though to be sure, you probably won't find them on just random restaurant cocktail menus. Like I don't know if Chili's offers an egg drink.

and club soda. It's one that famously requires a great deal of shaking. You may you may receive a dirty look from the bartender when you order it because of all the shaking it's going to require. Sometimes they have to pass it off to another bartender to continue shake

shaking it. But it is also a delightful drink. But yeah, he Wonderedge points out though, that even though we only have so many egg drinks that kind of survived, there was this time where where egg based drinks, egg egg based alcoholic drinks were consumed on pretty much a daily basis, And we're as popular as eggnog drinks are during the holiday year round. So just imagine imagine a world in which eggnog is stocked at the grocery store year round

to meet people's demand. For it, and everybody's having it boozed up. Not that they bought it at the grocery store, they made. You get my point.

For instance, anywhere you go today the my tie recipe, there's no telling what a restaurant will actually serve you if you order a my tie, even though the the original recipe is very well known at this point, or it's it's very easily obtained if you have a desire to seek it out. But these regional differences in eggnog,

this would this would really make people emotional. Wonderdch Show points out this account where there's a judge who encountered eggnog in an inn and it didn't have whiskey enough in it, and therefore there was this huge altercation.

the Texas Republic from eighteen forty three. The recipe serves about one hundred and sixty It calls for seven gallons of mescal, seven gallons of donkey milk, thirty dozen eggs, and a large loaf of sugar.

recipe for modern drinkers in that book. He of course says you can use cow milk instead of donkey milk, and he also recommends grating a little chocolate on top. So Jerry Thomas apparently chronicled six different eggnog recipes, and Wondrich includes recipes for three of them in his book. Roughly speaking, these are the contents of these three that he shares. There's Baltimore eggnog, eggs sugar, nutmeg, brandy or rum, wine, egg whites and milk. There's Eggnog Individual, which calls for sugar,

cold water, egg, cognac, Santa Cruz, rum and milk. And then there's General Harrison's eggnog. This is ninth American President William Henry Harrison, and this was said to be one of his favorites. It called for egg, sugar, hard cider, and lumps of ice. Important to note here that cider drinking was part of his brand. His whole image that he tried to put out was like, I'm not really at home in this old Washington environment. I just want to sit on the porch and drink some hard cider.

Won't you have some of my hard cider based eggnog and vote for me?

drinking chilled milk. That was his thing. That was the hardest drink that Zachary Taylor was known to imbibe himself. But I cut most of this out because he wasn't drinking as far as I can tell, a cherry chilled milk concoction. It was just chilled milk and then also a lot of cherries.

assistant in a lab who worked for salmon. The assistant's name was Theobald Smith, but of course the boss gets all the glory. Some zero types of salmonella are responsible for really serious and historically significant diseases such as typhoid fever, but multiple types of salmonilla will result in infections of the intestinal tract. So salmonilla infection or salmonellosis, is one of the most common food borne illnesses, often characterized by fever, diarrhea,

severe stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and headache. And because salmonella is often transmitted through the fecal oral route, the risk of contracting it is higher when people don't have access to clean drinking water and effective sewage disposal. Though, salmonella can also be transmitted between animals and humans, so animal vectors such as eggs from infected chickens, can be a major source of salmonillosis in humans as well. Now, on the other hand, one thing to remember is that most

eggs are fine. Most eggs are not infected with salmonilla. I don't know what the exact proportion is, but One figure I saw kicking around from the two thousands was a CDC estimate that roughly one in every twenty thousand chicken eggs in the United States was contaminated. That number may be different today. If so, it is probably somewhat lower than that. But you know, I'm not saying you

should go about eating raw eggs. There is definitely risk there, but also like the odds are pretty low that any given egg is going to make you sick. Also, eggs are fine if you cook them to the proper temperature for the proper time. One hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit will kill just about anything instantly. Also, you know, even lower temperatures, if held for a sufficient amount of time,

