Well, hi, everyone. We're here with Pamela McCall, who is the writer, historian, and I love this term, literary sleuth, who put the pieces together in a poem, I'm sure you can recite by heart if I say the first line.

Twas the night before Christmas. I know, you want to keep, you want to keep saying it. You might want to test yourself. It was the night before Christmas. What comes next? Well, Pamela researched this poem and has become an authority on its history, and we were lucky enough to sit down with her a few years ago to talk about it and how it really impacted the way we see Christmas as a culture.

She's now back with a new book, Wanderous Mrs. Claus, a literary and pictorial review. And she's sitting down with us today, which I'm excited about.

Perfect for this time of year, Pamela.

It's nice to see you again.

I was surprised to hear about this new book and excited about it as well

because of what you said about how one piece of arts can then set the stage, no pun intended,

for the way that we think about a popular Christmas character. And I was curious about Mrs. Claus for a few different reasons.

Where did you come up with this idea? How did it all begin?

Well, when I was working on Twas the Night, the art and history of the classic Christmas poem,

the book I wrote on Twos the Night Before Christmas, I kept bumping into Mrs. Claus stories

from the 1800s, and so I kept a file on the side of my desk.

And I thought, it might be kind of fun to write her history. And no one had ever done a

literary review of the character. And so I thought it would be a great book. And it was, it was

wonderful to work on not only because of the stories I found, but also the artwork I found.

The illustrations in Harper's in the 1860s and

70s were just so remarkable. And her story was so well developed back then that we've kind of

lost pieces of her and her story. So it became a really fascinating research projects, and I loved

writing it. Well, it sounds like to me, I've always looked at Mrs. Claus as sort of the unsung hero of the whole Christmas bit because, you know, you always see her. She's in an apron, sometimes like a little hat. You could kind have an image of her. And I'm like, look at how she's going to have to deal with all of this around the holidays. This is yeah i think what's really interesting about her is that each generation has their

perception of mrs claus so myself i'm 67 i would have a different perception of the

character because of the literature and the films the songs you know that king cole's song

miss you know mrs santa Claus, from the 50s.

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