Hey guys, welcome back to the Conspiracy Podcast, Christmas edition. Oh my god, though, it is upon us. It is time. It’s Christmas time. And in the Christmas spirit, and as we’ve been doing the last, what, six episodes, something like that, we’re going to make it a normal tradition to give shoutouts to our supporters. First things first, Sammy G, you’ve been a supporter, you’ve been in the Discord. Sorry for the late shoutout, but thank you for supporting us.

Some of our new Patreons. We got Mike. Don’t know your last name, but I love you. And Mike did a yearly. Oh yeah. What a boss. He did the yearly subscription because he’s a man who knows what he wants. Made after my own heart. He knows his future. Yeah, like he knows he’s not going to stop listening. I think he got a little discount too. He got a little discount. This sounds weird, but you buy eleven months, you get one free. He got so much more than a discount. He only paid for slightly less than ten months technically. It’s a bigger discount than I thought.

Then we have Joey Markle. What’s up, dog? Appreciate you. Thanks, buddy. Don’t let your kids listen to this. If kids are listening, please, I’m going to give you a five second window to not be listening to this. So, shoutout to Baron Vaughn Long Dong, legendary navigator of the USS Bang Bus and his trusty Rear Admiral Jake Jigglin Ball. Thanks so much for the support, my guy. That is the full name. That is his full name on Patreon.

Anyways, if you’re considering giving a gift, you could also do that for Patreon. You could give a gift. It’s Christmas. Give the gift that gifts multiple people. It gifts them, it gifts us. Everybody wins. The gift that keeps on giving. And if you were wondering what you get, just yesterday, or today actually, we released another mini. So that’s Patreon only. It was a good thirty, forty minute episode about the urban legends of food, junk food.

We are starting to build up a nice catalog of those. We’ve made it a point to do more so that there’s more value. We’re hoping that in 2026 we’re going to add anywhere from thirty to sixty more minis. Ideally more. But obviously we have jobs, so it’s slightly difficult to make time, but we’re making the time because we love you guys. Yeah, exactly. Anyways, thank you.

You also get discounted merch too, depending on your status. We are opening a merch store. It is going to be pretty much launching soon. We’re working that out with Lord Emperor Gamer Dave. So that’s coming to a phone near you. Although I don’t know if I like the designs that they’ve come up with. Well, just because they take your likeness and make it hilarious. All the funnies. Eric, do you want to get big or not? Accept it. Accept it.

So, it’s Christmas week. I hope you’re off by the time you listen to this. You are relaxing, or you’re stressed out on presents, or I don’t know, or both. Or both. Yeah. You’re deep into the eggnog. Oh, deep. You know. Do you guys like it? I love eggnog, though. I don’t know what it is about it, I love it. I love it too. It’s a little snotty for me. Dude, I don’t care. To me it’s like creamy. I’m going to give it a try this year.

Well, snotty is not the right consistency. It shouldn’t be. No, it’s like thick. Yeah, it is thick, but it should be nice and creamy. It’s good. Oh, it’s good. Add a little burn on the back end. Cinnamony. I mean, you can make it that way, but it’s not usually like that normally. If you just go by the eggnog, that’s just going to be plain. Well, if you put fireball in it, it’ll put a little cinnamony note. You know what? That actually might be good. Maybe I should try it. A little fireball.

All right. Well, last year we did a weird episode. A little tale. A little strange. But this year I decided that we should probably know what the true story of Christmas was. Yeah. Where did this come from? And then my boy Kevin Costner just came out with almost like a narrated history special. You should check it out, maybe, if you’re interested in the origins of Christmas, but more so the origins of the birth of Christ. That’s really what it was.

So, if you wanted to check that out, you could. It’s not bad. Is it Paramount or something? Hulu, I think. Okay. I just got the bundle, so I was like, check it out. Check it out. I was using Eric’s, but it would always log me out. I think he was logged into like twelve different devices, so it would log me out all the time. So I bit the bullet. You know what? You need it. I need your account. Take it. Okay.

If you strip away the lights, strip away Santa, shopping, Hallmark, the boring stuff. Why are we doing this? Christmas sucks. The origin story of Christmas is surprisingly messy, political, and stitched together from multiple cultures. Okay. The holiday didn’t appear fully formed at the beginning. Instead, it kind of grew like a snowball rolling downhill for nearly two thousand years. Oh, wow. Picking up different traditions from different cultures, different meanings. New characters were added later and we get to where we’re at today.

