We mark the festival of Christmas, which is the most sacred and hopeful day in our civilization. For nearly two thousand years, the message of Christmas, the message of peace and goodwill towards all men, has been the guiding star of our endeavors. The spirit of Christmas's measure by the love that each of us has in his heart for his family, for his friends, for his fellow Americans, and for people all over the world. It's the Ricochet Podcast.
I'm James Lylyx and I'm here with you. It's just the two of us rambling about Christmas. So let's have ourselves as a verry little podcast, shall we. For many of us, Christmas is a deeply holy day. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number six hundred and seventy one. I'm James Lilyx and I'm joined by No. One. First of all because I'm not falling apart, but secondly because Peter and Rob are off doing holiday things and I thought, you know, we could just take a week off.
But on the other hand, who knows what you're doing making cookies, wrapping presents and tiding up the house for the kids coming home from college. Any number of things, and you want something to listen to us, why not give you a Ricochet podcast, because otherwise, what are you gonna do. You know, you're gonna turn on Spotify and hear the same Carrols over and over and over again, unless it's your favorite one that you really want
to hear. But we'll get to that. I just have to say though, that in the history of podcasts, this is probably one with the absolute shortest shelf life. I mean, oh, you can go back to the two hundreds and three hundreds of Ricochet and see what Peter and Rob and myself we're talking about some terribly important moment in the Obama administration. I'm sure people want to resurrect that and I'll listen to that, but probably not punditry.
It's a very short shelf life unless you get it right. I mean, if you get something really right, you can dine off that. For an awful long time. There was a guy named Chriswell. You may have heard of Criswell. Perhaps he was one of those predictors, one of those guys who'd show up on La TV or in the newspaper like Geene Dixon. You
know how these people ever managed to keep a job. I have no idea, because every week they would make a series of predictions, but some of them would be vague enough in sort of a blind item in a winch will call him. But they Griswell nailed one and I can't remember what it was. He may have called JFK's Unfortunate Appointment in Dallas. Whatever it was, his name was made for a while and it's like, Criswell, maybe this
guy really can predict the future. Of course, nobody believed it, but it got on some publicity and it earned him the opening spot in Edwood's Plan nine from Outer Space. That's right, Criswell is the guy at the desk telling us that we're going to be very interested in the future because the future is where we will spend the rest of our lives. Great ed would stop. So if your Criswell and you get one right, then maybe your punditry
will will last. But otherwise probably not, especially if you're talking about Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year, the day we all look forward to. The whole month leads up to it, and then there's just something about the twenty sixth. Of course, you really don't want to hear about Christmas anymore. I mean the message of carrying through the whole year. Yes,
yes, yes, I know that. But the day after maybe I'm just remembering as a kid, when it just the world seems flat, the air had gone out of the tire, and all the decorations are still in the tree, and the house is still bedecked for it, and you're still in that Christmas spirit. They may be still playing some of the tunes on
the radio. Maybe I don't know for me. You know, Christmas night, the end of Christmas, when everything beneath the tree is bare, and you've put the last wrapping paper into the fireplace, stirred it with the poker, which, by the way, we were informed when we were growing up you were not supposed to burn the paper. Couldn't figure out why. Well, we like to burn the paper. We had a fireplace which was used once a year at our little ranch Rambler in Fargo, North Dakota, built
in nineteen sixty two, turquoise siding, faked flags done out front. Loved that house, and we would burn the paper. And we also had these little wax things that you would throw in the fire and they would make the fire supposedly glow variety of colors. So the Christmas fire was a very important thing. It was fun and you could throw the paper in and we were
