You're Wrong About
Sarah is a journalist obsessed with the past. Every week she reconsiders a person or event that's been miscast in the public imagination.
You're Wrong About
Cold War Santa with Sarah Archer
What happens when Santa trades his sleigh for a rocket ship? Christmas correspondent Sarah Archer tells Sarah about how the Cold War era affected the image of old Kris Kringle through the rampant consumerism and shiny new technology of a post-war economy. Digressions include Reagan’s girlypop diet, the Freudian aspects of the Nutcracker, and the thrilling history of aluminum.
Visit the YWA Instagram for visual references
More Sarah Archer:
Sarah on Instagram
Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler
More You're Wrong About:
YWA - Cold War Santa
Sarah M: Imagine if 17 on fire, levitating eyeballs appeared in front of you and were like, “Don't freak out.”
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we love to investigate the mystery that is Santa. And so of course, this week we are joined by Sarah Archer, our Santa Correspondent.
We did a Santa episode last year, which I would love for you to listen to. We had a great time. And this time we are talking about a particular moment in Santa history. We're talking about the Cold War Santa, and how the 1950s and the post-war era in the United States transformed what we make of Christmas and what Christmas has made of us.
We've had many great past Sarah Archer episodes, including one on Martha Stewart, and one of my favorites titled, The Trad Wife Rises. And of course, when we are talking about Santa, we're talking about so much else. And I love getting into the back rooms where all of these ideas connect, and somehow a lot of these ideas involve women doing more work, which I also find interesting.
Also, as you may or may not know, I have an exciting new show out with CBC podcasts. It's called The Devil You Know, it's about the Satanic panic. If you've been listening to me talk about the Satanic panic for the past seven years, then this is a place where we get to interview people, learn about the nooks and crannies of North America, how this flourished and why. And we get into some of the questions that we just have not been able to explore in this show.
But I would love for you to join us over there, and we will be putting out new episodes for the next couple weeks, as well as bonus episodes. And you can find The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts.
Of course, we also have a very fun bonus episode coming for you soon. It is a little survivalism Q&A with our survival correspondent, Blair Braverman. And more little bonus surprises are also coming over on Patreon. So we hope you join us over there or on Apple podcast subscriptions.
Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for continuing on into the wintertime, if that's what's happening to you, too, right now. And here's your episode.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where once again, the holidays are happening to us. And with me today is Sarah Archer, who is dare I say it, our Christmas correspondent. And you are here with us today to talk about, and I was reflecting on this this morning, there are some phrases you can only say in an Oprah voice, and this is one of them, “Cold War Santa.”
Sarah A: It is perfect. It needs to be said in an Oprah voice. And it needs to be like arms extended, hair tossing from side to side. And we deliberately put Santa Claus on pause, in unintentional rhyme, at the end of the last episode.
Sarah M: “Santa Claus on Pause” sounds like a Disney movie.
Sarah A: It does, yeah, from the eighties.
Sarah M: It’s about Santa Claus dying and being reincarnated as a corgi, who's voiced by Beau Bridges.
Sarah A: Can we make that happen? Is there a way that we could make that happen by December?
Sarah M: I'm sure with AI we could, but please don't. We need the water. Someday your great-grandchildren will fight to the death over a teaspoon of water, and we're throwing it away generating little videos of hot blondes doing God knows what.
Sarah A: God only knows. Ugh. I know.
Sarah M: But yeah, you're right. We put a pin in Santa. Tell us about that. What was our episode, what's the prequel to this episode?
Sarah A: So that's what I was actually going to ask you to reflect on. What your impression was?
Sarah M: Yeah. What's the Hustler to this episode's The Color of Money?
Sarah A: Exactly. That we had, that we left. You know, we tore through history from the ancient world to kind of the gilded age in the United States. But I wanted to kind of get your sort of overall impression of kind of who and what Santa was, sort of what is Christmas in this era when we left off, you know what I mean? And kind of who was he? What was he getting up to?
Sarah M: Yeah, I'll try. The interesting thing about making a podcast, I think, and maybe you experience this as well, is that to me, I'm focused so much as we're making the show on the conversation we're having in the present moment, that it feels like my brain makes fewer memories, because it's so focused on what's going on right now. And then I just release everything I've just learned to make room for the next thing, it feels like.
And so if I listen back to an episode, I often am like, wow, that's so interesting. Or I'll make an observation and be like, oh, that was pretty good. You know? Because I don't remember thinking that, because some of my best revelations I have forgotten about.
Sarah A: But luckily they were recorded in audio format, and we have notes.
Sarah M: Well, exactly. Which is why Nixon had the right idea about so many things.
Sarah A: Exactly.
Sarah M: Yes. That's, well, certainly about cottage cheese. I mean, let's be honest.
Sarah A: And grapefruit.
Sarah M: Yeah. And Nixon was the OG cottage cheese influencer. Girly pop, I must say. Nixon ate like a girly pop. It must be said. That's what was going on with him when he was in law school. This is true. He was surviving on candy bars.
Sarah A: Was he really?
Sarah M: Just like a girly pop.
Sarah A: Whoa. Nuts, nougat, little chocolate.
Sarah M: I think Milky Way, I want to say.
Sarah A: Milky Way. Oh, okay. So no nuts. All right. All right.
Sarah M: But look, I wouldn't testify to it under oath, Sarah. I like all candy bars, but I would never take one from a baby.
Sarah A: People need to know if their podcast host is a crook. Yeah. You do a good Nixon. I don't know if I've ever heard your Nixon before.
Sarah M: Thank you. Look, I’m not saying I'm great at it, but I do take some pride in my… no, I take pride, pride. Some people say too much, that's okay. But I take pride in my Nixon impression and my Ethel Merman impression, as I think you know.
Sarah A: Oh, I think yes. I think I do know that.
Sarah M: Have I done that one for you?
Sarah A: I think you have. Yeah.
Sarah M: You're supposed to say, “no”.
Sarah A: No, do it again! No, do it. Do it for the first time.
Sarah M: Is there a song or perhaps a Christmas song you'd like to hear in the style of Ethel Merman?
Sarah A: Oh my God. Can you do, Santa Baby?
Sarah M: Okay. Yes. “Santa a baby slip a sable under the tree, for me.” She's got a cold.
Sarah A: Yeah, but she's supposed to.
Sarah M: Yes. Always.
Sarah A: But I love her so much. Oh my God. That's really, now that you've done it, I think that might've been the first time I heard it, which is really exciting.
Sarah M: Well, anyway, okay.
So the rule of Santa, as we talked about it and Christmas, I think was not so different actually from an episode I did with Chelsey Weber-Smith a while ago on the show about the history of Halloween. Which is this idea that it started off as something that was kind of by and for the people, and became sort of co-opted, and commodified, and set in place as a certain type of much more controllable and less chaotic behavior.
Where in kind of our originating Christmas traditions, we have what wassailing, I guess, as a verb. Tell us about wassailing.
Sarah A: I think nowadays, if you're familiar with the word ‘wassailing’, your association probably with it is people in bonnets and kind of going from house to house and when it's snowing, which it never does on Christmas. But it's this kind of Victorian, very cozy image.
Sarah M: Have you heard the factoid that I probably mentioned in this previous episode, that Dickens grew up during an unusually snowy sort of weather period in England, and that's why he wrote about so much snowy Christmas stuff, partly maybe?
Sarah A: Yeah. Which might be true. I actually don't know whether that's true or not, but I believe it.
Sarah M: And then to us in America today, Christmases like Dickens, although we don't bother reading him because his books are too long, right? But the idea of snow as essential to Christmas feels derived partly from his particular childhood, which is so interesting.
Sarah A: But it's like an unattainable goal. Because we can't control it. And it never happens.
Sarah M: And because interestingly, in places where it snows a lot, it seems to mostly do it in like November and March.
Sarah A: Exactly. So it's like Valentine's Day or Arbor Day. I don't know what holidays are there? Well, I guess sometimes there's Easter.
But we had gone back in time to St. Nicholas who was a real person, right? Who existed in the ancient world, third century, what we now call Turkey. He was associated with charitable acts toward a group of young women's sisters, who he helped prevent from having to become prostitutes. And that was what he was famous for. So that was Santa Claus in the ancient world.
He then gets kind of grafted onto European celebrations like yule and the sort of figure of Father Christmas, who's kind of associated in a general way with all these different kind of folkloric traditions throughout Europe.
So the fact that Santa Claus has a lot of different names, like he'll sort of be referred to as Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, Santa, Santa Claus, is a kind of a fossil record of the fact that he sort of was woven together from these different traditions.
Sarah M: Right. Just like the word ‘bimbo’.
Sarah A: Which is equally etymologically fascinating. Exactly.
There was this group of prominent New Yorkers which included, it was our three guys who we talked about. Merchant John Pinard, the writer Washington Irving, and poet and real estate heir Clement Clark Moore, who wrote, A Visit from St. Nicholas. And their works collectively, in kind of thinking about this figure of Santa Claus and how Christmas could be celebrated, helped transform Christmas from kind of a rowdy holiday that happened outdoors, where a lot of sort of youths would be knocking on your door, demanding alcohol and kind of like harassing.
Sarah M: Not youths!
Sarah A: It was youth. Sarah. It was youths on the street. They wanted everybody inside. They said they wanted everybody indoors, like play with a toy, be inside, have a nice feast, do something, be a pain in the neck, but do it inside and don't terrorize the community.
And this is the moment when Christmas pivots from being this basically holiday sort of festival for grownups, to being very child focused, and kind of self-consciously so.
Sarah M: Interesting. So it starts off as maybe something a little bit more like Mardi Gras?
Sarah A: Yes, absolutely. It starts off, especially in New York City,
Sarah M: Or St. Patrick's Day. Where it’s a day for normal working people to cut loose.
Sarah A: To cut loose, yeah. Have a cocktail. Be kind of like rousting about.
Sarah M: Puke in the street. Puke in the street, perhaps, if one must.
Sarah A: Once or twice a year.
Sarah M: Better there than indoors.
Sarah A: And so that poem which you read for us, as I recall, in the voice of Rod Sterling, as Baby Jesus intended. A Visit from Saint Nicholas basically sets the scene for the way that we envision Santa Claus now.
Sarah M: Although, as we discussed, as I remember now, he's like a tiny, little guy. He's a tiny, little guy.
Sarah A: So this is why we're going to look at your fancy Cold War Christmas document. Because there are some nice images in this kind of transitional period of Santa from the Gilded Age, actually. The first one is from Harper's Weekly. And describe what we're seeing. He's like, I would say not ‘elfin’.