There is a semblance of, well, it’s a cash grab. It’s called what it is. It’s a cash grab. But there is a moment, like after three, four weeks of you running around buying stuff, putting up lights, trees, present wrapping, etc. There is a moment, I would say, and tell me if I’m wrong, but there’s a moment where you’re like, it’s special. That’s like the little moment where the nostalgia kicks in. You kind of think about when you were a kid, and then it goes away fast.

I always love Christmas because that’s like the one time when my family’s spread out, and I like getting the whole family together. Now that I’m older and I can afford to buy them gifts, it’s like I like that I get to kind of give back a little bit. That’s why I like it. For me, I’m like, oh, cool, I’ve made it. I’m an adult now and now I can actually provide the wonder and the joy. Personally I’m like, oh, this is whatever, but the joy that I bring others makes me happy. It’s not like Christmas itself makes me happy. It’s just the joy that I can bring others.

So now that you guys are super old, is it better? Is it better now than it was when you were a kid? No. Not even close. Like not even remotely close. I get socks and underwear every year, and you know what the sad part is? I asked for it. Yeah. By myself. I’m like, it’s in the cart, just kidding me. Yeah.

The story starts with a real historical figure, and that’s Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish builder from a rural corner of the Roman Empire. Historians agree that he lived, he taught, and was eventually executed by the Romans. What no one knows, literally no one, is the actual date of his birth. Exactly. So that’s a very common misconception. There’s nowhere where it says he was born on December twenty-fifth. Nowhere. It was made up. It’s almost like the Thanksgiving thing. They’re like, screw it, change this.

The earliest Christians didn’t even celebrate his birthday. Birthdays weren’t a big thing in Jewish culture, and the focus of early Christianity was entirely on his teachings and on his death, not the day that he actually entered the world. So like Easter basically. Essentially. Yeah, I mean, not as we know it. We’re still speculative, but yeah, of his resurrection. Not rebirth, resurrection. Yeah. For the first few centuries after Jesus lived, there was no Christmas. Nothing on December twenty-fifth.

But let’s be real. You know, two thousand years ago, what do you buy? You’re like, here is a piece of stone that I found for you. What are you even buying as far as gifts? There wasn’t like a store. You were workers, and what do you actually give? I don’t know. What were the gifts? There was no PlayStation. They didn’t celebrate birthdays. As far as it wasn’t a big deal. They just happened to be alive, surviving.

But what if we go back two thousand years and I whittled you a squid? I don’t know, I whittled you some sort of cool thing. I don’t even know what it is, but it’s cool. You’d be into it. Oh, I’m sure you’d buy it. Yeah. Or like a satchel. I made you a nice, like, a belt. Instead of socks, you just get a satchel. Okay. Yeah.

So the question then becomes, where did Christmas come from? To answer that, you have to jump forward nearly three hundred years to the Roman Empire. By the early three hundreds, Christianity was growing fast, and the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized it. Suddenly the church needed official holidays, fixed dates, set celebrations, annual traditions, something that could unify this massive and now legitimate religion.

Well, it’s so funny how the tables have turned. Obviously the Romans who used to be on the mythological spectrum, everything revolved around the gods, the several gods. There’s multiple gods. There were gods for everything. God of harvest, god of love, god of the water, god of the skies, gods for everything. But they were around specific times, and that’s how you got the people on board. So it’s funny, then they kill Jesus, and then they end up getting converted, and then they’re like, we need to make this legit, like how we did it back in the day. We need to have days, dog.

Yeah. But they had a problem. Jesus didn’t leave behind a birth certificate. Damn it. Church leaders essentially, he’s undocumented. Church leaders had to establish a date. They had to choose a date. And they chose December twenty-fifth. Do they say why they chose it? Not because of anything written in scripture. There’s no mention of month or season even, but because December twenty-fifth already meant something in the Roman world. Okay, here we go.

Long before it was Christmas, the end of December was home to two major Roman celebrations. First was Saturnalia, a week-long party filled with gift giving, heavy drinking, gambling, and decorating their houses. Hell yeah, boys. The perfect time. It was almost a little costumey, where they had this role reversal where the slaves could mock their masters for a week. Hell yeah. Oh wow. Okay. What a great time. No wonder they picked it. It’s the most wonderful time.