told not to by the authorities for two reasons. One that sparks might fly, the pieces of paper might float out in a light on something flammable, and the next thing you know, you're that family that's in the paper the next day standing outside their houses the firemen try to put out the plaze. The other reason was, we were told, was that the paper contained lead. No, well, everything contained lead back then and didn't make it special,
but I guess that was part of the problem. You throw some of this fancy flocked paper in there, and it's got leads and asbestos and chlor and the rest of it. The next thing you know, you're gas in the family, you know, undoing their DNA solidity for the next fifteen years. So we weren't supposed to do that. But to this day I like to burn the wrapping paper, except for the stuff, of course my wife has set aside to be reused. Now you may be like this, You
may have a spouse who's like this. My mother was like this. My mother would watch you very carefully unwrapped your presence, because you wanted to just rip them open, right, didn't She just wanted to rip and tear and see what was inside there. But you know that paper could be reused. My mother, who grew up in a farm in the Depression, didn't grow up hungry, but nevertheless, you know, she was frugal, so there would be boxes saved, there would be wrapping paper that could be saved and
ironed and clipped and used again. So over the years I realized that Mom didn't want me to do that, and I took the packages apart, very very carefully. So it's the end of Christmas, the end of the twenty fifth and as I said, the tree is denuded. All the packages beneath
it are along with there. They've been distributed throughout the house. There's still sort of remnant boxes here and there, and there's something playing in the radio, and the fire is dying down, and you're thinking that it's been a good it's been a good Christmas, you think, and it's odd that you have that feeling at the end of Christmas Day. It's odd that you have that feeling after the guests have gone and you've done that Minnesota thing where you
stand at the door and talk forever. Is that what it's like when you are where you are something about my culture. If people are going to go, they just don't go. First, you move to the door, which is sort of a staging area where the men fiddle with their hats and gloves and the women talk about whatever they didn't get to talk about in the course
of the dinner. And then maybe perhaps if they're really into it, you move to the car and the father, the dad, the guy fires up the car, and then women continue to have a conversation at the window, and if it's particularly cold, it might last only five or ten minutes or so. It's all because gun. At a moment of the twenty fifth at the dinner, when the men push back from the table and slap their thighs and say, welp, that is the sign that it's time to start to
wind it down. Welp, And that you know you got thirty minutes left before you're going to get out of the house. You got to get the leftovers. They have to give you the cookies, right, they have to
find something to put the cookies in. And then of course you're the conversation with the door of the conversation at the car, and eventually you get home and the person who's left at home is standing there at the end and the twenty fifth looking at the tree without the presence, and the fire dying down, and maybe hearing a Christmas carol drifting from the Panasonic radio in the kitchen and the and thinking it's odd that it all seems over, because this right
here in the evening is when it all began. Right, I mean, if the story goes Jesus was born on the twenty fifth at night because it was dark and the shepherds are tending their flocks by night, and there was a star and all the red, that would be the twenty fifth, That would be the end. That would be now Christmas night, when everything seems over, is when everything everything actually began. But the dates, you know,
we don't know. If you grow up Lutheran, you may be convinced that Jesus was born on the twenty fourth because we had a song called I am so glad He's each Christmas eve, I am I am so glad these Christmas the night of Jesus birth, And I sang that over and over and over throughout my childhood without ever putting two and two together. And wait, wait, wait a minute, here, hold on, I am so glad each Christmas Eve, the night of Jesus Birth of twenty four, not twenty
So what's tomorrow then? Exactly? Maybe it happened in I don't know, twelve oh one, twelve oh two, do we know? We don't know anyway, the strange song to sing, but we had to sing it every single year at the one of two Lutheran churches that I ended up going to. One was Elam. That was the home church, the home base.
