He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire and seeing faces in it.

The last face was so horrible and so simmian that he gazed at it in amazement.

It got so vivid that with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on the table for a glass containing

a little water to throw over it. His hand grasped the monkey's paw, and with a little shiver,

he wiped his hand on his coat and went up to bed.

That is a passage from my personal favorite ghost story in all of English literature,

and you probably guessed it, it is our Halloween episode. Hey guys, I can't believe it. We've

been doing this show for over a year now, which means that the holiday episodes are coming back

around. These are some of my favorite things to do on this show for Halloween, for Thanksgiving,

for Christmas, and later on for Easter. We're going to do a bunch of special episodes that kind of

take a little bit of a branch off maybe from our typical format, our typical way of doing things,

and just look at some of the classic entertainments and ideas behind our holidays. I think

holidays are sort of quietly one of the things that are under assault at the moment, sometimes

not so quietly, right? We just had Columbus Day, which is being renamed to Indigenous People's Day

before our eyes. If you want to know my take on that, which is that I refuse to engage with it,

and categorically I say no, you can go to the American Mind and read my piece, Hate Columbus,

Hate America. But there's something deeper and more serious behind this, right? What are people

doing when they're trying to unsettle our national holidays? Well, one reason why, one major

reason why they do that is because they're considered to be intolerant or unfair that certain things in

our culture get celebrated. Sometimes we say that those things themselves are bad, like with Columbus

Day, but then sometimes with Christmas we just say, well, this is not, this is a country with

freedom of religion. Why do we elevate this Christian holiday, right? And the key to all of this,

...