Sarah M: No, he is got a nice red Mac on, I would say. Yeah. Or like a big sort of red, one-piece cloak with a nice, pointed hood. Actually, he's kind of dressed like a cardinal, isn't he?
Sarah A: Yep.
Sarah M: Yeah. And he’s got like big, kind of knuckle hands, and a big, bushy beard.
Sarah A: Exactly.
Sarah M: And he is tall. Clearly, based on kind of how he is in relation to the tree he's next to, I think. Assuming it's a full-size tree.
Sarah A: Exactly. He's kind of next to what looks like it's probably a pine tree, and that's kind of, he's towering over.
Sarah M: Yeah. He looks like an old, human man with a crinkly, smiley face and a big white beard and white hair. Which is very familiar to what we know now. Although, he's less stylized. Santa, I think eventually begins to look like a drunk, because he is a little bit too rosy at times.
Sarah A: It's a little bit, yes. Well, actually, and we're going to get to that. Because he’s the next one, if you scroll down, he’s from the turn of the century, about a decade or two later. And this to me, this is kind of like classic or Santa like what, what he's wearing?
Sarah M: Yes. This is like Coca-Cola Santa. Because he is got like a velvet coat with a white fur trim and white fur cuffs. Actually, it looks like he's got white gloves on, which is interesting. It’s cold up there, you know, when you're working with snow, when you're getting into all those chimneys.
And a wavy, very well-conditioned white beard and white hair, and the traditional, I think, red velvet Santa cap with the white fur trim. And he’s got a sack full of toys, of course. Including a little toy drum, which I think you see a lot, I assume, because we like to talk about the little drummer boy. Although, I don't know when that showed up.
Sarah A: Or because drums look kind of cool. And I think as you're getting at something that's actually really key to the way that he's portrayed in this era. Which is that he becomes, as we talked about, Stephen Nissenbaum’s wonderful book, The Battle for Christmas, which traces Santa's evolution kind of throughout the 19th century and the way in which he becomes almost a figure.
I think it's possible to make the case that he's a figure of the arts and crafts movement in a way, because he's depicted very often - and we're going to look at this image again - as a carpenter in a workshop using old fashioned tools to make increasingly technologically complicated toys. And he's doing this really at the height of the industrial revolution.
It's kind of a right Victorian iteration of a medieval scene. And it's happening at the time when, I mean, it is so weird to even contemplate the United States as not a consumer society. Because none of us have any living memory of that. But there was a time when this idea, like there was an op-ed ran in a New Hampshire newspaper in the 1830s called, Think Before You Buy, that was all about - Nissenbaum quotes this in his book about, are we spoiling these kids? Is it conspicuous consumption? Is it sensible? What is this all for?
So one of the key things to note kind of before diving in, is that Santa's scene, his mis-en-scène, his workshop, his outfit, what he does, the fact that toys get to you as a small child magically, and not right at a cash register, and not from a big department store, and not flown in or shipped in a big shipping container. He kind of craft washes the whole consumer process that makes Christmas possible.
And what's interesting and what we're going to look at today is three different Christmas visual extravaganzas, if you want to call them, one movie and two cartoons. Both of which have quite a lot of anti-consumerist sentiment built in, even as they kind of rebel in the splendor of it all. Sothe other thing is that you may have heard Sarah, that there is a war on Christmas.
Sarah M: Oh yes, I have heard about that.
Sarah A: Which, I guess we should say from the outset is, is A) not true, but B) if it were true, it is kind of fighting a battle against an assertion that isn't real. Which is that there was a time before, you know, sometime maybe in the 19th century, maybe in the Middle Ages, maybe some other kind of glittering candlelit time that is very pretty and bucolic, when Christmas was about the spirit of goodwill towards men, and charity, and being warm and cozy, and having fun with your kids. And it wasn't about buying stuff, and it wasn't about consumption.
And in fact, there is no version of that holiday that ever existed. Like when it became child-focused is when it became retail focused. So those two things have never existed separately. But it is easier to be nostalgic about something that never was because you can't recreate it.
Sarah M: And also, because it's like if you were nostalgic for the actual past, you would have to let in all this stuff about it that was more complicated. So by definition, nostalgia is like a selective emotion.
Sarah A: And you'd have to start becoming charitable yourself in the present day. Which like, God forbid.
So the Gilded Age is when a lot of our customs gel in America. In 1870, it becomes a federal holiday. Louis Prang markets the first commercially available Christmas cards in 1875. That is roughly the time… it’s sort of like alternative crayon brand. Right? Aren't kind of, they're like Brach’s Candy. The one’s that aren’t Crayola.
Sarah M: It’s like, “Eww, mom got me Prang’s”.
Sarah A: Yeah, that’s alright. It’ll do.
Sarah M: Fanta, until you can get a real crayon.
Sarah A: Real, with a built-in sharpener. And this is also the moment when we start to have Santa present in department stores. So there's this funny gesture of instead of sort of hiding the commercialness of it, Santa as a persona, gets kind of woven together with the process. Almost as though you're going to see the wizard, you know? You're going to see the sort of magical man who's in the fancy place, and it's kind of like confession.
Sarah M: It's completely insane, by the way, to have to have children pose annually for a meet and greet with Santa, which I would never do as a kid. I think I was one of the many kids who absolutely melted down during it. Which makes sense, because aside from the whole stranger danger element of it, meeting Santa is like meeting God based on the level of his pre… like it's kind of more important when you're a kid because presents are a lot more real to you than damnation or whatever.
And yeah, as we talked about it last time, the Santa should be smaller. They should be approximately the size of Zelda Rubenstein, and they should talk very quietly.
Sarah A: Oh, that's such a good idea.
Sarah M: Yeah. They should be like, hello…
Sarah A: Because essentially, I mean, in a strange way, it's like it has certain things in common with going to confession if that you sort of go to a special place and you see a man in a red robe, in bishop's red, and you tell him your heart's desires and whether you were good or bad. And he takes notes and then, you know, I guess instead of having to say 800 Hail Marys, you might get a fire engine that's sort of like a different outcome.
But it's like, there's something strangely ritualistic about how all of that transpires. And it's like a guy in a beard. I can see why kids melt down. I think it's a pretty normal reaction.
Sarah M: Yeah. Beards are very scary. Even if you know someone who has a beard as a kid, it can be stressful.
Sarah A: If you scroll down, you will see a Santa in a different ensemble. Describe to us what we're seeing.
Sarah M: Alright, so in my best A League of Their Own newsreel voice, the text here says, “Santa Claus has gone to war. Your gift, plenty of weapons, the inland way for USA.” And you captioned this “wartime propaganda poster from the Office of War Information 1941”. And Santa is wearing, you know, a nice…
Sarah A: Kind of a fatigue coat.
Sarah M: Yeah. I don’t know any of the correct terminology.
Sarah A: Neither do I.
Sarah M: But he's joined up, he's got a helmet on. His beard has been shorn to regulation length. And we also are seeing the face of drunky Santa.
Sarah A: Exactly.
Sarah M: Because his cheeks are very truly as red as two cherries.
Sarah A: And so the timing of this is interesting. Because one of the funny things that I discovered when I was researching mid-century Christmas is that there are people who think, and I don't think we can blame anybody for this, because it actually kind of makes sense that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus, lock, stock and barrel. Whey did invent was a very recognizable depiction of Santa.
Sarah M: And a copyrightable one?
Sarah A: I think. Because it was designed by an artist named Haddon Sundblom, who lived in Michigan. You can Google him; he's a really cool guy. He often is shown wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and he is the guy who sort of pen to paper and created Coca-Cola Santa.
And did so in a way, what he wanted to try to do was not make it look like a guy dressed up, but make it look like a real guy. Like, kind of make it look like a kind of cozy, older kind of grandfatherly, rosy cheeked guy.
Sarah M: Which is interesting, because the outfit has become so ritualized. I know that at this point it feels like seeing somebody wearing a conductor uniform or something, or like an airline pilot. It's not a person, it's an identity.
Sarah A: Exactly. It's his work outfit. Like Busy Town. He's like the guy in Busy Town who brings everybody prezi's.
Sarah M: Is he influenced at all by the ghost of Christmas present in C Dickens's?
Sarah A: Oh, absolutely. Christmas Carol.
Sarah M: Okay. Because he is wearing velvet and [inaudible] maybe.
Sarah A: And one of the things that's interesting about that is that you'll sometimes see that figure, the sort of ghost of Christmas present, wearing green. And sometimes, before the 16th century, bishops wore green. So you'll sometimes see the reason Santa wears red is because he's wearing Bishop's clothes. But sometimes it'll kind of toggle back and forth.
So, but Coca-Cola Santa is sort of the regularized Santa image that we end up inheriting, kind of in the late 1930s and 1940s. And this is right around the time that the United States enters World War II, and the celebration of Christmas then becomes kind of DIY and ad hoc. There's a lot of rationing of not just the food. The food is what a lot of people remember, like coffee.
Sarah M: Let’s all have a World War II Christmas. Let's have no more sugar, we're going to have no coffee. A ration Christmas. No meat, no dairy. We're going to drink chicory and tell tales.
Sarah A: Exactly. We're going to sit around the radio, we're going to stare at it. And we're going to have faux coffee with faux sugar.
So basically, everything that you kind of think to do around the holidays is curtailed. Rubber and metal are both in short supply, gasoline, anything nylon, long distance phone calls are restricted.
Sarah M: I think it's easy for me to forget today… sorry to interject. But I think it's easy for me to forget today because I'm often a little bit startled when I'm reminded of Americans in a way that I think would be very divisive today. Obviously, during World War II, not everybody, not unilaterally, and a lot more Americans were isolationists than we've chosen to remember, been educated about, typically during this time period.
But really, as I learned from my Molly books, Americans to a great degree believed that it was their patriotic duty to endure personal deprivation in order to help the war effort.
Sarah A: That is also… well, we'll get to this, but that's something that then becomes taken up by advertisers, that impulse that you're describing.
Sarah M: Right. Which is interesting because in a way, it sort of becomes folded into capitalism. The sort of identity of being the kind of person who's helping the war effort.
Sarah A: Exactly. Because if you scroll down past Santa at war, you will find two print ads for Hoover vacuum cleaners. And the first one you'll see is not advertising a vacuum cleaner. What is it advertising, Sarah Marshall?
Sarah M: It says, “Give her a war bond, and you give her the best.” And then it's a pair of sexy lady hands with pretty red nail polish, opening up a beautiful war bond with a red ribbon.