That's where you went, that's where, that was your place. That was the one where when you were a kid you went to Sunday school, you ran around on the church basement while the adults after church had their weak Lutheran coffee translucent you could see right through it. But man, you could drink gallons of that stuff. Or we would go to Christmas at the farm church. Now, as I mentioned, my mother grew up in a farm and my father grew up in the rural area too, but they didn't have a
farm. They worked for farms. They got put to this house in that house, and this house and that house because they were poor. But they all went to Maple Cheyenne, which is this clapboard ancient church on the edge of the prairie beyond which it's just stretches forever, and you have to know how to get there. The roads to get there are absolutely straight, because when they laid everything out, they laid out straight. That's it rectangular farmland,
farmland, school, church land and the rest of it. But there's one beautiful little curved road that takes you to maple Cheyenne. When you get there, it is not an impressive place. You walk inside and you look at the roof and you see that's pressed tin that they got out of a Sears catalog. Well, they didn't have a lot of money, the pioneers building this place, but eventually they did. Eventually they could afford a stained
glass window. Eventually one of the stained glass windows was put in commemorating one of the early early members of the church, my great great grandfather, who was notable for leaving the farm during a snowstorm around the time of Christmas, getting lost. He's trying to bring the cows in, couldn't find his way back to the house in the storm. They had to sleep inside a dead cow for the night Star Wars style, you know, when Luke did that
great tale. Hardy people, hardy, hardy people. And so that church had a different aspect the El Lutheran Church where we went, that was Fargoing, that was cosmopolitan, but out here with the farmers. And I never knew which exactly when my dad preferred. My dad loved Christmas, he absolutely adored it. And yeah, he'd rip up in his packages. He'd love to see what we could have, because I said, he grew up poor and he loved to give his children the fruits of his success. And he
loved Christmas music. As a matter of fact, I remember the twenty fifth when the tree is empty of presents and the fire is dying out. That my father could frequently be found in the kitchen with the tom and Jerry's listening to the last Christmas Carol because that was the last time at which they really would seem to fit. And he said once I wish they would play Christmas music all year long, and I say, you know, Dad, no, then it would lose its power, it would lose its strength, it's
specialness, or would it don't know? It meant something to him. I know that when he you know, when he was a kid, grown up in various impoverished situations. There wasn't a phonograph they could crank up and play the bing Crosby and the old tunes. There was probably a radio, but I don't know how much Christmas music they pulled in. They didn't have any instruments. Maybe one of his twelve siblings could say something on a mouth harp
or a guitar. I don't know. But one of the stories that my father told me about his first Christmas away from North Dakota was when he was sixteen and he was in World War Two and he was on a subchaser in the Caribbean. The Caribbean you never think about that. You think the Pacific, you think the Atlantic. But no, he joins up at the age of fifteen to go fight because his brother, his twin, had just died and he wanted to get out of there. And so he was fifteen years
old. He goes and he says, I'd like to sign up, and he brought his father to lie to say, yeah, he's sixteen, yeap, he can go. And his father, as a matter of fact, signed up at the same time that that my father did. Still in the Fargo Forum, Father and Son off to war, isn't that great? Heroic? Ex said the father was something the ne'er do well and was trying to get out of his twelve thirteen children obligation. Scallywag never met him because he
was divorced while he was away. Scoundrel pity too, because he had a great last, great first name, Sam. Would have loved to have a son named Sam, but nobody ever had a son named Sam and the Ladlex family. Anyway, my dad goes off to war, and he's in the Caribbean for his first Christmas away from home, and it's hot and it's humid, and his job is to stand there on the deck and look for fish. And by fish, I don't mean aquatic creatures that leap out cartoon alike
like mister Limpet. I mean the little telltale ripple in the water that tells you that there's a torpedo coming it away. That's Christmas. And after his shift was over, he stuck around for a little while and played Christmas tunes on his harmonica to entertain everybody else, because, of course, you know, when you're leaving North Dakota to go to war. You always think,
well, I gotta pack my honor marine band harmonica. So he did, and he stood there and played Silent Night on Christmas in the Caribbean as the young men watched the water for the signs that a torpedo was coming to kill them all. But the good news is when he finally saw one, he could get the message to the bridge in time. But that was after Christmas. Maybe that was the twenty sixth, the twenty seven I have no such tales like that tell because I grew up in a land that my father at
the time, that my father and their generation built. Lucky me. What I do have here, however, is a question for you, and it's this now Christmas music. Will all be tired of it in a little bit, right, But for now, I don't know about you. I put it off. I try not to listen to any Christmas music whatsoever. As the years go by, you find two things happen. Three things. Maybe I just made that up. Better come up with three. The first is