will be enough to to basically sterilize eggs. This is you can look up charts on the amount of time eggs need to spend at a certain temperature in order to make them safe. However, eggnog is traditionally not made with eggs that are cooked at all, but rather with raw ones. So is there any risk, Well, yes, obviously if you are just drinking raw eggs straight up, there

is some risk of salmonilla infection. One example of this I mean, it happens all the time, but one example, one case study I dug up with an interesting secondary finding. This is a study published in The Lancet in nineteen seventy five by Steer at All called person to person spread of salmonilla typhimurium after a hospital common source outbreak. So the abstract reads, in September nineteen seventy three, diarrhea caused by salmonilla typhimurium developed in thirty two people in

a main hospital. Both epidemiological and microbiological evidence indicated that raw egg beaten in milk for eggnog was responsible for the infection. However, six patients and eight employees had not had eggnog, and their illness developed after the source of infection had been recognized and removed. Most of these people had had direct contact with an infected patient and presumably

acquired the infection by person to person spread. It's concluded that person to person spread of salmonilla typhimurium can occur in hospitals and can be a hazard to patients and staff. So initially a bunch of people in a hospital got salmonella from drinking eggnog, but then those people gave secondary infections to others who didn't even touch the noog. Also, I wanted to share another medical journal article I found

just because I thought it was very weird. This is called eyelid absess in an eggnog drinker by Marcus and Wolverson, published in the British Medical Journal nineteen eighty nine. Short story is a seventy two year old man showed up at a hospital in England with a huge abscess swelling on his left upper eyelid, which they eventually determined had spread to an infection of the bone in his forehead, the bone above where his eye was. So he was

put under general anesthesia and the absess was drained. They did a culture of the pus and it revealed the presence of a type of salmonella. They eventually did another procedure to take care of the swelling in the bones of the face, and he eventually made a full recovery. The man had no gastro intestinal symptoms, and the authors say that there had been recent cases of salmonilla infection related to eggs, So they asked him about his diet.

And here I'm going to read from the case report his diet consisted of West Indian and European food, but he said that he cooked all eggs well. When he was seen in the outpatient department, he was specifically asked if he drank eggnog, and he then admitted drinking it frequently, using a recipe of raw eggs, brandy, sugar, milk, and

vanilla essence. Now, the authors say they could find no previous evidence of this particular type of salmonella causing an eyelid absess, but that there are other known cases of this bacterial infection spreading from a gut infection originally to a secondary infection elsewhere in the body, such as in the bones, especially the long bones, especially in patients with underlying medical conditions, and in patients over seventy years of age.

And finally, the author's write quote, from nineteen eighty one to nineteen eighty six, the proportion of salmonilla infections caused by salmonella, and then they're talking about a specific type here, salmonilla teriditis rose from eleven percent to twenty eight percent. This rise was due mainly to a rise in phage type four infections. Transmission of this phage type has been increasingly associated with poultry, and it is now known to

be transmitted in eggs. Egg born salmonilla teroiditis is destroyed by thorough cooking. The raw egg in the eggnog may have been the vehicle of infection. Unless specifically asked for, a history of eggnog drinking may not emerge on dietary questioning. But okay, now, I'm sure a lot of people out there are wondering, Wait a minute. Okay, obviously, you know you mix up a bunch of raw eggs and you just drink that, that definitely is putting you at risk.

But if you put alcohol in the eggnog, surely that would be safe. Right. Doesn't alcohol kill germs?

in an eggnog like product containing seven percent ethanol. This is by notermans at all, So this is a lab test. They say, let's make some boozy eggnog and directly inject pathogenic microorganisms in there and see what happens. So they say a liquor consisting of whole egg sacros meaning sugar twenty five percent and ethanol of seven percent was artificially contaminated with Salmonella teriditis, salmonilla, typhomurium, Staphylococcus aureus, three different

strains Basillis serious, and Listeria. And they say, after three weeks of incubation at twenty two degrees celsius twenty two degrees celsius is about seventy one degrees fahrenheit room temperature, the numbers of salmonilla, Staphylococcus aureus, and of the Listeria species they use decreased by more than three log based ten units, and if I understand correctly, I believe that's a ninety nine point nine percent reduction in the number

of bacteria units there. They say, under such conditions, however, the total number of microorganisms increased three log ten units. Then they say at four degrees celsius, so I think this would be simulating refrigerator temperatures. The decrease of pathogenic microorganisms was much slower, and a decrease of three log based ten units was observed only after seven weeks of incubation.