And then let's read the copy here. “For 35 years at Christmas time, it has been, ‘give her a Hoover and you give her the best’. Today, few Hoover cleaners are available. The Hoover Company is not making electric cleaners now. It is making materials of war. This Christmas, a war bond is just about the finest present we can think of. Someday there'll be a victory. Someday those war bonds will turn into US currency. Now let them stand for the money you're saving for the things you can't buy, the money you'll have when the GOOD DAY comes to pay for new electric cleaners, and automobiles, and refrigerators, and stoves. Then again, we'll say when Christmas rolls round, give her a Hoover and you give her the best. It beats, as it sweeps, as it cleans. The Hoover Company, Canton, Ohio.” Incredible.
Sarah A: It's very nice. Incredible. Right? It's because they're, they're advertising delayed gratification, which is so interesting because that's not something that we typically find. And this was essentially women's magazines and home magazines jumped on this idea that there were kind of workarounds to be had for, you know, you could do things like shave bar soap or use powdered soap to make convincing fake snow. Or you could sort of use natural things like shells, and pinecones could be sort of fashioned into ornaments and decor.
And what's interesting is that after the war, all the big companies that make stuff like DuPont and Reynolds and Alcoa and 3M, continue to sort of advertise and promote this idea that you can kind of DIY, make your own stuff, only now you're using tinfoil, cellophane, plastic, et cetera.
But at the time, I don't know if you're aware of this, I was not aware of this until I started doing this research. Most of the really good Christmas stuff historically came from Germany. So all your ornaments, toys, like really good children's toys. So not only are we rationing things like meat, dairy, sugar, coffee, all that stuff.
Sarah M: Because where do all the nutcrackers come from? Oh my God.
Sarah A: Yeah, exactly. Where does the Freudian ballet come from? It has got to be Germany.
Sarah M: The Nutcracker is one of the weirdest things that is a part of annual holiday American life. It's just amazing.
Sarah A: Yeah, it's incredible that it just kind of goes on, commented on.
Sarah M: It is so frightening. You're having a dream about a nutcracker and rats, and they're battling over you. That is actually the most frighting thing. I'm so glad that Freud never had the chance to analyze Clara.
Sarah A: I know. Poor Clara.
Sarah M: Well, I think it all worked out for her because she probably just got to wake up and eat fun cooking or something.
Sarah A: Exactly. And so there's this interesting moment where every company, it's weird to think about the US as not being a consumer society. It's also kind of weird to think about the fact that there didn't used to be a military industrial complex the way we sort of are permanently, there are all these big companies, gigantic, Raytheon and Boeing and Northrop Group that are constantly producing things and have government contracts and sell things to armies overseas, but are massive, huge, industrial concerns that didn't really exist when the US entered World War II.
And so the reason that all these companies like Hoover were sort of making these quote unquote “materials for war”, is because they had to. There just wasn't an existing infrastructure in place for that to happen.
Sarah M: Oh, interesting. So basically, the government was like, “Hey, vacuum guys. You are going to make our technology now. You can't do vacuums anymore. You're busy.”
Sarah A: And it happened to people, too. This is actually the reason that my family lives on the east coast is because my grandfather, who was a metallurgical engineer, had been working on alloys that were used mostly to make skyscrapers more flexible and stronger. Like the metal that was used in skyscrapers.
Sarah M: Like that giant tower in Central Park. Whatever, that's going to collapse and kill everyone, apparently. Could have used him.
Sarah A: Apparently. They didn't ask him, because he was in metallurgical heaven, so he was not available to be asked. But I think that was the first problem. But they basically, people like him who were sort of working on practical industrial problems were sort of like, “Okay, you're going to go work at this lab on the East coast that's doing World War II-related metallurgy stuff. And kind of figuring out how can we apply what you've learned to airplane propellers or some part of a machine that we need to refine.”
And so then after the war ends, this infrastructure is still there. And that part of what we think of as the kind of “consumer boom” that took place, quote unquote, after the war. Like everybody's buying fridges and sofas and TVs. And there is Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan for General Electric is encouraging everyone to do so. And they say, “Yes, Ronald Reagan.” But it's also because the capacity is there.
So it isn’t just that people are kind of starving to shop. If you build it, they will come. So what we're going to do, I think, is we should look, let's take a peek at a clip from Miracle on 34th Street.
*recording*
“I understand that, but there must be something you want for Christmas. Something you haven't even told your mother about, eh? Oh, come on now. Why don't you give me a chance?”
Sarah M: Oh, it's Natalie Wood.
Sarah A: It's Natalie Wood.
Sarah M: Little Russian child.
Sarah A: Yeah. Which nobody knew.
Sarah M: Santa has his beard at ward light.
Sarah A: Well, it's only 1947.
*recording*
“That's what I want for Christmas.”
“You mean a doll's house like this?”
“No, a real house. If you are really Santa Claus, you can get it for me. And if you can't, you're only a nice man with a white beard, like mother said.”
“Now wait a minute, Susie. Just because every child can't get his wish, there doesn't mean there isn't a Santa Claus.”
“That's what I thought you'd say.”
Sarah M: Susie is early representation of women with autism.
Sarah A: Oh my God. Susie is incredible. Yeah. Susie and her mom are both like…
So from your knowledge of the movie generally, put this clip in context for us. What are we seeing?
Sarah M: So I haven't seen it for a long time, but the premise basically is that this guy turns up and works at - is it Macy's - as a Santa?
Sarah A: It's Macy's. Yes. Because it’s the parade.
Sarah M: Yeah. Okay. But he's basically definitely actually Santa. And I think a busy woman. Who, is she played by Maureen O'Hara?
Sarah A: Maureen O'Hara plays Mrs. Walker, who's a successful career woman and single mom living on Central Park West.
Sarah M: Yes. One of those career girls, you know.
Sarah A: Yes. One of those in 1947.
Sarah M: And she's got a cynical little girl who's great. And also, there's a remake from the nineties with Mara Wilson, which I also grew up with, which is fabulous. And these are both wonderful. And the remake is faithful, in a really good way.
And it's basically, I think just this idea of like, I really have always loved it and found it very sweet. And it's like Santa basically, I don't know, enchanting the child within of all these kind of cynical Madison Avenue type people.
And there's a lot of kind of movies like this. I also, this is revealing me as a boomer, basically. I've always been very fond of the Bing Crosby as singing priest movies.
Sarah A: Oh, sure. Of course.
Sarah M: The Bells of St. Mary's and Going My Way, two very scary institutions objectively. Bing Crosby and the Catholic church.
Sarah A: Both equally terrifying.
Sarah M: And also, The Bishop's Wife, and then of course, The Preacher's Wife. Where this theme of Christmas movies about just kind of a little bit of random Christmas magic showing up and just kind of encouraging people to be a lot nicer to each other. And then also happening to buy stuff as well along the way.
Sarah A: Yeah. And so what I find super interesting here is that, so we're in 1947, which means that probably this movie was being made at sort of the end of the war, right? Or certainly being conceived of. And it is a moment when, so here's this career woman who's living on her own and is famously sort of teaching her daughter to be very skeptical and not to believe in magic.
And Maureen O' Hara’ character kind of takes the same view that, you know, in the same breath kind of, Santa isn't real, first husband's leave you, and you can't believe in fairytales because then you'll just end up a single mom, and you have all this stuff on your shoulders, and the world isn't like that.
And then Santa and his kind of sidekick, the neighbor, Mr. Gailey.
Sarah M: The movie is like, you can trust men and Santa.
Sarah A: You can trust men, you have to just have no plan. And then a man will come along and make things materially easier for you in some undisclosed fashion.
And so what's interesting about the way consumerism is being posited here, is that there's a kind of, are you familiar with the idea of the ‘citizen consumer’?
Sarah M: I don't know. Tell me. Probably not.
Sarah A: I'm a huge fan. This is historian Lizabeth Cohen's phrase to describe the kind of American shopper from kind of the depression onward, who is being tasked with a kind of patriotism that goes hand in hand with shopping.
Sarah M: Because the depression is basically, use it up, wear it out.
Sarah A: Exactly. For the country.
Sarah M: Use it up, all that stuff. And for yourself, because you don't have any money.
Sarah A: And in the era that follows the war. If you're spending on things like domesticity, curating and kind of furnishing the life of a nuclear family, which is literally what Santa Claus does in this movie. He basically steers them in the direction of a house.
Sarah M: They get married, he moves them out of the suburbs to beautiful Stepford Connecticut
Sarah A: Where, where nothing weird happens that, that kind of a spending, certainly not at that new plant. Not at the new plant. Nobody, nobody's talking about that.
That, that kind of spending is good. It's not frivolous. It's you're not. Mm-hmm. Just, you know, kind of like buying luxury goods for no good reason and sort of, you know, just kind of enjoying yourself. You're investing in the future and you're spending money on Right. All the things you need to have a household that also happens to more or less trap women at home.
Yes. That you, you know, you don't have any shared resources. You don't have neighbors down the hall
Sarah M: surrounded by appliances.
Sarah A: Exactly. You don't have a neighbor who can watch your kid for 10 minutes. You have a dishwasher.
Sarah M: Yeah.
Sarah A: And that all of this is being presented as, as good and patriotic, and that it's a form of sort of patriotic spending.
Sarah M: Interesting.
Sarah A: Yeah. And then this is the moment where we meet Santa Baby for the first time. Who is kind of, I don't know, an appliance pimp for wives. Like he's kind of like, the lyrics are actually really funny and they're mostly about luxury goods, but it's also, she wants a car. And so there's this idea that Santa Claus is less a grandfatherly, quasi-archbishop/World War II.
Sarah M: Santa's into sugaring.
Sarah A: Exactly. Santa is kind of like, he would be interested in your OnlyFans.
Sarah M: Although interestingly, he is Santa Baby and not Santa Daddy.
Sarah A: Exactly. Right. So we're kind of, we're seducing him.
Sarah M: But there's a lot of baby men with a lot of money.
Sarah A: Yeah. And so basically, if you want a fur coat, a car…
Sarah M: You got to put out for Santa ladies.
Sarah A: Yeah, exactly. Not just carrots for the reindeer.
Sarah M: It's also so interesting to be living, and I know we talked about the Trad Wife in another episode that I really love doing with you. But this idea of so many women, either sincerely or for engagement, one of the two. I mean, they both work. So many women we're seeing today in this cultural movement, that I think is part of a bunch of other bigger ones, are saying, “I do everything for my husband, and he pays for us to exist.”
And it's like, yeah, that was basically the promise of post-World War II America, and really of the industrial revolution, that men would be paid enough to support a family, and therefore could have all of their needs and functions as a human being supported by a woman. And then we invented the Sunday paper, so they could ignore their families on Sundays.