I have absolutely no tolerance whatsoever for modern Christmas music of any kind. It is absolutely empirically true that we live in an era of meritricious pop music where virtually nothing that is being made today is authentic. It is created by robots, It is auto tuned, it is hammered together by the cynical and the base heavy and the a musical and the rest of it. And I just don't like it, No, sir, don't like it, not for me. But I'm correct. I mean it's we all know that as you get
old, you just don't like modern music anymore. But we're lucky in that modern music is, as I said, demonstrably empirically insuperior to that of our youth. It's a fact. So I don't like modern Christmas music, but I don't even like the modern Christmas music of my youth. Jingle Bell rock is an utterly inate song. Rocking around the Christmas tree. I say this every year, rock around a Christmas tree. I don't know how you do
that. If it's in the corner, it's a tight squeeze. I don't even know what rocking exactly is. It's just one of the little novelty songs that they did and has stuck with us forever. That thing had a shelf life of about two years tops. But no, we got to listen to this boomer stuff forever three. I have a particular affection, as do boomers of my generation, for burl Ives, probably a comie who sang a couple of Christmas songs, and every time I hear them just take me absolutely back
to the age of eight, eight, nine ten. Why because of Rudolph. Because of Rudolph, right, I think I'm pretty sure of this. Owen Bradley was the guy who was behind that burl Ives Christmas music album, Holly Jolly and the connection between Holly, Johnny Christmas and Rudolph. We all know, we all grew up with it. We all couldn't wait. It was one of the things with Charlie Brown and Grench that absolutely made Christmas for
us. But there was something special about the Rudolph one because it had peril and had a story in it, and the older thing. I get that I listen to it. All of the songs and the Rudolph special are fantastic. They're all great Johnny Mooks, I think. But from a modern perspective, it is a bit of a strange show, is it not. For one thing, Santa Claus is an absolute tiresome pill. When we first meet
it, he's cranky. It really doesn't want to do this. The elves have been practicing this show for god knows how long, and they put it on for him and missus Claus gets him together and he sits there and he rolls his eyes and he's tired. He's obviously tired. He doesn't want to see this sort of thing. So he's a bad boss. And then when he goes to see Rudolph, who's just been born, and he walks into this cave where the reindeer parents are staying. The cave is absolutely undecorated,
so you get the sense that he's not paying these guys anything. There's no lamps, there's no pictures. He's just bare cave with his kid bouncing around it. And what a Santa do? He sings a song about himself, I am old Chris Kringle, which you know, she's just given birth, she's got a new kid, and he shows up and he starts singing about
himself. That's the kind of guy Sanny is in the Rudolph special. And also this about the Rudolph thing is that that was stop motion right, well, there was another stop motion add that they would put in that and it was an electric shaver, Nerelko, I believe, which had a stop motion Santa who was writing a Neurelko razor around the snow, and it seemed as if this was part of the sand part of the Rudolph verse, if you
will. We loved it when there were commercial tie ins to Christmas because it was you know, wow, the commercials are getting the Christmas spirit as well. Well. I mean this being Ricochet, it's being a good capitalists. We have commercials for you here too. And I want to tell you something here that may not you know, it's not going to show up in time for Christmas, but it's going to show up in time to make somebody's day
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back to the Rudoff thing that I was telling you about. The Other thing that we can never figure out when we were a kid was why Yukon Cornelius would lick the end of his pick. He would throw the thing up in the air and it would land down and he lick it and he'd say nuts something like that. It's because deleted portion of that thing was that Cornelius was
a peppermint miner. He was looking for a rich vein of peppermint, and that's why he would lick the end of the end of his pike, his stick, his pickaxe to see his ice axe whatever killed Tronsky, to see whether or not that he'd struck my rain. But it had the horrible, horrible moment. Rudolph is going off by himself to fight the abominable Snowman, and we think he's gonna die, but he doesn't. He gets back and
reunited with all those sixties archetypes. You know, the guy who looked like mel from Dick van Dyke showed you know round he had big black glasses, and Hermy the little gay dentist, and the rest of it. It's wonderful. So when the Owen Bradley holly jolly music, burl ive stuff comes on, that to me is that's good Christmas music. But then there's the old stuff that preceded me, the old pompular tunes. Not really too much into
the high Luckamucky whatever Christmas whatever that is. But you know white Christmas, of course you love it. The great songs are the sixties. Silver Bells is not a particularly lyrically brilliant song, but it has the wonderful recollected memory of somebody who's not seeing this happen, but remembering shoppers were bustling. I Will be Home for Christmas is a song that occasionally can unstring your bow utterly.
