Hi, I'm Ophira Eisenberg.

I'm a comedian and a parent.

Uh, the absurdity of telling jokes late at night and then waking up early with a small

child in the morning.

I have a new podcast called Parenting Is a Joke.

I'll talk to other funny people who are also parents.

Will we be laughing?

Will we be crying?

Find out by listening to Parenting Is a Joke.

Find the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff

to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time.

The Winter Hall of Days have arrived once more.

It's a time for festive foods by the fire, a time for the giving of gifts, and of course

a time for parading through the streets with the head of a dead horse.

I speak of the hoodan horse or hoodan, a tradition from Kent and southeast England that dates

back to at least the 1800s, but with likely roots to much older pre-Christian traditions.

I first read about this practice in the 1987 Enchanted World Volume, The Book of Christmas,

which features a beautiful illustration by visual artist Matt Mahur, that depicts a ghostly

humanoid horse stamping and prancing down a misty street.

The book describes the Christmas Eve tradition in which a man and a sheet or horse blanket

...