Sarah A: And a pipe to go with it. Exactly. And then we invented TV to make sure that they could absolutely fully ignore.
Sarah M: And their children could be taught by puppets.
Sarah A: Exactly. And what's interesting is that we're looking at two moments that are, I kind of think of Christmas almost as being like the arena in which at various times in history, we as Americans are kind of wrestling with our relationship with buying stuff and what it means.
Sarah M: I think that's absolutely true.
Sarah A: And so during the Gilded Age, there's a lot of self-consciousness about it. And part of the reason why there's this obsession… Well actually, let's go back to your special fancy document for a moment. Because now we're going to do a visual compare and contrast.
Sarah M: Let's go back to my scroll.
Sarah A: Unfurl your scroll, and it should be passed, underneath Eartha Kitt. So we've got Santa Claus…
Sarah M: Honey…
Sarah A: That's a real Samantha voice.
Sarah M: That's what I'm always going for. Okay. Yeah. So we have Santa Claus in his works, which I think I remember looking at in our previous episode from Harper's Weekly 1866. Which I also love because it's very much in line with Santa as Saint.
Sarah A: Yeah. And he's twee, and he's kind of putting his feet up by the fire, and he is making notes in his little book and you kind of chiseling things.
Sarah M: Oh, and this is canonical Little Santa, a little Danny DeVito, little Santa DeVito. He eats fish. And so it's Santa on top of a chair, because he had to get on the chair to get the stockings down from the mantle. Because he’s just a little guy.
And then there's… it's so good. I love it. So he's inside different circles. So one of them is the Christmas tree, and he's up on a ladder trimming a tree. There's workshop where he is making a little horse. There's dollies tea party, where there's just some dollies sitting around a table having a tea party. I don't know, I guess Santa set them up.
Sarah A: I think the idea is he probably crafted them. He made them and then kind of set them, he sort of put them in a mise en scène under the tree.
Sarah M: Yeah. He's the god of the dollies.
Sarah A: The god of the dolls
Sarah M: On the lookout for good children. He is in the North Pole with the Northern Lights behind him with a telescope looking for good children.
And then, oh God, this is so cute. Which dolly will you have? And then there's some beautiful dolls lined up. Christmas Eve, where he is bursting through the night sky on his chariot of reindeer. Making dolly’s clothes. A lot of emphasis on the dollies. I really like making dolly clothes.
Sarah A: Does that sound fun? He's sewing.
Sarah M: It’s him with his little glasses on. And yeah, and he's sewing doll clothes. God, Santa works hard.
Sarah A: Because he's a craftsperson. He works tirelessly.
Sarah M: That's so many individual garments per dolly. Interestingly, there are no elves in these pictures.
Sarah A: He's doing it all himself. Yeah, it's very American. It's all DIY.
Sarah M: Yeah, because he's elven Santa still, I guess. Oh my gosh. Oh, and I remember we talked about this before, but it's so good. Account book: record of behavior. Tell us about this.
Sarah A: It's incredible. So it sort of positions Santa as almost a kind of like, he's got an accountant's ledger and it's as though he's keeping track of who's good and who's bad, in a gigantic binder.
Sarah M: A binder full of children.
Sarah A: A binder full of children. But it's as big as he is, which is so funny.
Sarah M: Yeah, the book is like waist high to him. It's so cute in terms of the page height as he's turning the pages, and it's probably like four times his height if he stood it up. And he is leaning over it, trying to… I cannot express how tiny Santa, he's so tiny in all these depictions, and it just makes me really happy.
And then the last one, I would say chronologically, is holiday week where he's in his rocking chair.
Sarah A: Holiday week. He's chilling with his dogs up in front of a fire. Like, ugh, what a week I've had. Oh my God. Having delivered, you know, 800 million presents around the world. He's now, he's putting his feet up, because that's a lot for one little guy.
Sarah M: Yeah. And he's a really little guy. Delivering full size presents. Although, I guess children were also slightly smaller back then because they weren't getting adequate nutrition.
Sarah A: That's true. They weren't getting enough niacin or whatever. But yeah, and then we contrast with…
Sarah M: Oh my gosh! Alright. And then we have American Christmas card, mid-1950s. And the text says… wait, this is also my time to point out that Santa Claus Battles the Martians is a pretty good movie.
Sarah A: Oh, I know. It's pretty good. Yeah, 1964.
Sarah M: And an early film of Pia Zadora.
Sarah A: Oh, that's right. Oh my God.
Sarah M: She plays a Martian child. Yeah. So the text says, “Here comes Santa's spaceship full of cards and toys, zooming in to wish for you lots of Christmas joys.” And then it has, as promised, Santa and his little Jetsonian spaceship, it looks like a B-52 bomber, honestly. But not at all really. I'm sure anyone who would look at this and be like, “Sarah, no, it doesn't.” But it looks maybe like a vaguely military aircraft of the Cold War era. It looks like it could bomb Russia inside of like three hours is my point, I guess.
Sarah A: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Sarah M: And it's got snowflakes painted on the wings, and it's got a Christmas tree painted on the body, and then the caption just tells you how to make your own spaceship for Santa, if you cut up part of the card and you use such exciting products, obviously scotch tape and rubber bands.
Sarah A: Exactly.
Sarah M: And yeah, it's very different. And we don't know how big Santa is. Although actually no, we do, because he's got presents in there with him. So if they're regular sized presence, then he is probably regular sized, adult male.
Sarah A: So he looks person sized. Yeah. And so, I mean, it's almost, it's hard to know where to begin in the differences between these two.
They're about a hundred years apart. But one of the things that is really key about this era is that we've pivoted from imagining Santa in a kind of vague candlelit, sort of cozy past.
Sarah M: As kind of like a little sprite, like a really hard, little fairy worker.
Sarah A: And specifically, from the past to imagining him like a figure from science fiction or the future. Which is a complete about face, right?
Sarah M: Or just fully in the realm of fantasy.
Sarah A: Yes, during this kind of obsession with outer space, during the Cold War. And so there's a sort of body of Santa. Now, I find this super fascinating, because this is not the Santa that I grew up with. I very much grew up with Victorian Santa in the kind of 1970s and eighties version.
But there was this phase in the fifties and sixties when Christmas and Santa were positioned as almost space age fantasias, like things that you would sort of imagine together with technology.
Sarah M: Which I guess we kind of have aspects of today. Like the NORAD Santa Tracker, maybe.
Sarah A: Which begins in 1955. So there, right, so there's this…
Oh, god, that's really early.
It's really early. They cast the sleigh ride in a new light so that it becomes, instead of this kind of story of Bethlehem or kind of him in the sleigh, it's the idea of we can track him on radar that begins in the mid 1950s.
Sarah M: Yeah. Can I say something that I've been thinking about?
Sarah A: Of course.
Sarah M: As I've been promoting my Satanic Panic show. Which one of the questions that I've been thinking about is like, why Satan? You know, why exactly? What's the appeal? Why does Satan make the story so sticky? And I think one of the reasons is that Satan is allegedly like, and if you're superstitious, this is both maybe scary and maybe in a way kind of comforting, but to believe how available Satan is supposed to be. Because there are so many people in America who feel like if you even think too hard about Satan, he's going to show up and be like, “Good evening…" You know?
Whereas Jesus, on the other hand, says he'll be right back. And is evidently taking his sweet time. Although according to my theory, Jesus has been reborn many times and never got as far as he meant to because of how unjust society is. And he keeps dying. Keeps being an undocumented baby. That's the kind of theory that makes me think I should probably just cut to the chase and become a Quaker.
But that God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, are famously elusive and are like, “I'll be back any day now”. But Satan, allegedly, is going to come back all the time. Like you can't even get rid of him. Which is scary. But it's nice, the idea that someone from a supernatural religious realm or that offers you proof of your religion, might actually show up.
And yeah, I was about to say, “Satan comes once a year” But Santa, Santa comes once a year. Which is very comforting for a child. You know, it's just so regular.
Sarah A: So we are going to take a little detour into atomic age design. And if you scroll past your American Christmas card spaceship, you should see a kind of tripartite panel where there's a Christmas card on one side and some wrapping paper on the other side, and in between a clock and a chandelier. You see? Okay.
So we've talked before, I think, about streamlining and sort of during Art Deco, which was the dominant design language of the 1930s. The machine age, the kind of the use of techniques like streamlining to give a sense of industrial progress or sort of futurism to household objects that actually don't need to go fast, like vacuum cleaners.
But there was this real push to kind of like apply the look and feel of things like skyscrapers and trains and cars, to pencil sharpeners and toasters. And designers like Raymond Lowey, Norman Bel Gettis, Brooke Stevens, famously sort of transformed the look of household appliances, stoves, fridges. You know, anything, you name it.
Sarah M: Is this an aesthetic where the Hudsucker Proxy would be a good place on display?
Sarah A: A hundred percent. Yes. Or actually in a strange way, as is the 1989 Batman. Because there's a lot of sort of art deco revival happening, weirdly enough. I love it.
Sarah M: Yeah. I love the Tim Burton Gotham. It's so good. It's so good. And the giant statues of the big, muscley guys.
Sarah A: Yes, exactly. So it's kind of, imagine like you're at Rockefeller Center.
Sarah M: Tim Burton's Metropolis.
Sarah A: You're at Tim Burton's Metropolis. Everything is streamlined. There looks like an A-train in the 1930s. And so what this does is sort of give consumers access to a kind of sense of the future in the form of something like a radio that looks like a skyscraper or what have you.
And the next iteration of this kind of gesture in design that happens, happens during the Atomic Age. And you can just sort of see what you can. I mean, describe for us what you're seeing in kind of the two objects in the middle.
Sarah M: Yeah. So I'm seeing what I would call an atomic starburst style decoration. And I can see in the caption that it's a chandelier, but I think of that as the atomic starburst pattern. Is that correct?
Sarah A: It looks more or less like, it's called Sputnik, but it basically looks like a kind of controlled explosion.
Sarah M: But is that, like, I'm thinking of, because isn't mid-century decor the kind of like atomic.. not the atomic symbol. Tell us about that.
Sarah A: So the starburst. Yeah, so here's basically the gist. What you're getting at is actually a very important observation. Which is that unlike every other revival movement or sort of futurist movement that came before it, the designers are tasked with using a visual language that refers back to something that people can't see.