After Saturnalia came another holiday, the festival of Sol Invictus, the birthday of the unconquered sun. Ooh. This festival celebrated the winter solstice, the moment when the day started getting longer and the sun seems to return. Oh, the sun returns. The sun. The son of Christ. When Christianity became the empire’s favorite religion, placing Jesus’s birthday on December twenty-fifth was a brilliant bit of symbolism. If the pagans were already celebrating the birth of the sun, Christians could celebrate the birth of the Son.

It allowed converts to keep the same seasonal festivities, but with a new meaning layered over them. In other words, Christmas wasn’t born in Bethlehem. It was born in Rome. That’s so wild. Yeah. Damn. Interesting. Romans were like marketing masters. True. They were. They were kind of like, oh, well, we already have this party here, let’s just change the name a little bit.

But what about the nativity story? The star, the wise men. Oh yeah, we three kings. The animals, the snow on the ground. These details grew over time. The earliest Christian writings barely mentioned Jesus’s birth at all, and the two gospel accounts in Matthew and Luke don’t match each other in many ways. The three wise men might not have been three at all. They weren’t even wise. Like a homie, like one of us. It could have been two, or it could have been like six. The star is widely believed to be symbolic rather than literal, and the animals, the donkey and the innkeeper, were later additions from a medieval story.

The image of a serene, quiet nativity scene is a work of tradition, not necessarily history. Yeah. Once Christmas had a date, the way it was celebrated changed dramatically depending on the era. In medieval Europe, Christmas was less of a quiet family holiday and more like Halloween meets Mardi Gras. Man, you know, we went back to that time travel story. Yeah. Might go back a little, little Christmas celebration back in medieval times. But again, it involved feasting, dancing, pranks, loud celebrations in the street. It also gave way to temporary suspensions of social order. So if there were curfews that night, there were no curfews. It’s like the purge but back in the day.

Also, what’s interesting is that the three kings are celebrated in January, so it’s not technically the Christmas time period. Wait, what? Yeah. So I’m not sure about historically when supposedly they came by, this and that, but in the Hispanic cultures it’s celebrated in January. Christmas is? No, the three kings. You celebrate the three kings. Yes. Oh, hell yeah. You celebrate Christmas, then you celebrate the three kings. What’s it called? Los Reyes Magos. Okay. What does that translate to? The kings, and magos is the magical ones. Oh, the magical kings. All right, that’s cool. Yeah. I like that.

For several days each year, the poor could demand food, drink, or money from the rich, and they had to give it. Church leaders routinely complained about the drunkenness that would ensue. Why are the poor people waiting for what’s happening? This is ridiculous. Some don’t know this, but things got so out of control with these festivals that the Puritans eventually banned Christmas altogether. It’s like husbands counting the days of Christmas while out partying.

In the sixteen hundreds, Christmas was outlawed in England and even in Boston. Oh wow. What? Yeah. The Puritans believed it was too pagan, too rowdy, too unbiblical to be a Christian holiday. Okay. I love that they change. It’s like far too fluid. Like you can just do whatever you want.

So then the question becomes, how did we end up with this warm, kind of cozy Christmas that we celebrate? Family today, food, gifts, margarita. I mean, yeah, we have some sort of holiday drink. But when you think of Christmas, you think of the fireplace and having a drink in your PJs, and it’s kind of a cozier thing. I think of the PJs, yeah, for sure. You know what I think about that’s kind of funny that you guys say that, because Hispanics will celebrate more on the twenty-fourth. Oh, okay. Really? Oh, that’s like the party day. Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve.

You’re out, then you do hangover Christmas, like, let’s open this stuff. And then you’ll still do a dinner or something like that on the twenty-fifth, but more so another party, and then come January, another party. You guys are just wining out all the time. Yeah, I love how, I don’t know if it’s like this in other countries, but in America, you have Christmas Eve, Christmas, and then kind of recovery, and then you have like one day of work, and then you have New Year’s Eve, and then New Year’s, and then it’s another holiday. It’s this weird thing. Yeah, it’s super, like, how much are people getting done on December twenty-eighth?

But then it’s always like, you’re working, but you’re just like, please don’t email me. Whatever you do, don’t email me some Zoom meeting. Susan, you hear me? Susan, why aren’t you on video? It’s just a technical issue.

