Bratmicae here and walk with you another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Well, it's Christmas time, trees are up, stockings are hung, and you've likely seen Santa Claus at dozen or so times already.

While many Christmas traditions have ancient roots, Christmas culture as we know it today is a modern creation, and most of that Genesis happened in New York City the big apple over a century ago.

My guest today on the show wrote a book that explores the development of Christmas in New York City by looking at a 1920s con man who's the story of Santa Claus to swindle hundreds of thousands of dollars from generous New Yorkers.

The author of the book is Alex Palmer and his book is the Santa Claus man the rise and fall of a jazz age con man and the invention of Christmas in New York and today on the show, Alex and I discussed what Christmas looked like before the 19th century in the famous New Yorkers who helped turn Christmas into what it is today.

Against that backdrop, we discussed the life and times of John Gluck, a PR manager started an organization and answered letters written to Santa Claus, but in the process, line his pockets with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It's also a story that sidetracks to a story that involves a bitter rivalry between the Boy Scouts of America and another scouting organization that consisted of rifle toadding 12 year olds.

You don't want to miss this holiday edition of the Art of Manly's podcast. It's going to give you lots of fodder to talk about at Christmas dinner after the show's over.

Check out the show notes at awim.is slash Santa Claus man.

Alex Palmer, welcome to the show.

Hey, Brett, thanks for having me.

All right, you wrote a book called the Santa Claus man, the rise and fall of a jazz age con man and the invention of Christmas in New York and it's telling you earlier before we started recording that this play the fun is history book.

I've read and a long time because it has Christmas. It's seasonal. It's December now.

It involves all these missing bits, these forgotten bits of American history that still haven't influence on American culture today.

We got Santa Claus, the way we celebrate Christmas, Boy Scouts making appearance in this.

It's a lot of fun and it all centers around this paper story involving a guy named John Glock who used Santa Claus to line his pockets from un...

in generous New Yorkers.

Before we get into the details of Glock and we'll get to what he did specifically, but how did you find out about this guy?

Thanks a lot. Yeah, and that's kind of an interesting story in itself.

John Glock is actually a relative of mine. He's a great grand uncle who I didn't really know much about till a couple years back.

It was actually on Christmas Eve. We were sitting around with our family and my uncle had mentioned that we had this relative that had been...

he didn't know a lot of details, but he had been Santa Claus. He had answered Santa letters in New York and that was about all he knew.

And that seemed like a fun story. I thought maybe there was... it'd be worth just learning for myself or maybe there'd be a fun article or something.

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