So part of the reason why everything is so stylized and why what you'll find is something like on the Eames Hang-it-all coat rack, or the Marshmallow Sofa by Irving Harper, or the Ball Clock, which is also by Irving Harper, because he was a fricking genius, is what looks like somebody took a model of a chlorine atom or molecule, deconstructed it, and then kind of used those essential parts to create a useful household object like a clock. So there's kind of like, there's rods, there's spheres.
Sarah M: Well, and there’s, I would say, a sense of playfulness to it. Which is interesting to think about as something that was partly inspired by the tools of the greatest American death machine.
Sarah A: Well, and that actually is addressed, directly or indirectly, by Disney. Are you familiar with, Our friend, the Atom? Have you read or seen the cartoon?
Sarah M: I've heard of it. I haven't seen it. I feel like it's kind of a classic footnote of the time. But tell us about that.
Sarah A: It is a classic footnote of the time, but it just is another kind of little cul-de-sac, because this is going to be helpful in sort of understanding how…
Sarah M: Is this perhaps providing a little bit of the inspiration for the animated DNA helix in Jurassic Park?
Sarah A: I would not be surprised. I mean, because it's basically… so one thing that is kind of interesting in this time period about the Disney worldview, is that the past and the future are presented as kind of a place you can go. There's the Tomorrow Land, there's the Old West, there's Main Street, USA. There's kind of different places that you can pivot to.
And there's this funny conflation, I think, maybe in part because it comes out of the Disney sort of idea factory of ancient mythology with physics and science. And so our friendly Atom tells the “story”, quote, unquote, of nuclear energy using the ancient folk tale that I believe comes from Shahrazad. It's 1,001 nights of the fishermen and the genie. And it's basically the idea that nuclear energy, like we collectively are the fishermen, and the genie is nuclear power. And we have three wishes. And I think it's health, peace, and energy. And it was turned into a cartoon, and it's narrated by a German physicist named Tins Haber, who's kind of the same cohort of as Werner Von Brown.
And he essentially becomes the voice of physics in the 1950s and sixties. It's like a guy with a German accent wearing a tweed jacket is going to explain to you, using the language of mythology. And if you think about it, there's a lot..
Sarah M: (in German accent) “To do ‘zis experiment, you'll need four paper clips and the nuclear core.”
Sarah A: And just don't worry about it, you’re going to be totally fine. And that the way that Americans were introduced to nuclear power is, as you say, through like the unprecedented death and destruction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Sarah M: And this, I think, folklore may be sold to the American people that I think about a lot of, like, well, we had to. Don't think about it. We had to, don't even think about it.
Sarah A: Right. It was a myth. Exactly. And also the idea that it's kind of, it exists in the same universe as Snow White and Cinderella. It's the Disney universe of folktales.
Sarah M: Or at the very least, Johnny Appleseed.
Sarah A: Right. And then he's also kind of weirdly not alone about that. Because think about the things that are on TV at this time or a little later. I Dream of Jeannie is an astronaut meets a literal genie, Barbara Eden, in a bottle. There's Bewitched. And so there's this kind of conflation in a lot of different cultural properties of folklore with the high tech.
Sarah M: And it is the time of my magic wife. You know?
Sarah A: Exactly. And so if you look at the visual, this little sort of collage that's in your Christmas document, there's the atomic aesthetic where you've got lots of things that look like they've had a lot of caffeine, right? Like objects that look like they're just ready to go, sort of splayed out, rods and spheres, that happens to lend itself really naturally to the iconography of Christmas. And specifically, the Christmas tree.
So when the time comes for an aluminum Christmas tree, which is all the rage between kind of circa 1958 and 1964.
Sarah M: I remember this on Happy days. I remember. Do you want me to tell you the Happy Days joke about this? I remember this.
Sarah A: Of course. Yes.
Sarah M: I think Howard Cunningham says this. But the joke is that someone brings home an aluminum Christmas tree, and the joke is, “Well, we'll save a lot of money on tinsel, because it already looks like tinsel.
Sarah A: Exactly, exactly. And it does. It's essentially, this is not to get sort of too over the top in terms of talking about aluminum.
Sarah M: No, I challenge you to get too over the top about aluminum. I think we can handle it.
Sarah A: I think we can do it. I think we can do it.
Sarah M: This is a hardy crowd.
Sarah A: No, we're tough. So aluminum is kind of an interesting story in American design, because up until the 1880s, it was more expensive than gold or silver. Not because it was rare, but because it was very difficult to refine. So isn't that weird? Just to contemplate. And that's one of the reasons why you actually kind of don't see a lot of aluminum objects that are older than let's say the 1920s and thirties.
Sarah M: That's fascinating. Yeah. Although when you think about it, I guess, you know, nobody ever found an aluminum nugget that I heard about.
Sarah A: Because you have to sort of, there's this whole sort of electrolysis process. I think it involves passing…
Sarah M: While Lucky's down there panning for aluminum. And if he finds a piece big enough, he's going to buy a new wig for his girlfriend.
Sarah A: Run it through with the electrolyzer. And two Gilded Age characters form a company, which is eventually known as the Aluminum Corporation of America, or ALCOA. And ALCOA has a very sweet deal with the United States government for a while.
Sarah M: They're the ones that funded all that TV theater.
Sarah A: Exactly. And they funded the forecast program where they had people like Charles and Ray Eames and Isamu Noguchi designing tables and sculptural works of art to kind of experiment with aluminum and see what cool things we could make out of it.
And one of the cool things you can make out of it is an aluminum Christmas tree. And you can sell millions of them for not very much money. Because once the ability to, well, and part of, just to go back for a sec, part of the reason why ALCOA is so successful is because a lot of this is, it's giving Dulles brothers.
There's a lot of in the category of Cold War foreign policy in which the United States is able to extract resources from countries overseas in, it's kind of not officially an empire, but it's kind of an empire, right? And they have a patent with the government, which means that for World War I and World War II, most if not all of the aluminum that's used for the war effort comes from ALCOA. So they make out like mineral tycoons. Which is what they are.
So as a result of that, one of the reasons why aluminum is so plentiful and why it becomes such a sort of crafty, like you can make a decoration, you know, decorate your tree. You can make a costume. You can make a Halloween costume of a robot for your kid because it's so cheap. It has been processed up the wazoo, and so there's tons of it.
And there's a whole infrastructure. Pittsburgh is home to big aluminum, and it's also kind of a cool new kitchen gadget and sort of tableware material that plays a similar role to plastic because aluminum doesn't shatter.
So if you're comparing it to glass, let's say, and plastic and Tupperware is still relatively new in the fifties, not a ton of people had a lot of plastic at home. But you could have something like Russell Wright's spun aluminum barware. It looks really cool. It's very light, it's not very expensive. You can drop it on the floor. It'll maybe dent slightly, hopefully not. And it won't shatter.
Sarah M: And I imagine for kitchen tools, it would be really revolutionary too, right? For like a colander and stuff like that.
Sarah A: It's cookie cutters, colanders, all the pots and pans, all that stuff. Food mill. Yeah, food mills, anything.
Sarah M: Oh god. Yeah. Cookie cutters.
Sarah A: Cookie cutters. I mean, so there's a ton. If you are out and about, antiquing is where you're going to find a crap ton of aluminum kind of in the thirties and forties. All those sort of kitchen gadget stuff that comes from your grandma's house or your great grandmother's house.
And so the aluminum tree then takes on this almost kind of iconic status during this time period. Which, if you scroll down, you'll find there's a pink print ad from Reynolds, which is now owned by ALCOA, actually.
Sarah M: Well, yeah. I'll also say that this tree looks very much like the Christmas tree I have, which is an artificial pale pink tree. Which lives in the garage, and I haul it out once a year. Because it bums me out to cut down a tree and then put it in my living room until it becomes crispy.
Sarah A: See, this is the thing. Do we want to create more plastic in the world? No. But if you can find a used, this is my, I will die on this hill. If you can find a used aluminum Christmas tree for a reasonable price, which is say under $200 on eBay or Etsy, you should, because you can use it over and over again. You're letting trees live. I mean, it's good to plant trees, but it's also good to not cut them down.
Sarah M: I mean, I'm not going to tell anyone not to cut down a Christmas tree. It just personally depresses me.
Sarah A: I am in the same boat, I find, and I'm also kind of allergic to the crud that exists on the…
Sarah M: Right. And also, it's what I think that, I'm sure we talked about this last time, but Christmas is interesting to me because I think it's kind of like the Olympic gymnastics competition, except it's in events where as a nuclear family, which is of course also what we're talking about, is a period during which that concept was kind of cemented, arguably. I don't know if you would agree with that.
Sarah A: Oh no, I totally agree. Yeah.
Sarah M: It was this idea of like the way we never were being one of the great books about it, right. Where it's not that we used to live in nuclear families, it's that there came a time when we decided to all agree to pretend that we should be. And the word ‘nuclear’ is interesting there.
Sarah A: It's a double meaning.
Sarah M: It conveys a total lack of danger. So I feel like cutting down the Christmas tree and hauling it home is like a feat of strength, to use some Festivus language. That's also something that families do to prove that they're adequate as a family. And if you have fighty parents like I did, it sucks because it's an argument.
I was always happy to have a Christmas tree, at the end of the day. And I love the part where you get to lie under it and look up through the branches and all incredible decorations are on it. But the process of getting it can be brutal.
Sarah A: And it's very, I mean, it's very old school Santa Claus. It's the worship of trees. It's physical labor. It's lumberjacky, the worship of Victoria and Albert.
Sarah M: Exactly. The worship of Victoria and Albert, worship of lumberjacky. Right. And also interestingly, how the sort of fall and winter rituals of ‘white girl fall’, basically.
Are PSLs pretending to work in agriculture a little bit because I think that that's what we understand that we have some kind of a need to be in touch with the seasons and so we have pumpkin patches. Which is our like stand in for the kind of an apple picking old wicker man seasonal rituals that we used to do. And now we just go to the pumpkin patch.
Sarah A: Yeah. And so the, the clip that we're going to watch is the Charlie Brown Christmas story, which is one of our three cultural properties that we're talking about today. One of the big sort of areas of conflict within it is the nature of what kind of Christmas treats you have.
*recording*
“I don't know, Linus, I just don't know.’
“I guess we better concentrate on finding a nice Christmas tree.”
“I suggest we try those search lights, Charlie Brown.”
Sarah M: This is definitely a cartoon for kids who want the tiny, soft-spoken Santa.
*recording*
“This really brings Christmas clothes to a person. Fantastic.”
Sarah M: Yep. This is what I picture when you mention aluminum Christmas trees.
Sarah A: Right? Pink, perky.
Sarah M: Although the nice thing is in real life, they don't echo.