So this study finds eggnog without alcohol incubated at room temperature. Yeah, that's you allow populations of salmonilla and staff to explode. But in this study, the presence of seven percent straight ethanol significantly reduced the amount of salmonilla staff in listeria over the course of three weeks at room temperature and over the course of seven weeks at fridge temperature. However, other microorganisms can grow.

and Shuck and it was covered on Science Friday. And apparently these researchers used a recipe that the staff at the university would make every year, which originally traced back to the great American microbiologist Rebecca Lancefield. So this is her original eggnog recipe. She had worked at Rockfiller University decades earlier. Apparent they're still making her eggnog years after she passed away. And the recipe includes raw eggs, but

also cream, sugar, and a lot of hard liquor. The liquors in this version are Bourbon and rum NPR reported that the alcohol concentration of the final drink was about twenty percent. And the way they would do it is every year they'd make it before Thanksgiving and then enjoy it around Christmas time. So it had an incubation period in the refrigerator of about six weeks. So for this experiment, the researchers made their usual noog, but they deliberately spiked

it once again with salmonilla. Just you can watch video of this. They're just injecting this orange juice into the eggs. It's disgusting. They say. They put in the amount of salmonella you would expect from including about somewhere between one and ten contaminated eggs, and then they took samples at various stages of preparation and incubation to see what grew over the course of the next three weeks. So egg plus salmonilla with no alcohol, that's just it formed a

solid mat of salmon just huge boom, millions of bacteria. Disgusting.

there's nothing, no bacterial growth at all. So somewhere between one week and three weeks this batch went from biohazard to presumably safe. Though I noticed that the Science Friday report made a joke about like the researchers themselves are joking about this. They said, you know, we could really commit to our result and just drink it, but maybe not,

which makes sense right, like why risk it? And that kind of spirit comes through in a lot of the other sources I've seen talking about whether alcohol will render your eggnog safe, because it seems clear there's evidence that at least in some cases, even if you got unlucky enough in got a contaminated egg, given enough alcohol and an enough time, the noog would probably be safe. But there are a lot of variables here, and so it seems like a bunch of public health and food safety

sources are still cautious. They're still kind of cagy about giving the green light on this, and they default to saying that if you want to be sure you're safe, you should use pasteurized eggs from a carton which have been rendered safe by preheating in the facility where they

were packaged, or they also recommend cooking the eggs. Basically, like sources citing experts at the FDA or the USDA say that you can't always count on alcohol to kill potential bacterial content of raw eggs, and if you want to be safe, the eggs should be cooked. You can do this by like mixing the eggs and milk together and gently bringing up to one hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit while stirring to kill any possible bacterial content before

you add the other ingredients. So personally, I don't know exactly where we are left here. I will say it looks like some experiments do show that alcohol content will at least often, maybe not always, but will at least often neutralize the main bacteria that people are worried about,

meaning salmonilla, given enough alcohol and enough time. And I will say that I also, just speaking for myself, not giving advice to other people, have personally drunk eggnog made in this way with raw eggs but with lots of alcohol content, and personally I felt fine about it. But it also looks like some experts still have concerns that this might not always work, and caution that if you want to make sure you're safe, you should cook your eggs or use a pasteurized product.

not knowing exactly how risky it is. Like you you can't come up, you don't have a number, you know, to say like, Okay, I have this percent chance of getting salmonila if I do this instead, you just have a vague sense that I have some small chance and I don't know exactly what that chance is.