Most of what we think of as traditional Christmas actually emerged in the eighteen hundreds. Writers, artists, and cultural movements reshaped the holiday into a family centered celebration of generosity and nostalgia. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, and that was, you know, Scrooge and that story. It was hugely influential and it reframed Christmas as a moral, compassionate holiday at a time when the industrial revolution was creating massive inequality. So you see it in the story. Yeah, where the poor guy, and the rich man is the grumpy humbug. He’s like, my money. And this is the time that you’re supposed to give back.

I personally like Mickey’s A Christmas Carol the best. I watched that numerous times with my daughter. Same. Same. It’s great. And Scrooge McDuck. Oh, yeah. And he’s cutting the bean. Oh my god. I always remember the, it’s a pea, and he cuts it in half. Was it like Goofy and Donald and they’re all splitting it? No, it’s Mickey and his family, and his one son’s legs don’t work, like spina bifida or something, and he’s like, don’t worry son, it’s okay. And he makes like six cents a month. It’s wild. I always think about Chevy Chase, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Christmas Vacation. What a classic. I know.

Around the same time, Prince Albert introduced the decorated Christmas tree to England, and American writers like Washington Irving romanticized holiday gatherings. Santa Claus is another late addition. He evolved from St. Nicholas, a Greek bishop known for gift giving, combined that with Dutch traditions, and then polished by American illustrators in the eighteen hundreds. Then the red suit and jolly look, the Coca-Cola Company. Cemented by Coca-Cola ads in the nineteen thirties. The marketers stepped in.

What about Krampus? Where does Krampus fit into all this? Again, tradition, not history. No. It just evolved over time into this thing. Yeah. The character we call Santa Claus is one of the most heavily remixed figures in history, stitched together from ancient legends, medieval folklore, Victorian nostalgia, and twentieth century advertising. His earliest ancestor was St. Nicholas. He was a thin, dark-haired Greek bishop living in what is now Turkey. Oh, wow. That’s why he was the one. He looked nothing like the jolly man in the red suit. If you ever met someone who’s Turkish, no, they don’t look like Santa.

In fact, he was known less for being merry and jolly and more for being fiercely protective of the poor. So protective that one legend claims he punched a fellow bishop in the face during a church argument. What a boss. All right, Saint Nick. But the story that really stuck was the tale of Nicholas secretly helping a poor father who couldn’t afford dowries for his three daughters. According to legend, Nicholas tossed bags of gold through their window at night, and one of the bags landed in a stocking drying by the fire. Okay. Wow. By stocking it means like a sock. It was a legit sock.

That single story became the seed for modern stockings. Maybe it was like all the poor people were like, hang up your stocking, everyone. Put them on the hearth. And additionally, that was the formation of the story of a nighttime giver. You know what I mean? Where he’s throwing stuff in the window. Sneaking in, creeping up in your house. He sees you and you’re sleeping. Turned out to just be a peeping Tom. I know. Good god. Like some serial creep. Oh, that’s terrible.

As Christianity spread across Europe, St. Nicholas blended with local winter folklore. In some places he appeared as a tall, stern bishop. In others, he looked like a ragged old wanderer or a mystical figure in a hooded cloak. Jesus, that’s kind of ominous. I know. Some regions even paired him with darker, frightening companions such as Krampus. Yeah, Krampus. Where you literally scare your children into compliance. You don’t know Krampus? It’s pretty much, I think it’s Norwegian or some stuff, and dude, he literally comes if you’re bad, he steals you and kills you. His thing was he punished misbehaving children.

And so that shadowy character shaped the concept of Santa keeping track of naughty or nice. Oh, if you’re nice, Santa comes. Kind of the original elf that I’ve got to move around every day. Yeah, we don’t do that. We don’t do that either. It’s terrifying. No, we don’t. Not because it’s not fun for the kids. I’m scared of the elf. I don’t want that thing staring at me blinking. Dude, it’s terrifying. Have you ever looked him in the eyes? Dude, he scares me. Talk to him.

We found one. We found one, and my wife’s like, throw this thing out. And I threw him out, and then I checked the trash the next day to make sure he was still there, dude. Make sure he has no pulse. No, make sure, because if he was gone, I was freaked out. It’s hilarious. Anyway, so that’s one of them. Or you see how these stories, like every culture is adding to it. It just kind of blends in. Maybe that’s why Christmas is so great. It’s a universal holiday. Everyone has a little slice of contribution to the legend or to the tradition, I guess.