Sarah A: Well, that's true. Right? Yeah. They're kind of, they're sort of tinny.
Sarah A: And there's a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It's got two little branches and a little top.
*recording*
“Gee, they still make wooden Christmas trees?”
“This little green one here seems to need a home.”
“I don't know, Charlie Brown. Remember what Lucy said? This doesn't seem to fit the modern spirit.”
“I don't care. We'll decorate it and it'll be just right for our play. Besides, I think it needs me.”
Sarah M: See this is the Charlie Brown school of shopping, which I do follow. Which is that you should buy things because they seem to be underdogs and you don't think anyone else will buy them. Which is how I feel about single bananas.
Sarah A: Exactly. The single banana needs you to rescue it from the produce market.
So this is to me, there's part of me that is very annoyed by the entire premise of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Because basically, you have a man in a bad mood, and everyone needs to kind of stand on their head and rearrange their entire existence to make it so that the man is not in a bad mood anymore. And I find that very annoying.
On the other hand, it is endearing because you have a group of little kids wrestling with all the same themes basically that animate A Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th Street.
Sarah M: And can you remind us, what is the kind of overall story of this show? Because I don't remember it as well as I maybe would like to.
Sarah A: It is wildly subversive and it's actually worth watching it again if you haven't seen it since you were a kid. Because it basically is Charlie Brown, it opens with Charlie Brown saying, I believe to either Linus or Lucy, that he feels sad and that he feels like he should be happy because it's Christmas season.
Everyone's skating to Vince Guaraldi’s jazz music on the little pond, but he doesn't feel happy. And the dog is kind of charting up his doghouse with all this kind of Christmas crapola that's really tacky and everything is so commercial.
Sarah M: Snoopy is doing the old Clark Griswold over there.
Sarah A: Totally. He's totally doing a Clark Griswold.
Sarah M: And why is the carpet all wet, Todd? I dunno, Margo.
Sarah A: That's so good. So the suggestion is made, because remember there's also psychoanalysis because Lucy has “the psychiatrist is in”. And so she says, well, why don't you, if you're sad, why don't you be in charge of the Christmas play or pageant, or whatever it is. And so he kind of becomes the artistic director. And there's a scene where they're all kind of doing modern dance - remember that they're all doing kind of this long…
Sarah M: I remember that. It's really cute. Yeah. I watched this.
Sarah A: Yeah, you really need to watch it again. Then there's, you know, it's like you're going to be in charge of the tree. So he picks out the tree that needs him, because it's this pathetic little kind of pine tree that has one branch.
Sarah M: And it's the only actual like tree, tree in a whole lot that we can see. The others are all artificial or have been spray painted, I guess, at best.
Sarah A: Like pink spray paint, which is not a thing, but pink spray painted. And Lucy is like, yeah, get a pink one. Get the biggest one you can find.
Sarah M: Yep. Oh, wow. I have a Lucy tree. Wow.
Sarah A: Exactly. And so he is super bummed out about this and kind of basically has a meltdown and doesn't understand why everything is so commercial. You know, doesn't anyone know what Christmas is all about? And I believe it's, who's the one with the blankie? Is it Linus? I think it's Linus.
Sarah M: Yeah, Linus. I remember this part. Linus is the one who reminds them, right?
Sarah A: He recites this verse, basically, from the Bible of the kind of the enunciation of sort of the shepherds are raising their sheep, right before you sing Glory to God in the Messiah.
Sarah M: The angel Gabriel appearing before the shepherds. And he says, “Be not afraid.”
Sarah A: Be not afraid, even though I'm biblically accurate and have 17 eyes or whatever. Don't be afraid.
Sarah M: Imagine if 17 on fire, levitating eyeballs appeared in front of you and were like, “Don’t freak out.”
Sarah A: Don't freak out, but FYI. And so he just kind of calmly delivers, because again, that's his line in the Christmas pageant and says, “Well, that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
And do you want to know what the reaction was from the network when this was initially shared, before it was broadcast, with the brass?
Sarah M: I have to assume negative, because it probably seemed like a real pinko commie kind of a thing to do. Right?
Sarah A: They did not get it. They didn't understand. There was like, this is like a weird, first of all, like really weirdly religious.
Sarah M: Which is interesting, because now we're trying to have less Christianity forced upon our children. But at the time it felt subversive, I bet.
Sarah A: Well, but it was also, on the one hand, it's like hippie dippy Christian. So it's sort of, you know, it's like goodwill toward men.
Sarah M: It’s like Charlie Brown is one of the Jesus people or something.
Sarah A: Paired with anti-consumerism. And they were just like, what? You know, it's super weird. They didn't understand the music.
And you know what this reminds me of? Apparently the exact same thing happened when Prince played Kiss for executives at whatever his music, Warner or Sony or whatever his music company was. People were panicked. It was like, this is so minimal and stripped down. It's so weird. Like, what even is this? Wow. Hated it.
So that just proves that if you are working on something, and the initial reaction to that thing is not what you would hoped…
Sarah M: Just wait five minutes.
Sarah A: Wait five minutes. You might be in the same category as Prince and Charles Schultz, and you may be creating a stone cold classic and not realize it.
Sarah M: And also, you know, the commentary for The Godfather is pretty fun. And it's like, it’s Coppola in all his glory. But in that vein, fascinating things about it is that when some of the most iconic scenes were being shot, the things that you would assume people recognize at the time were great, the studio was kind of watching - well, I don't know if they were watching what he was shooting as he was doing it. I don't know. I don't know how movies were made. But that basically the studio was like, “We think you're doing a terrible job.” And it always seemed to be on the verge of being taken out of his hands.
And they're against having the production go to Sicily for those scenes. Like all these choices that you would assume people just kind of intuited would be good. You know, they famously wanted to cast Robert Redford as Michael originally. And these were all things that clearly today we all see as idiotic, but it's just that the thing that we've internalized is great. That's not because it was clear to everyone at the time, you know?
Sarah A: Exactly. And if we go back a little further in time, so How the Grinch Stole Christmas airs on the same network, CBS, the following year. But it's published in book form in 1957, and I thought that we could read ourselves a little excerpt or two from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
How familiar are you? So you had sort of… you remember aspects of Charlie Brown? Do you remember the sort of the gist of the Grinch?
Sarah M: Yeah, I remember the story is that the Grinch hates Christmas, and I can't really remember what the basis of that is, to be honest. But he's against it and he lives above Whoville on a mountain with his dog. And he decides it's, you know, it's not just a clever title. He decides to steal Christmas, and specifically to steal all the presents and Christmas foods and decorations and all the kind of like objects, I guess, or the material aspect of Christmas from the Who's down in Whoville. Because then they won't like Christmas anymore.
But it turns out that once, well, and then he goes to, I think, his last house where a little baby, Cindy Lou Who lives. And they have a moment. I really kind of forget what that involves, but his little heart is touched. But then he hears all the Who's singing down in Whoville because they're still grateful, even though they don't have their stuff anymore. I forget why. I think they're just like, they just are like that. They're like, Lutherans.
Sarah A: So I've selected three passages from it, and I figured we could alternate.
Sarah M: Oh my God, I would love that. Okay.
“Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot. But the Grinch who lived just north of Whoville did not.
The Grinch hated Christmas, the whole Christmas season. Now, please don't ask why, no one quite knows the reason.
It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.”
Boy, as a kid, I remember thinking, that can't be it. That's a weak excuse.
Sarah A: sauce. Yeah. So the middle part is, and then we'll get to what this reminds us of when we're done with part three. But the middle part is from his reign of terror when he's kind of going through Whoville attempting to steal Christmas.
“Then he slid down the chimney, a rather tight pinch, but if Santa could do it, then so could the Grinch.
Then he slunk to the ice box. He took the Who's feast, he took the Who’s pudding, he took the roast beast. He cleaned out that ice box as quick as a flash.
Why that Grinch even took their last can of Who hash. Then he stuffed all the food up the chimney with glee. And now, grinned the Grinch, I will stuff up the tree.”
Sarah M: Okay. It's a fun sequence, both in the book and in the adaptation. It's fun to watch him steal all this stuff. It's very resourceful. Okay. Should I read the ending now?
Sarah A: Let's do it. And we'll talk.
Sarah M: And this is our thrilling conclusion.
“Every who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing without any presents at all.
He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming. It came somehow or other, it came just the same.
It came without ribbons, it came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.
Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
So this is like really kind of very similar to A Christmas Carol, which I also really love. Which is, someone who is like a textbook Killjoy is like, “I hate Christmas. People only care about buying things.” And then he realizes that no, they actually love it because they're just good and nice. And then he's like, well, nevermind. We should buy even more things.
Sarah A: And it happens to be, if you're like me, it's a holiday where you can, if you're somebody who's sort of obsessed with paper products, you can kind of go nuts a little bit.
But I think what's also interesting is that I think he has deftly channeled A Christmas Carol in the persona of the Grinch. And it's a great made-up word. And Dickens was so good at making up character names like Scrooge.
Sarah M: Yeah. Which I think was kind of an antiquated verb of the time, but yeah. Ebenezer Scrooge. It's perfect.
Sarah A: Perfect. Yeah. But it also has the cadence of a visit from St. Nicholas.
Sarah M: Oh my God. It does. Oh, it's genius.
Sarah M: I don’t know if it's identical. I'm not enough of a pentameter. It's like that horrible Kid Rock song that is emulating both Werewolves of London and Sweet Home Alabama, and yet it's just its own terrible song.
But this is a good thing that we like, sorry to compare Dr. Seuss to Kid Rock. Like I know he did some racist stuff, but he doesn't deserve to be compared to Kid Rock.
Sarah A: But it sort of echoes. I don't know if it’s letter perfect identical, but it's pretty similar. And it definitely, it kind of took me a minute to realize that that's what it was referencing.
Sarah M: And I never thought about it, but it's like what the American brain perceives as the Christmas meter, the Christmas dog roll.
Sarah A: It's Christmas meter. It’s duh, duh, duh, duh… It's, yeah, exactly. And so it's like, whatever you hear…
Sarah M: It’s the rhythm of a horse drawn sleigh.
Sarah A: Of little reindeer hooves on your roof. Yeah. And I sort of, I love the fact that this is initially published in 1957, so this is really like we are in prime Santa Baby dishwasher buying, like putting a big ribbon around a toaster, consumer frenzy.
And as early as 1957, Dr. Seuss is kind of saying, look at all this over-the-top commercial sort of gift laden Christmas. You don't need all that stuff. You just need to hang out with your Who's and sing a song. Maybe somebody will bring roast beast. Don't plan too hard.
