Hola! Bonjour!

Ho! Ho! Ho! Felice Navidad's Merry Christmas!

Welcome to this week's normal not normal podcast with myself, James Phelps.

And me, Oliver Phelps, guys, we thought we'd bring the festivities of the holidays to this episode.

Very much so whether you're celebrating Christmas or Quanzar or you've just celebrated Hanukkah

or Duvali or any other holidays, welcome! We hope you have a great time with us now.

We thought as it's Christmas we'll have a listener participation week again to celebrate the holiday

season. So we've been inundated so thank you so much with your messages, your stories,

your questions, your did-you-nodes. We've had a great time just picking some of them out first

to play it this week. So our first story time is all about Hungarian holiday traditions. Take it away!

Hello, James! Hello, Oliver and hello, everyone! I'm Fanny and I'm from Hungary and I would like to

tell you a Hungarian tradition from the old times when people believed in witches. On the 13th of December

the masters started to make a chair and this chair is called Lutsaceka in Hungarian which can be

translated as a Lutsace chair and Lutsace is a girl named here. So they had been doing it for

13 days and at night on the 25th of December on the midnight mass you have to stand up to the chair

and you could spot the witches because they wore horns and when you spot a witch you have to escape

because the witches can attack you. You have to throw away poppy seeds because when the witches are

busy picking them up you can easily escape and after that you have to burn the chair and then

the country and the town is safe from witches. Yeah, it's a bit confusing and it's a bit weird but

it's still interesting I think. Yes, I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you will have a very

merry Christmas. Bye! Fanny, thank you so much for that one. That was very interesting learning about

the Hungarian holiday traditions. I have so many questions. How do they know that the poppy seeds

...