The reindeer, the sleigh, chimney entrances, and gift deliveries evolved much later in the eighteen hundreds, when American writers began reshaping Christmas as cozy. In that era, Santa was often drawn as a tiny elf-like creature, more of a goblin. He like sneaks in there. That’s how he can fit in the chimney. Yeah, that’s how, a goblin.

It wasn’t until artists like Thomas Nast in the late eighteen hundreds placed Santa at the North Pole. Six foot eight. Yeah. And gave him a rounder, more human look, that he became recognizable. Even then, Santa still didn’t look like he does today. The final transformation came in the early twentieth century when advertising began adopting Santa as the perfect mascot for the winter holiday. Coca-Cola didn’t create the red suit. That part was already in European art, but their painter Haddon Sundblom cemented the modern Santa with his rosy cheeks, soft belly, and a warm, comforting personality. Before that, Santa was thin, tall, somewhat spooky or elfin and goblin.

And goblin. I actually prefer, we should bring goblin Santa back. I kind of like that. You don’t even like the elf. Are you going to like the goblin? I think it’s more legit. That’s why, you know, there’s consequences if you’re not nice. He’s a goblin. Meanwhile, American department stores helped popularize the idea of Santa as a commercial figure. He started visiting malls, being in parades, becoming a key part of the holiday economy. Macy’s brought him mainstream. They were like cash. They saw dollar signs.

What makes Santa so fascinating is that he isn’t one story or one culture. He’s a compilation. He’s a Greek bishop, a Dutch folk hero, a Norse winter god, a medieval gift giver, a mischievous elf or goblin, and finally a symbol of modern holiday cheer, an overweight old man. Yeah. Who’s loaded. But he’s gone through, he’s been kind, stern, spooky, tiny, fat, enormous, magical, religious, commercial, whatever you want. He’s been everything. He’s everything. Maybe it’s like Santa is the best of all of us. He’s what we all aspire to be.

The Santa we know today isn’t ancient at all. He’s a surprisingly recent creation. But he carries the fingerprints of every culture that he’s passed through, which is why he feels timeless and adaptable across the planet. By the twentieth century, Christmas merged religious meaning with cultural nostalgia and commercial opportunity. Retailers leaned into it hard. Department stores, advertising agencies, Hollywood films, and the growth of the American middle class helped turn Christmas into a massive economic engine. Oh, it’s cash, dude. Playbook. It’s now the playbook.

Right now, it’s a season of shopping, travel, parties, movies, and decorations. Spending. Today, Christmas is celebrated by billions around the world, many of whom aren’t even Christian at all. Yeah. Eric posted in the Discord like what the average person spends on their kid. How much? It was like four hundred. Four sixty-seven. And I was like, bro, I spent so much more than that. Like such an amount more. Yeah. But I mean, if you had say a family of four, then the idea. Oh, I’d be bumping it down. Sorry kids, we broke. Yeah, we ain’t got it.

Anyways, but as an example, almost every single thing on that list I’m doing this year. Shopping, travel, parties, movies, decorations, trees. Every single thing I’m spending. I’ve actually already done all those things. Yeah. Anyways, so what is the true origin of Christmas? It’s not a single moment. It’s not one story. It’s a long layering of history. A teacher in Judea, a Roman calendar decision, a pagan winter festival, medieval chaos, Victorian reinvention, and then American commercialization. Christmas is a holiday built over two thousand years, part history, part religion, part culture, and part marketing.

I really think that makes sense. It actually makes sense why Christmas is the most universal and the most beloved holiday, because it’s not really about any one thing. It’s about everything. It’s not just about the birth of Christ, otherwise only Christians would celebrate it. But it’s like everyone’s involved. Everyone’s involved. Yeah.

And then a couple other things that I had written down as notes about, like, why do we do certain things? One of which is, why do we have Christmas trees? Yeah. Why do we have, I mean, it’s pretty. I love it. Trees, why are they inside? You kind of touched on it. Yeah, but go ahead. Like why are they inside? Why don’t we just put them outside and decorate them? Trees are outside things. Meanwhile, it’s like a crazy concept. We put them inside, then we throw them in the trash, like burn them.