But it's kind of, I think it's kind of remarkably subversive for the time.
Sarah M: Yeah. It also makes me think of A Christmas Story. Which is why, you know, speaking of things that took a while to become beloved. That's certainly one. It's like the Wet, Hot American Summer of Christmas movies.
Sarah A: Do you know that I actually, I have to confess, I don't like it.
Sarah M: I mean, it’s not in rotation for me.
Sarah A: It's not in rotation for me. That's a more diplomatic way of putting it.
Sarah M: What is in your rotation, out of curiosity? I've said a lot of mine already.
Sarah A: Well, so for Christmas, in terms of stuff to watch, I pretty much always watch Miracle on 34th Street. That's sort of probably like my all time. And because it takes place in the neighborhood where I grew up, and it's sort of where the parade begins. And it's really, it's so very cozy for me.
I super love vintage. Like I'm kind of a Call the Midwife person, which is weird, but they always have a Christmas special. And it's this bizarre kind of retro futurism where all the Christmas specials take place in like 1965, because that's when the show is set. So it's as though you're watching a rerun from something that's 60 years old, but it was just made like a few years ago by the BBC. So I'm a huge fan of that.
I'm also a huge fan of certain Christmas music. Like it's as Karen Thompsons famously said in that documentary, “It's Karen Carpenter season.” You know, once you hit Thanksgiving, oh, it is Karen Carpenter's season. It's Carpenter season. So there's Merry Christmas, Darling.
Sarah M: And also, I mean, I feel like one of the things about Christmas as we're talking about it, that I feel like is so tricky, is that it's like you can't really engage with it in the kind of classic sense, or it feels like you're being urged to do without having too many feelings, it's almost like an invitation to too many feelings.
Because it's like, it's about family and it's about how much money you have, and it's about getting the right toys for your kids. And it's about whatever the latest craze is, as we got more into the Cabbage Patch era and beyond. And it certainly, I would imagine, too, in mid-century.
Sarah A: But one of the reasons why I think people collect this stuff is because, I mean, as you say, part of it is like that emotional Christmas triggers that part of your brain, that's like childhood, parents, emotions, toys, cookies, et cetera.
Sarah M: All of your trauma, potentially.
Sarah A: All of your trauma, but your happiest memories when you were sad, when you were scared. Like all the things that you feel at that age, some people more than others. But then it's also people, grown adults collect toys and collect Christmas ornaments, and I've interviewed lots of them. I interviewed people from my book who were the world's greatest expert on aluminum Christmas trees, you know, vintage. It's fantastic and it's kind of incredible.
But you also have to think, part of it is that collecting impulse, I think, is sort of chasing something that is forever receding further and further into the past. And that part of the reason why grownups collect stuff, especially things from their childhood.
Sarah M: Beat back like boats against the tide.
Sarah A: Absolutely. It's this, you know, you can never recreate it, but you can kind of glimpse. You can listen to the music. You can listen to Eartha Kitt, you can watch Charlie Brown, you can kind of glimpse echoes of this time and place when a lot of people who are probably not around anymore, were still around.
And there is actually a scene in the movie Scrooged that I think, do you remember this when it's David Johansen from the New York Dolls?
Sarah M: Yeah. Buster Poindexter.
Sarah A: He, Buster Poindexter, he's driving a cab and he's like, “Oh, you know who was a total crybaby, was Genghis Khan.” Or whoever it was. Somebody was in the back of his cab, who was like…
Sarah M: Is David Johansen the ghost of Christmas past in the scenario?
Sarah A: I think he's the ghost of Christmas… because he takes Frank back to his house right when he gets meat for Christmas. And then he is crying because it's like, “I don't understand”. And his dad's like, “Well, that's 40 pounds of veal. What do you want? You know, you’re a millionaire. And it sort of captures that feeling of the toughest, most cynical dude you've ever met, if you turn the key or the dial just right and remind them of something. You know, the Christmas when they were five years old and their dad yelled at their mom or something.
Sarah M: Right. And that Christmas is maybe actually like a tool to get at the hearts of horrible, old men.
Sarah A: It's a portal.
Sarah M: Yeah. Yeah. Because one of the things I love about A Christmas Carol is that Scrooge is only transported back to his boyhood for like five or 10 minutes, before he starts crying, you know? It's like he does not take that long to be worked on. Honestly, he folds pretty fast.
Sarah A: And honestly, I think the last time I saw it, I think I cried during that scene.
Sarah M: Oh yeah.
Sarah A: So, yeah. I mean, it's intense, right?
Sarah M: It's the most intense possible emotions. And also it's about Jesus, incidentally, and Christianity, which is kind of also an emotional area for a lot of Americans. There's just a lot. I feel like it's fair to say academically, that there's just a heck of a lot going on.
Sarah A: There's an extreme amount going on.
Sarah M: But I fear I've derailed us at some point.
Sarah A: I think we're actually right on schedule. We covered like most of the larger themes that we were going to get to. You know, we've arrived somewhere in the mid 1960s, and we're probably poised, perhaps, I don't know, maybe for a part three one day, I think.
Sarah M: The Santa trilogy.
Sarah A: Yeah. We can sort of tackle the 1980s perhaps, or the nineties.
Sarah M: Well, tell me about kind of who is Cold War Santa spiritually, and when does he exit the scene? Or does he just become part of the broader Santa that we now live with?
Sarah A: That's a great question. So I remember there was a super interesting conversation over on, I want to say Blue Sky, about how do you date the Cold War? Or how do you date Mid-century? I was saying, it was how do you date mid-century in terms of design?
Sarah M: Yeah. Because it's obviously not literal, or else it would be for like one day.
Sarah A: Exactly. It would just be like certain decades. So my rubric for this is roughly that it's the end of World War II to the oil embargo in the 1970s. Because that is the end of kind of unfettered, with some dips, this streak of unfettered prosperity and consumption. In which the rest of the world was in tatters, because it was the end of World War II, so Europe is in ruins.
Sarah M: And the American dollar is so strong that it's a little too strong, maybe. Scary strong.
Sarah A: It's a little too strong. People are buying stuff like there's no tomorrow. Consuming, nesting, white flighting out to the suburbs, buying aluminum trees, watching TV, et cetera. And then when the oil embargo happens, suddenly, we can't afford things again.
Sarah M: Right. Now we're back to the American version of bicycle thieves.
Sarah A: Exactly. We're back to sort of 1930s, I can't afford it. And so I tend to think that also the heyday of the aluminum Christmas tree was pretty short. It was sort of mid to late fifties through mid-sixties. And then after that, then it's the hippie movement and free love and things like this. The space age starts to seem really dorky by comparison. Right?
Sarah M: Also, the thing that your parents’ generation bought into that, then in a fairly direct way led toward the war that you are now being drafted into potentially.
Sarah A: Right. That basically the dream of the early sixties then decays into Vietnam and assassinations.
Sarah M: And so we have kind of innocently, or intentionally naively, bought into the military industrial complex, and now it must continue to perpetuate itself. And the United States under Nixon is still involved in the Vietnam War, despite being past the point of knowing that it's basically mathematically unwinnable.
Sarah A: Exactly. Yeah, that has basically been acknowledged as per the tapes.
Sarah M: What are your opinions about the Christmas aesthetics of today? Or kind of the, you know, the recent past and looking ahead?
Sarah A: Like most curmudgeons, I'm having a hard time with today. And I'll tell you why.
Sarah M: Well, yes, today is a little rough.
Sarah A: For a number of reasons. One of the things that drives me batty is the kind of AI generated, printed, wine mom font, home decor objects. Like when you go into an Airbnb and it has like “friends gather here” in wine mom.
But I think what grosses me out is to think about how much of this that you're aware, even though we're neither of us are on Twitter anymore, but you're aware that Twitter is now a cesspool of official federal government accounts, basically posting that posting.
Sarah M: That's pretty much why I left.
Sarah A: It's posting essentially kind of Nazi propaganda, for lack of a more…
Sarah M: Well, that's nice. And also, we're having basically fascist human processing and concentration camp building facilities built in all of our backyards right now. And it's all really happening. Yeah.
Sarah A: It's really happening, and it's happening self-consciously. And one of the ways that you know it's self-conscious is because the Department of Homeland Security Twitter account will post an AI generated kind of fantasia that is riffing off of either a Soviet or a Nazi poster that's like “protect the Fatherland.” So it's not in German, but it'll say…
Sarah M: Why Sarah, why?
Sarah A: I know. I mean, it's a really good point. Why are they doing that?
Sarah M: Why do so many people want to be Nazis? That's really, that's what I want to know.
Sarah A: Yeah. I mean, I think that it is a giant ‘fuck you’ from an unhappy person, in a general way. I think that's part of it.
Sarah M: I hope he gets visited by a biblically accurate angel. And that the angel does whatever it wants.
Sarah A: Just scares the crap out of these people. But then also it's like if you look at the trolls behind the accounts, it's like, do any of them actually look like this? I mean, probably not, because most people don't. But it's just kind of like, I think that realizing and seeing that that has become… and I'm not on Twitter, but I follow people on Blue Sky who post this stuff just as a way of documenting it. And so I'm aware that's happening.
This is going to sound extremely dorky because it is extremely dorky. But to kind of take propaganda from World War II and position it as though you're defending the homeland, you're defending the borders, essentially just makes me want to vomit. And for all the obvious reasons, I'm not different from anybody else. I mean, I'm not having any reaction that anybody else wouldn't have.
Sarah M: Well, actually you are. Because apparently, a lot of people are pro the very thing you’re talking about.
Sarah A: That’s true, I guess.
Sarah M: But there are a lot of us who are feeling equally ill right now.
Sarah A: If your family was here during World War II, if they were somewhere scarier than here during World War II, if your ancestors fought, or like mine did engineering, just what it took and how close it came to completely knuckling under to fascism the first time, and now to be kind of fucking around with it.
Sarah M: I know. To embrace it enthusiastically.
Sarah A: And to do so in the service of tormenting all of these wonderful people who want to move here, who we want to have live here because they're great. And even if they weren't great, we would want them here because it's America. But I think most of them are great. And it just makes me really sad. So that's my very inarticulate rant about anti-immigration.
Sarah M: I was kind of asking you more about the idea of a Ralph Lauren Christmas being the thing this year. But I think what you said is a lot more relevant, and mine was like a brain-dead question.
Sarah A: Well, actually, I mean the Ralph Lauren Christmas is actually kind of a fascinating additional cul-de-sac.
Sarah M: Yeah. Talk about that for a second. Let's have one last cul-de-sac.
Sarah A: It's an echo of the Reagan era.
