The History of the World Podcast, written and presented by Chris Hasler. This is the History of the World Podcast Unscripted. Oh, you know, you know. Now, the Hello everyone. Merry Christmas from the History of the World Podcast.

It's great to join you here on Christmas Day,

and a real pleasure to speak to you after a couple of weeks.

I didn't broadcast last week so this is my Christmas gift to

you and we're going to have a couple of episodes and hopefully all being well we'll

get back to having proper episodes just inside the new year so

probably I think now listen I get my dates a little bit mixed up, but maybe yes, maybe it will be New Year's Day when we get our next episode, but anyway, in the meantime I've been very, very busy and I've spent a bit of time out of the country as well

so hence the reason why I've not been broadcasting but it's only going to be a short break I

promise I know we had a long break in the summer,

but this one's only going to be a short one and then we're back to normal episodes.

But yes, finally we're here Christmas Day and it feels for the first time for me like the first

somewhat normal Christmas. We did have, you know, we did get together with family last year and of course the year before we were all in

lockdown so we couldn't get together at all we were still somewhat affected by the whole COVID-19 thing last year but this

year really feels like Christmas is somewhat normal like it was maybe three years ago so

that's quite a nice thing.

Made me think about Christmas Day and this whole tradition of Christmas Day and I

know that during the course of the

volumes of this podcast we actually spoke about Christmas Day maybe the dates

follows on from a Roman tradition. So I thought I'd explore this a little bit further and it does seem strange doesn't it that when we're singing Christmas carols and

talking about Christmas we we're talking about the Shepherds and the Shepherds watching

their flocks by night. You know I can't imagine too many Shepherds being

thrilled about watching their flocks at night in the in the freezing cold.

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