Hello everyone and happy holidays. Merry Christmas. I love Christmas. I love Thomas Jefferson. I love

working with David Swenson. It's a great, difficult, strenuous time of the year but I for all of that I love the idea of Christmas and do you want to

apologize for Mr Jefferson now or let what stand it was at the beginning of the show I mean

you know Jefferson is essentially Ebenezer Jefferson he only did two holidays

and Christmas wasn't one of them he and he's all

snoddy about it you know like you can't really tell me that Jesus was born on the 25th of

December and well there there are those fun stories about his youth and I believe that.

I mean there are beautiful sides to this story and you know actually I have to say the best

Christmas of my life. I was in Oxford. I was away from my family, I missed them terribly.

You know, sometimes you have to throw something into relief

to understand its importance. When I finally called home from that

professor's house and finally got through and my father answered back in Dickens and North Dakota across the Atlantic across America.

There they were. I knew they missed me.

And my father answered and I just burst into tears and I thought,

where'd that come from?

Was that your first Christmas away from home?

Yes, it was.

Yeah, that's where it came from. And my father loved Christmas more than anything in the world. And so for him, Christmas was it, fruit cake, and he would, putting up the lights on the trees would take

hours and he'd make us all squint and, you know, is it balanced and eggnog and he loved Christmas. He just loved it. We had one fire in the fireplace

every year and of course he was just a dork. And so he would smoke up the house,

all the alarm bells would go off.

We'd have to open all the doors at 22 below to air out the thing,

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