Sarah M: Yeah. God, it is. Oh, it's right out of the preppy handbook, isn't it?
Sarah A: It's the preppy handbook. So, because Ralph Lauren came into prominence around the same time as John Hughes movies and Ronald Reagan's second presidential term, the world that Ralph Lauren depicts, which is this kind of like western ranch slash New England country estate slash… It's kind of a non-place that has sort of -
Sarah M: I would say that the classic eighties Ralph Lauren looks are like your cosplaying, maybe not a character on Dynasty, because they were just dripping in jewels and stuff like that was pretty over the top. And I would say not preppy really, but like a horsey, like horsey plaid. You're cosplaying like a beautiful girl from a horsey family. You're like the girlfriend of one of the guys in Mystic Pizza.
Sarah A: Exactly.
Sarah M: And you're so beautiful, but your family's got secrets.
Sarah A: There's a lot going on at home, as they say.
Sarah M: Yeah. And you're wearing plaid a lot of the time, and you've got the LL Bean boat tote or whatever it's called.
Sarah A: Oh, the pullover. Yeah. Exactly. The boat tote with the little monogram. That is depicting an extremely white racial landscape of 1980s America.
Sarah M: Well, yeah. And I think in the eighties we were talking about WASPs, explicitly, a lot more.
Sarah A: I don't mean to cast dispersion on Ralph, personally.
Sarah M: Well, but not for this reason, maybe, I guess. And this idea that like Ralph Lauren, I think real name Lifshitz is, as an outsider. And I remember I did an episode on, kind of prepped him with Avery Truffleman a while ago, that got into, like he took an outsider to synthesize the sort of aspirational WASP aesthetic for just not normal, necessarily. Because this clothing and stuff is still a symbol of upward mobility, but for someone who is trying to learn and perform this aesthetic rather than just living it.
Sarah A: Because if you're doing it naturally, you don't realize you're doing it.
Sarah M: Right. And it's very much the aesthetic of white, generational wealth. Which of course goes hand in hand with racial oppression in America. Because that's just where a lot of families have made their money.
Sarah A: That's where it came from. Exactly. It was aluminum. So I think, I mean, I don't want to, you know, Ralph has a kind of 19th century Santa Claus appearance nowadays. So I feel kind of bad. He’s 80s Santa Claus, so I don't want to cast aspersions. But I think I am a firm believer that store and mall Santa should reflect the communities they serve.
Sarah M: Mm-hmm. And they should also be smaller. And maybe we need more women and non-binary Santas, so we can get a smaller Santa. Just get that Santa nice and small. Because have you ever experienced Mickey Mouse at Disneyland or Disney World as a child? Because Mickey Mouse is like five feet tall. Imagine if Mickey Mouse were played by someone the size of Gaston, it would not feel good.
Sarah A: I know. It would be so weird. Whereas, I mean, didn't we talk previously about the idea of either John Waters or Fran Liebowitz being Santa? And I think either of those are great choices, but there's infinitely good… Bowen Yang. I mean, there's incredible choices out there.
Sarah M: You can have whatever Santa you want. And also, as you famously have observed, Santa Claus as a mom.
Sarah A: Yes. He's your mom. He's totally your mom.
Sarah M: Okay, so maybe my last question is, because I feel like just kind of on TikTok, this is going around this idea of like the thing to do this year is a Ralph Lauren Christmas. And of course, really the thing to do every year is to throw out all your stuff and get new stuff because that's what they want you to do.
Sarah A: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah M: To me, a Ralph Lauren Christmas is also basically the entire aesthetic of the McAllister household from the Home Alone movies.
Sarah A: A hundred percent.
Sarah M: And those people, except Kevin… Eh, kind of Kevin too, are assholes. And so we don't need to emulate that. I feel like my Christmas aesthetic is definitely a little bit Atomic age. Which is evidenced by my Christmas tree. But also, my Christmas aesthetic is I am tired and whatever I bother with is great. And I think that that's the aesthetic for 2025 that I believe in personally.
Sarah A: Exhaustion. And also being like, what I have found is actually you're lucky I did this much. You're welcome. I baked and there's a tree.
I think we've maybe talked about this last year, but basically my various passions in domestic life are at loggerheads with one another. Because on the one hand, I have a miniature aluminum Christmas tree which has been in storage for quite some years because I also have cats. And cats and Christmas are a fraught combination. So I have to be really careful in kind of the edit of like what gets put out, what will they leave alone.
Sarah M: Oh yeah. There's a reason I have a Christmas tree but not ornaments on it. Because the cats use it as a climbing wall.
Sarah A: So part of the, I mean, so we're kind of Christmas middle mills a little bit. And partially, because my husband is Jewish and neither of us are religious. But we're just kind of generally festive is the vibe. Like Atomic age Festivus for all of us.
Sarah M: Well, you just need more lights up because it's dark all the time.
Sarah A: Yeah. You need more lights, and then you are tempted to dress up the cats, but then resist doing that, and make special food. I actually got these really cool battery powered, illuminated trees from the MoMA gift shop. I highly recommend if you want to put something out that you need to only put batteries in and then turn on and then you're done decorating. Incredible. Like 10 out of 10.
Sarah M: And you know, my advice this year is, I think it was last time is, let's try to the best of our ability to stop treating Christmas and the winter holidays as an event that we're being judged on. Even if there are people who are actively judging us, let's try to ignore it and just do less, and have a better time.
Sarah A: Truly do less, have a better time. Because people don't care. And if they do care, it's weird, and they're caring about the wrong thing.
Sarah M: Yeah. Because you know what I think too, and this is a real big part of our culture right now, is the anxiety about knowing that the technologies are lies that were sold to us as a means of entertainment and productivity, are now robbing us of all the waking hours they can possibly get. Got to keep them running while we're asleep as well. And that our time is really precious in a way that I think we’re more and more becoming conscious of as we’re feeling it being sucked away from us by corporations and industries that make money by taking our time from us.
Sarah A: And taking our attention.
Sarah M: Yes. Yeah. The whole attention economy of today. And so I think that at Christmas we're all thinking about spending money. And that's a very difficult area because people are trying to get by with less. And for a lot of people, certainly in the United States than in a long time or in recent years potentially, and things have just been tough for a long time for various reasons.
So I feel like this is really a time to try and celebrate and share the joys that come with just spending money on things that we enjoy and on kind of treating the people that we care about, if that makes us happy and is possible for us. But not thinking of this stuff as obligatory, and not thinking of there being a minimum of stuff that you have to buy or to display in order to be doing it right. Because whatever we choose to do is the right thing for us.
And also, to think about the time that we spend is very precious. And to not take part in things just because we feel like that's the baseline that we've been trained to do regardless of whether we really have the capacity for that.
I feel like Christmas is a little bit of a green sheet cake, But to me, Christmas is a great time for enforcing boundaries and saying ‘no’ and also spend time on your own if that's what makes you feel safer. I'll always say that. Christmas is also a time when abusive people use the holidays as an excuse to get you to do what they want you to.
Sarah A: God, I know.
Sarah M: You can ignore that. It's okay. Santa doesn't care. Santa's on his spaceship.
Sarah A: Well, I think that is one of the things that I really love and try to remember always about. I think it's a useful thing if your personal relationship with Christmas is fraud, which I think honestly most people's kind of is to some extent. Because I mean, just look at it. Look at it. All of this stuff is made up. We treat it as though it's a federal holiday. It's from God. It's just this unstoppable force.
All of it is invented, and cultivated, and shifted, and changed, and tweaked over time by people. And you can do that, too, if you want to. You don't have to. You're a people also. You can be a Grinch temporarily if you feel like it.
Sarah M: You can invent your own Christmas tradition randomly out of nowhere, because if there's one eternal Christmas tradition, it's making stuff up and pretending we've always done it.
Sarah A: And pretending that it comes from the Middle Ages. That's the only caveat. That's all you have to do.
Sarah M: Yeah. So do whatever you want. Say it's from the Middle Ages.
Sarah A: And to all a good night.
Sarah M: Sarah Archer, you're so great.
Sarah A: Oh, well, Sarah Marshall, likewise.
Sarah M: We are going to put this out around Thanksgiving actually, because like the Christmas tree, we want to give it extra time to stay out and become desiccated. Where can people find your work? And have you written any fun books that people might like to buy or get from the library this Christmas season?
Sarah A: That is a great, well, all three. So my books are Midcentury Christmas, which is seasonally appropriate and it makes a great gift for your mom.
Sarah M: Which is really both the things we've been talking about. It's like the book version of this podcast episode.
Sarah A: It is the book version of this podcast. Exactly. And the Midcentury Kitchen, which touches on many sort of overlapping themes of Cold War domesticity. And Catland, which is about cat culture in Japan from the view of people in the West who consume it very avidly.
So all of those three, depending on who's on your list, if you've got a kitchen gadget person or a cat person, or a Christmas person, these might all be the same person. It could be.
Sarah M: Could be me, but I already have your book, so get them for someone else.
Sarah A: You already have them? Thank you so much. And you can find me on Blue Sky and on Instagram at @sarcherize. And I usually post links on both of those places to whatever my latest piece is out in the world.
I've been doing a fair amount of writing for Architectural Digest lately, which is super fun. And yeah, I would love to hear from you if you're out there and want to talk about Christmas stuff.
Sarah M: Yay.
Sarah A: Or cats or whatever.
Sarah M: Thank you so much for your work and the things that you write, and also for joining us.
Sarah A: Oh, it's such a pleasure.
Sarah M: And thank you for being just the most fun person to talk about material culture, and ephemera, and why my kitchen looks the way it does.
Sarah A: Anytime. Truly anytime.
Sarah M: Also, this is a hard time to feel like you're doing enough.
Sarah A: Yeah.
Sarah M: And maybe it might help to remember my theory that cats are ancient aliens, and someday the larger family members who brought them to our shores will come back and we'll be judged on the way we've taken care of them. So when things are feeling difficult…
Sarah A: Just take good care of your cats.
Sarah M: Find a cat to pet or not pet. If that's what it wants. Do what it wants. And then you'll have done something good, and that'll make it easier to do your next thing. All right, a lot of good advice.
Sarah A: Excellent advice all around. Merry Christmas, Sarah Marshall.
Sarah M: Merry Christmas.
And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being here. If you can, find Sarah's books in the show notes. They will make a great gift, especially perhaps to your mom. I know my mom liked hers.
Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing and producing. Don't forget, we have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple+. Check out The Devil You Know from CBC podcasts. Check out a sunset, they happen at 4:15 now, so they're a little bit easier to catch. We will see you next time.