It did to me. I was sitting in a bar. I know that sounds bad in Washington, d C. While it was in the bottom of my building a two thousand and ten where I worked. It was an Italian restaurant, but they had a bar, and it was right before Christmas, and I wasn't going home for Christmas that year, and it was the first time i'd actually that song was playing it the first time I'd listened to
those lyrics. I'll be Home for Christmas, if only in my dreams the first time it struck me, you know, if only in my dreams, because previously, of course I'll be home for Christmas. Why wouldn't I be home for Christmas? Bargo was just up the road on I ninety four. What are the chances that are going to close down the freeway? Well, it happens sometimes the snow is so heavy and so thick that they will close the entrance ramps to I ninety four. But what if you're already on the
highway, You have to keep going. What if it's night Well, you turn on your brights and you follow the ruts of the cars that came before
you to get home. What if it's snowing a lot? You follow the ruts best as you can, and eventually you hope, using your high beams, picking out the reflective markers in the side of the road, this obscure path which you no longer see, which in the summertime is bone dry, and you take it seventy five miles an hour, absolutely zipping on your way to Fargo to home at the end of it, which you know has got
to be there, it always is. Why wouldn't it be it's always home at this point, your hands and knees on the freeway, trusting that home will be at the end of the road. Then it is until it isn't. My mother died, my father died, and there is no house. There is no home for me to go to in Fargo anymore. And that's okay. I've been in Minneapolis since nineteen seventy six, except for a brief tour of duty in Washington, DC. And home is now where my daughter
comes to be. That's the karma of it all, isn't it. I mean here, growing up in Fargner at the my parents were convinced that that was the place to be. And why did I have to go to Minneapolis? What was in that big What was in that place really that Fargo didn't have. Oh, they had colleges. If Fargar Moore had had three colleges, and I'd say, way, Minneapolis is a big downtown. Fargo has a big downtown. Well, it's kind of dying at the time, But anyway, of course I had to go off to the big city. I
had to go off to the Emerald city and make my way. And I was repaidkarmically many years later. When my daughter did the exact same thing upon graduating from high school. It is that she had to go off to the big city and do what she had to do, which was Boston in her case. And I would say, why can't you stay here? We have got a big city, We've got perfectly good colleges. But no, she went, and I'm glad she did because it was good for me and it
was good for her and was absolutely necessary. And now it's all being replayed where she comes home to Minneapolis, to the house, to her room. All of us remember going home for Christmas after being away. Right, there's a wait, there is, and I mean w E, I g h T there is. There's a lightness to it. That's joy that you're coming home, the traditions. You're getting right back into the old groove that you
remember. Swedish meatballs and Christmas Eve we have to have that at the four o'clock handle light service, we have to have that at some point familiarly. We made the shift from Christmas Eve opening to Christmas Day opening. I'm not sure why I liked it better that way. We're always a Christmas Eve family, but when I made the change, it made Christmas day even better,
stalking the stuffing. You know, I still stock my daughter's stuffing. I'm sorry stuff my daughter's stalking spoon rized it there at one o'clock in the morning after she's gone to bed, And I still put on the cookies and hope the dog doesn't get them. Still do all of these things. So when you come home for Christmas after being away for an awful long time, there's the familiarity of all the things that you do. There's the songs that everybody
played. I insist on playing the Good Year nineteen sixty four in nineteen sixty five albums because they are the finest examples of Christmas music ever wrought by the hand of man with the inspiration of God. None better. I mean, you've got okay, you got Maurice Chevalier, Joliel Saint Nikolaos is kind of funny. You got Edie Gormey and Ted what's his name singing sleigh Ride.
