Hello everyone and welcome to my introduction to this week's podcast of listening to America.

It's a couple of weeks before Christmas, but this is our annual Christmas show.

You know, we used to during the Jefferson Hour talk about Jefferson and Christmas quite a bit,

but Jefferson is sort of on the Scrooge end of the spectrum.

He didn't observe Christmas.

There was Christmas at Monticello, but it was nothing like what we regard as traditional

today. Jefferson was a deist, after all, and he did not believe that it could be ascertained

that Jesus was born on the 25th of December, and it wasn't the case that Jesus was crucified

on the 25th of December. So for Jefferson, it's an arbitrary Saints Day, and the Protestant

Reformation swept most of that away, along with relics and much iconography in the churches

of England. And as I think you know, Christmas was actually banned legally in some New England

places during the 17th century. Things lightened up thereafter. At any rate, David Horton

turns out, is a, is a sentimentalist and a traditionalist per Christmas. He doesn't have

children himself, but he has nieces and nephews, and he takes that very seriously, and has

invented a number of his own rituals for that. I also talked to Nolan, our videographer, who you know the work

of, but you haven't seen him much. I talked to him about the elf on the shelf phenomenon,

which I had really, frankly, never heard about until now, and he has a pretty interesting

and funny story to tell about his own families getting on board with the elf on the shelf.

I didn't say this on the show, but I do remember talking about this once with my old friend

David Swenson.

There's a book called The Physics of Christmas by Roger Highfield.

And I don't remember much about it, but it's worth reading.

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