By the way, I feel like I got scammed on my tree. You did? Well, I went to, you know, the side of the road where they have the tree guys. And I was like, oh, this is a great deal. And then they were like, yeah, we’re from Wisconsin, these are fresh, these are the best trees. I’m like, all right, right on. So I got a small tree. Like, by small? Seven feet. That’s small for you? Well, no. I mean, yours is way bigger. No, it’s not. Mine is bigger than seven. Yeah, smaller than yours. Got it.

Two hundred bucks. That’s a terrible deal. So I went to Home Depot. I paid seventy-five. No. And then I went to Home Depot to pick something else up and I saw the trees there and I was like, what is happening? It’s seventy-nine ninety-nine. And you got scammed. Yeah, I got scammed. You got super scammed. I got scammed a couple years ago because I got the fake, it was the viral tree on social media, blah blah blah. You got to get off TikTok. Five hundred dollars. Oh. But the good news is I haven’t bought one for three years. So it’s an investment. It’s like after seven years you’re in the black. You’re good now.

So decorated trees first appeared in Europe. Many Christian leaders condemned them as heathen symbols. Can you imagine, like, the inquisitors come in, you’re like, it’s just a tree, I don’t know, and they snatch you up, pagan. The tradition actually grew out of Germanic and Norse winter solstice rituals where evergreen branches symbolized life surviving the dark cold season. I like that. And they even used the branch as a symbol. For sure. It wasn’t until the fifteen hundreds that devout Christians in Germany began bringing small evergreens indoors and decorating them with candles to represent Christ’s light.

Dude, I don’t know if you know what happens when a Christmas tree gets real dry. You don’t want to be putting candles. That thing. How many people died putting candles on their pine tree? Yeah. They’re done. So then why do we put a star on the top of the tree? Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe that was the symbol, the star from the three kings, or what? The star represents the star of Bethlehem, the light said to have guided the wise men to the birthplace of Jesus.

But the tradition of physically placing a star atop a tree didn’t appear until the nineteenth century in Germany, when Christians merged biblical symbolism with their growing Christmas tree custom. Yeah. Before that, trees were topped with angels, candles, bad idea, so bad, or even food items. Just like a turkey on the top, just a whatever. Some would put an apple up there. Okay. An apple’s cool. The star eventually won out because it visually tied the entire story together. And it was way prettier. Yeah.

Then why do we put lights on trees and houses? Because it’s better than a candle. Yeah. Too many houses burned down, so they’re like, we need a different solution. Well, keep in mind, long before electricity, Europeans decorated their trees with candles. Each one symbolizing Jesus as the light of the world. It was risky business. Yeah. Dry pine, open flame, and fires were very rampant. Is that how they blame, you know, Nero burning down half of Rome? It was just Christmas trees that burned down half the city.

Actually, Thomas Edison’s assistant, Edward Johnson, strung together the first electric Christmas lights in eighteen eighty-two. It was actually a publicity stunt to promote Edison’s new light bulb. Johnson hand-wired eighty red, white, and blue bulbs on a rotating tree in his New York home, and newspapers called it brilliant. I mean, can you imagine seeing that and you’ve never seen that? You’d be like, how do we get those in this house? You’re like, Johnny, we usually put the candles. Sorry, the accent doesn’t work. Or the wife’s like, why can’t I get those on my tree? Well, sweetheart, those are, why don’t I own that? Each one of those light bulbs is like a year’s salary. So, Sean, make it happen. You know what? You’re going to get it.

By the nineteen twenties, electric lights became safer and affordable, and people started using them not just on trees, but they decided to put them on the outside of their house. And that was basically, in the coldest, darkest nights of winter, to have light and warmth. And now it’s just to show off to your neighbors. Yeah, that’s what it’s about. Which neighbor can have the best, who’s balling the hardest. Yeah, who’s balling.

And the last little interesting fact I had, which is, why do people carol? Like what’s the point? Oh, dude, I never understood the point of caroling. I’ve never been into it. No one’s ever, if they come to my house caroling, it’s not a thing anymore. Not really, but I’ve seen it. Like when I lived in Ohio, homies tried to carol and I was like, I’m not into it. In Mexico, they’re called posadas. You go house to house. Same thing. House to house singing. But what does posada mean? I don’t know, singer, or, I think it means that you’re offering. I thought they were called mariachi. No, I’m sorry, that was, that you’re offering. That’s what you meant. Yeah.