Randy Quaid, among others. But there are at least a couple of key scenes in this movie in which the Griswold family drinks eggnog from glass goblets made in the likeness of the Wally World moose. These are you can actually buy these now, this is an actual product. But in the movie they are these these little glass goblets and they have big glass moose antlers on either side, and there's a big droopy moose snout on the front.

Hold it by the ear and you sip your eggnog that way, or you gulp it, as it happens to be the case in some of the scenes.

the ryton. This is generally spelled r hytn and it is a style of head cup that appears in various forms throughout the ancient world, according to Maha Abd el Maghwud al Kadi in Forms and functions of rytons in Ptotomaic Egypt. According to this author, they were likely Persian in origin and were particularly pop they're during the Acaimenid dynasty of five point fifty through three point thirty PCE.

You can look up images of the ryton and the various versions of the ryton that appear in different times and different cultures. One can roughly compare these to a drinking horn like a you know, the hollowed horn of a beast, But the design and function here is a little more involved. So imagine a drinking horn in which the slender part of the horn, the tapering part of the horn, is in the likeness of an animal's head, or in the like the front half of an animal.

And we don't have time in this episode to really dig into the variation and the different cultural takes in this episode. But again, this would have been a realistic drinking vessel. This would not be something you would bust out, I would imagine for your just everyday consumption. This would be for ceremonial drinking. And there are essentially two types

of ryton. In one form, you drink from the slender part of the ryton it above one's head or roughly you know, above one's head, or at least parallel with one's head, by either twin handles on the side, or from some other kind of handle that's a fixed to the object, or even from sort of the horn itself.

In other forms, one drinks from the wide portion of the ryton, so the whole thing is more like a traditional goblet, except many of these designs would require you know, gripping by the horns or by the or the antlers that are on it. If there are antlers on it and you might not be able to set it down, it might not have a bottom to it.

last year. The item was apparently eluded from a museum in Turkey originally, but I'm unsure exactly when the looting occurred other than sometime during the twentieth century during a time of unrest, which that only narrows it down so much concerning the twentieth century, though, it does seem to be of ancient Greek manufacture, somewhere in the region of

the Black Sea, probably from the fifth century BCE. And with this one, you'd apparently drink from the stag's lower lip while holding it aloft, though not by the antlers, as is visible in many photos of this particular artifact. There's this curved handle behind the neck. Oh, I see it. Yeah, So the question remains, is the Wally World mug a ryton? No, it's not. No, it's not. Yes, it's first of all,

it's not horn shaped. It also doesn't You don't drink from the moose's lips, so that alone wouldn't disqualify it from being a ryton, as we previously noted, though I've included a picture for you, Joe, of a ryton that would involve you drinking from the wide portion as opposed

to the beast lips. You can sort of see, so this one would be very much a situation where you have this kind of like I don't know, bronze or golden chalice, and you wouldn't be able to set it down because instead of having a flat surface, flat bottom on the bottom of your goblet, there is like the head of a ram down there. Yeah, so you'd have to lay it on its side, I guess, in which case you would either spill what you were drinking or you would have to have consumed it all.

of warrior ethos. We do see Clark Griswold drinking copious amounts of nog while working cousin Eddie up for violence, though curiously I had to go back. I was imagining this, remembering this scene incorrectly, the scene where Clark Griswold is throwing back a whole bunch of eggnog and talking about how he wishes somebody would kidnap his boss. He's curiously not drinking from one of the moose goblets in this scene. Oh so, I don't know. I don't know what the

reason for that is. You'd think you'd want him drinking out of the moose. Maybe it's just because it's harder to hold. I don't know.

a big silver moose head. Perhaps you grip it by the antlers, and he's allowing cousin Eddie to then drink nourishing noog from the lips of the moose before he sends him out into glorious battle against the enemies of Christmas.

We'd love to hear your take on all of this. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Mondays we do a listener mail episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.