Good day, Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners, and as always, thank you so much for listening.

This week, it's our annual Jefferson Hour Christmas show.

Jefferson was not a believer really in Christmas because he was pretty certain that Jesus

was not born on the 25th of December.

So he was a sort of scientific literalist, and he had difficulty with metaphor, and he

was not a Christian in the full sense of the term.

And so he frequently traveled on Christmas.

He wrote letters on Christmas, but he didn't have a eulog, or a Christmas tree, or Christmas

gifts.

It was a different era, and the enlightenment was still very much in control of American

life.

And as I think I've told you in previous years, in previous Christmas shows, David Christmas

was actually banned in New England by the New England Calvinists for almost 150 years,

because it was thought to be a Catholic superstitious event.

We've gotten a little more generous about Christmas since that time, and in Virginia, there

wasn't the same puritanical distaste for Christmas, but it just wasn't the big deal that

it became beginning in Victorian England.

Yeah, I remember that discussion quite well.

And there's a really good book about sort of Christmas from a scientific point of

you called, it's called The Physics of Christmas.

And I haven't read it for many years, but we've talked about it on this show previously.

There's one of the scientists in the book talks about the reindeer's red nose, and shows

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