You have Adam Maria Alberghetti singing. You have Andre Pustolato's playing this version of We Three Kings, which is just to this moment, to this day, the recollection of it practically cracks me up and brings me tears. So I will play those things so and my daughter will hear them again having not heard them for a year, because she hasn't been home for a year. So everything on the tree will be familiar, the ornaments. There's a story behind
every one of them. I can tell you we got this one at disney World. I can tell you got that one at Macy's in nineteen ninety one. I can tell you I got that one at Element's store in Minneapolis in eighty six. I used to hang it on my door when your mom, when my wife, when she first came to my room, my apartment for Christmas, that was hanging on the door, that little plastic, cheap thing. That's why I kept it here. This little bear, I got this
for opening up a Macy's cart. It's got a little guy go dive a box that he's holding. There may be a chocolate in there, we don't know. It's about thirty five years old. This one right here, that's a Coca Cola one. Used to be you pull that thing back and the mouse would stand up. But it broke, but it's still on there. This right here, child, for shame to tell you is I'm not ashamed. I'm proud is one that you made when you were for and I know
you're embarrassed by it now, but you shouldn't because it's beautiful. And my mother, until the day she died, hung on the Christmas tree a drum that I made from a toilet paper tube that had two little Q tips as drums on it, because drums and Christmas natural connection. So my mom never threw that away. I never threw that away from you. All these things abide and collect, and when you come home, you see all the things you haven't thought about for a year and you're back and it's great. It's
a connection and your heart swells. But there's also a weight a w I j ht to it because your parents are older, a lot older sometimes and you think that the host hasn't changed at all. You look around and you say, these people done anything here, This chair moved since I've been gone. That picture is the same to that picture was there when I was when I was in kindergarten. And then you go up to your room, which is this this memorial to who you used to be. There's books that you
had in high school. God can't believe the taste you had there's a picture that you drew. Oh, you're so much better now. There's a bulletin board and all the pictures and the postcards and all these things from previous pursuits. Oh gosh, postcard from Japan. Can't even remember if I know any Japanese anymore. And there's this sense that your life was sort of freeze dried
and put on display in this room. And you sit down at your desk that you're sat at for your entire life, and you open up your computer, and of course the computer screen is a window to the world that you occupy. Now you can escape through it if you want to, but you're surrounded by where you used to be, and you know you're going to eventually come here and you're going to have to empty everything out. And that's the weight. But it's not now, and it's not next year, not a
year after that, we hope. No, it's Christmas. No, it is Christmas. That's right. It is Christmas, which is why hand on the door. It is a little Santa Claus thing. I can't remember where I bought this years ago, but I made a sort of vow to myself, I'm gonna get out the decorations. I'm going to hang this on her door, and that will be the symbol that Christmas has begun. And so every year I get that out and I hang it on her door, even
though she isn't there yet, but she will be tonight. So that's where I am right. And did I have a third point about Christmas music? Yeah? I think I did. It was another song. It wasn't will be Home for Christmas, I'll be home for Christmas. It wasn't in the Bleak Midwinter, which they played the other day, thinking that's a Christmas song. Huh, please bleak Midwinter around here, that's about the third week of January. I got your Bleak Midwinter. No, I think it was have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, which is a very adult tune. Works well with small jazz ensembles, works well with a cello and a small and a flute, and it has that great yearning moment, which is, like all great Christmas music, touched with an element of melancholy. Right. I mean, you can't tell me that Carol of the Bells doesn't have some melancholy too it even though it's a very vigorous song and it is by the way a
Ukrainian carol. Carol of the Bells is a Ukrainian folk song. It's about a bird that flies into the room, but it have your but have yourself a merry little Christmas. We will muddle through until next year. Nineteen forty four was when that song came out. Next year, we may all be together, nineteen forty four. They're thinking nineteen forty five, it'll be over
and everybody will be home nineteen forty five. As it happens, my father did make it home from his long and perilous time in the Caribbean and then in the in the Pacific. You know, he traded ships with the guy they could do. That guy wanted to swap assignments, so my dad went to the Block Island and the other guy went to the Indianapolis. My dad was supposed to be on the Indianapolis, but it wasn't. So he got
home and they had themselves a merry little Christmas. And when I hear that song play, I think that that's all I really want out of it, A big one anymore. No people will be over. It'll be fine. We're gonna have a great meal and give a gifts. That'll be fine, but I just want a merry little Christmas. It it's not hard to have a merry little Christmas. Even if you're by yourself on Christmas Day eating at
Salisbury Steak Lean Cuisine, which I have done for reasons. It's still Christmas, and there's still something in the season and the meaning and the history and the memories to find and enkindle in your heart. So I am going to have a merry little Christmas, and I expect you to do the same. If you wish, if you celebrate, if you want, if nothing else, find your favorite song, listen, recollect, remember, smile and well
it's Ricochet. So we will muddle through, will we not. And at this time next year, I hope we will all be together as well, with Peter and Rod should they show up. Thank you for being a member, Thank you for listening. This has been the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lilacs. Merry Christmas, Ricochet. Join the conversation.