It still happens in Mexico. It’s still a thing. Caroling started as wassailing, a medieval English tradition where villagers went door to door singing and drinking to bless their neighbors’ health in exchange for food or beer. I’m blessing you right now, brother. I’m blessing all of y’all. So the idea is that you would go and you would bless your neighbor by singing them a song, and you’d be like, I’m going to need something in return. They would give you something in return. Little tip, some cookies and maybe a beer. Damn. I’ll take that. I’m about to go carol. My man neighbors are still up. Let’s go. Not this one on the right, though.

But it actually turned into a rowdy and loud, more of a pub crawl than an actual choir performance. Thirteen dudes outside your house. I don’t have that much beer. A mobile karaoke, annoying karaoke. Isn’t that wild, dude? But like the third house is just chaos. We can’t do this again, we can’t do Bohemian Rhapsody again. But the church didn’t necessarily like it because it got too rowdy and out of control. So what happened is the church softened it. Instead of wassailers, it was turned into carolers who sang religious songs instead of drinking songs. They were singing like the hooligan soccer team.

Can you imagine going to your neighbor and singing an Irish pub song? Oh, Danny boy. We should bring that. That sounds way better. You know what? I’d have my door open. I’d give them beers. I’d totally give them beers. Yeah. Anyways, the wandering house to house singing religious songs, let’s go to the next call, at the neighbor’s house. All right, there you go. That’s the basic story of Christmas. Hope you guys learned something. I mean, I know I did.

I actually was getting really into learning the actual story of Jesus, of his birth. Oh yeah. It’s a great story. It’s riveting and it’s moving. It started with that, because I was like, oh, I’ll check this out, and then I had to look deeper, you know, because it’s only like an hour and then you’re like, I got to watch that. Yeah, that’d be cool. And it’s just cool to learn. I think it’s important. And obviously, you know, we don’t know the exact truth. I mean, it’s over two thousand years ago and there’s a lot of change. Look what happened with Christmas. Look how it morphed over the years. But I think it’s important to at least look and see what we do think happened, because, like, why not? That’s kind of cool.

And we try to stay away from politics, and religion actually. But I am very much a strong believer that Jesus made an amazing effect on earth, on humanity, and you know, one of the biggest effects in the history of mankind. Yeah, I’ll be honest, that’s what my view has always been. Regardless of whether you’re a Christian believer or not, I think Jesus was a real dude. Yeah. Whether he was, you know, the son of God and resurrected, I mean, we don’t know for a fact, there’s no like your Samsung S25. But I still believe he’s a real dude and he did good things and he tried to help people and made people better, and we should all be thankful that there are people like that.

Yeah, that’s right. And he brought us Christmas. And he brought us Christmas. I mean, technically he did. So here we are. And you know, I just wanted to say merry Christmas to you guys.

Thank you for listening. I don’t know if you guys know, it’s really hard to break into podcasting, and somehow, some way, we have, and it’s because of the listeners. You guys keep downloading, you guys keep sharing, you guys keep reviewing. That all helps, because I’m telling you, without you guys, we probably would have quit a year ago. Or we would be done. We would have phased it out. Because the fact is that the reviews you leave, the actual messages, there are some messages we don’t even share that are heartfelt messages of just gratitude. And I just wanted to reverse that and say, hey, when you guys send us those messages, when you leave us those reviews, we get them. We get all of them, share them amongst us, and then Erica always posts them in the Discord.

But here’s the thing about the Discord. We post the bad reviews too. The bad ones too. Yeah. And we get a lot of bad ones. But anyways, thank you guys. Thank you so much. You guys make it work. Yeah. For listening, for subscribing. And merry Christmas from me to you guys. And I just want to say, on that same note, we do it because you guys want to hear more, and that is awesome. That is actually awesome. Definitely fuels us.

So, wherever you are, if you’re with your family, if you’re traveling to your family, if you’re traveling alone, if you don’t have family, if you’re working, if you’re in the truck, if you’re working your extra overtime hours, double time, whatever you’re doing, cheers from us to you guys. Merry Christmas. We love you guys, and we’ll see you soon. Yeah. Catch you next time, guys, on the Conspiracy Podcast. Night night. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas.