Behind the Scenes Minis: Pumpkin Spice Christmas

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fried. We talked about nutmeg this week. We listeners also don't get to know that we had to take an entire pause after recording almost ten minutes of the episode because of incredibly loud leaf flowers. Yeah, just directly outside. And then when we started back over, there were some more leaf flowers that returned, which was not expected. I think I said this in version one, but not in version two when we started over. In my personal opinion, pumpkin spice flavored things are for October live and later. And I was as soon as I thought that, I thought, yeah, I thought, Holly is probably like pumpkin spice. The moment it's available is I'm what I'm thinking is probably your What do you mean the moment it's available, it's never not available? Twenty four to seven, three sixty five. I have pumpkin spice. Yeah. Do you mean the blend? Yes? And do you also mean commercially produced products that come out in a seasonal pumpkin spice here's the good news. Yeah, some of those things come out year round, and they just get pushed a lot. Then. So if you're like me and you love pumpkin and pumpkin spice everything, because I love both. Said it before and I'll say it again. I'm the weirder that will eat pumpkin pure out of a can. I know that's a lot of squash too. It's not all pumpkin. I don't care. I'll take all of it. But like I have like subscriptions set up with certain vendors so that I'm always getting my pumpkin pie, which includes pumpkin spice coffee syrup on a quarterly shipment subscription, so I'm never out of it. Okay, I will make my own pumpkin spice everything all the time. Listen. I don't wait for the PSL because I can't drink it anyway anymore. Okay, I just about to segue me to another thing that makes me I rate, but we'll get there. I have so many feelings just because it's a little too sweet for me. I can't handle that much sugar, so I make a like a sugar free version at home usually. But also do you remember this is into more pumpkin than nutmeg. But several years ago, I don't know how many, when someone did some chemical analysis and was like, there's no pumpkin and a pumpkin spice latte. There's not supposed to be. Hello, thank you. It's not a pumpkin latte is spice latte. It is the spices, including the glorious nutmeg. Yeah. Yes, that makes me irate every time. Yeah, here's my one other thing, okay, Tracy V. Wilson, Yes, you left out the most important use of nutmeg and why it is a year round spice. Please tell me cocktail garnish. Oh sure, Yeah, if you're making flips, if you're making painkillers, if you're making a variety of cocktails. Yeah, have that nutmeg on your back, the nutmeg on there. Yeah, that sounds great. I like to drink a lot of flips, so in it goes all day every day. Yeah. We use some of the blends that often have nutmeg in there all the time in our kitchen, like razalh. Nutt is a frequent thing, which that is a blend that can really vary. I think it means something like top of the shelf. It's meant to sort of showcase the spice vendors best of their product is like my understanding of how that blend works. So you can make it yourself with lots of different spices. You can buy one from a specific spice shop that might be very different. But one of the things that is often in it is nutmeg, and that is frequently in use at our house because I love eggnog so so much, and because those sugar cookies in our family have nutmeg in the in the flavoring nutmeg, just straight nutmeg without other flavors also in it has always just felt like a very Christmasy specifically flavor to me. Gotcha. And as I was researching this and I realized how many other things also have nutmeg in it, like sauce. A lot of sausages are seasoned with nutmeg, I was like, Oh, I'm just I'm having a lot more year round nutmeg than I ever realized, because the things in the autumn and winter are the ones that are maybe the most nutmeg forward of all of them. I do love all of those things. They are really delicious. Something that I stumbled onto after having written the episode that I didn't I'd already sent you that line. Don't even know why I found this after the fact I had moved on to another topic, but it is one of my old favorite, uh one of my old favorite topics that we've card on the show, which is Hildegarde of Bingen, who I just have a big fondness for. She apparently believed that nutmeg had quote a great warmth and a good temperament in its strength. If a person eats nutmeg, it opens the heart and purifies the senses and brings a good disposition. What a lovely thing to associate with nutmeg. This is from her physica, which she talks about medicinal uses of all of these different spices and herbs and things like that, among other topics, and she talks about pulverizing equal weights of nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves and making little cakes with that mixture along with fine whole wheat and water, and then said that eating these would open the heart and relieve impaired senses and make the mind more cheerful. So various people have turned that very basic instruction into a recipe that they call cookies of Joy, and all of that sounds super delicious to me, and there's a recommendation to eat it every day. I sure would eat that every day. I have a question, okay about things you eat huh, because you mentioned sugar cookies are a Christmas tradition for you. Huh. Are they a special thing for you for Christmas? Or do do your family make them year round? Or is there a Christmas only version. I have made them myself at other times of the year as a family recipe. They are a Christmas thing. They are made at Christmas. They are decorated for Christmas with usually colored sanding, sugar, and sometimes other little things, the sort of decorative elements that are always very Christmas y in there doing so. My grandmother is the first I guess great grandmother, first generation of the family who's like whose sugar cookies I heard about from the family because she had died before I was born, but people would talk about how thin she was able to get them in a way that other people in the family just could not replicate. By the time I was born, my grandmother was making them, My mom was making them. My mom is not able to do that anymore because of her disabilities. My dad does them now and they are super good. I look forward to them every year when I have made them. For some other purpose. I have usually cut them out into different shapes because they're they're rolled and cut with cutters, and so I have cut them using different shape cookie cutters and decorated them differently for different purposes and eating them. It still felt a little Christmas need to me because that association is so strong with them. There, I'm fascinated. Yeah. Yeah, there are other sugar cookies that are like I would just either buy from a store or eat that do not have that Christmas connotation for me. Oh, now I have more questions. Oh okay, just these may or may not be good for Behind the scenes, I'm just like, okay, how do they taste different from regular sugar cookies. Well, I've had sugar cookies that have just instead of having nutmeg, have maybe had some other spice flavoring them, or maybe there's been just vanilla and nutmeg coure. Like I think just because there's also eggnog, having a lot of nutmeg in it, just it feels like a Christmasy flavor to me in a lot of ways. I think one of the reasons that it's used in so many fall and winter traditional foods here in the US is that it can feel very warming. Oh yeah, it's a very warming flavor, and so it's comforting to have it. It goes into the blend called warming spices. Yeah, that makes total sense to me. I seem to remember at one point in my life another seasonal thing for usually Thanksgiving in my family is called per semon pudding. And if you've never had per semon putting, the texture of it is almost like pumpkin pie fill, but there's an almost figginess to it because of the texture of the per simmons. And I seem to remember there being a very heated argument about whether there was supposed to be nutmeg in there because somebody else had made it other than the ant who usually did that, and there was just a big controversy about whether nutmeg was correct to have in there. See, as we mentioned in the episode, people have very strong feelings yeah about yeah these things. But here's my take. Okay, there may be a way person X makes it right, Like the way I make a cookie may not be the way someone else makes the same cookie or the cookie with the same name, But like my reaction is never to be that it's wrong, But like I want to try your kind too. Oh sure, yeah, I don't know if that's just my gluttony driving the bus of like, sure, let me try all of it. Yeah. Yeah, I never understand getting mad about people not doing things the way you do them. Yeah, I have seen this phenomenon. And when you know, when it comes to me saying that I want to have pumpkin spice flavored things in the autumn, that's just me. If you want to whenever, have it whenever. I'll also get mad at the weather if it becomes fall and I feel like it's too warm outside to be having some kind of gigantic pumpkin spice coffee beverage because iced it's not as good to me as some other things are good as an iced coffee. So yeah, I as we said in the episode, I know this is not just about holiday foods, but it's December, so that's what I'm thinking about the most right now is coming out the week of Christmas, in which uh, probably there will be a lot of eggnog at my house, possibly also sugar cookies. It's my dad. If my dad continues to make them, because he is also getting older in years and things take more and more effort to do them as we age. Yeah, I'll probably make a lot of flips. Yeah, yeah, yeah, although lately I've been doing different things with flips, like making them spicy and putting red pepper on them instead of instead. Oh, that sounds really interesting. It is. It's a it's really just like you're listen, I'll give out a cocktail recipe. It's like two ounces of your brandy or your cognac, whichever you prefer, an ounce of chili liqueur, your whole egg. You can add like a half ounce of Demarara syrup if you want. Give it a good dry shake so the egg gets nice and frothy, and then you can shake it with ice and pour it out, strain it out, and then we just top it with a little red pepper flake. Yum. It's like a spicy, not quite old school Christmas y winter bevy. That's a little different, you know. I just love it. Yeah, work shopping it over here. We're always playing. We're always playing. But there are a lot of good drinks that have nutmeg on them. Talked about Christmas decor this year, Yeah, I have so many thoughts on this matter. There's so many things to talk about because people have strong feelings about Christmas decor one. I don't care when you want to put it up. Yeah, as we've mentioned. I think we've talked about it here before because I grew up going to craft stores. Holidays are year round to me anyway, Like I don't have weird like only after Thanksgiving, only after labor d like whenever my house is Halloween twenty four seven, three sixty five, so like I have it all the time. But Christmas. I know people that put up their Christmas trees extra early this year because they just felt like they needed some joy. None of this like up on the twenty fourth, then down in a couple of weeks. Thing, sure, and ours has no rules. We get to it when we get to it, and it comes down when it comes down, it's fine. I definitely have a memory of my mom one year saying that we were not going to take the Christmas tree down until we had received some gifts that another family member had promised they were sending. Listen, don't do that, because it was like May thirtieth before we took that tree down. Yeah, which is fine if you're into it, but I think she was just adamant that, like we had to have the tree until the I don't know why. Yeah, don't do that. Okay, the big very argument spawning question, uh huh, realer artificial artificial because I have an artificial because too. So Yeah. So when I was little, for the first few years of my childhood, we did have a live tree every year, and then eventually moved to artificial, and I think part of the reason with that was just that the cleanup from the real tree was a lot. My mom had felt like artificial trees were really ugly, and so getting to the point of one in the late seventies early eighties that that was attractive enough, I think was part of it. For my part, I have always had cats, and I feel like an artificial tree can be managed a little better for the cats. I know people probably we have the opposite conclusion for other reasons. Another big reason, though, is that my spouse has a range of allergies to the natural world and bringing a live tree into our house would probably aggravate some of them. So what we have is not just an artificial tree. It is a pre lit artificial pencil style tree. Because we live in a house in New England that we could afford to buy, which means it is small. There is not a lot of available floor space for a whole the whole footprint of the base of a typically shaped tree, so it is very narrow, which also seems to have knock on wood kept the cats from trying to climb up into it, like the branches are not really big enough to support a whole cat, and they, for the most part, have not messed with it every year since we have had the tree and cats. Okay, my artificial because is a little more troubling a story for some people. Okay, Oh, okay, I'm just gonna I've written a story in my head, and I'm gonna tell you whether it was right. We'll see. Okay. So one year when I was a kid, my dad was stationed overseas. My mom insisted that we get a real tree that year. We didn't always sometimes we would have artificials, sometimes you would have a real one. There was no rhyme or reason. And we got a real one that year, and we got it home and we put it in its little stand with the water, and we put all the decorations on it, and we even put some gifts under it because we already had some. And the next morning we woke up to what I'm gonna guess was millions of spiders, Yeah, everywhere, all over everything. Yeah. Yeah, my guest was gonna be bug infestation in the tree. Yes, And I like spider's fine, but that was overwhelming and I don't really want to invite them over for Christmas. They can if they show up in my house, I will treat them with hospitality and find them a place outside, but they're not like on the guest list. And a lot after that, I just remember being like, I will never have a real tree, and I haven't now the cat thing. I'm stalling a little bit to talk about my terrible buying habits, but the cat thing. We had a funny turn of events, which is that some years back, I don't know ten, possibly more, not much more, we had been in our house a few years and I was like, hey, when we were in our apartment, we only had like a little the kind you would put on like a table, like one of those little dinky two to three foot or things. Yeah, and we'd been like, maybe we get a tree. And we got a tree that year, and we decided that we would like test it by just putting it out without ornaments and seeing what happened mm hmm. And at the time we had we have five or six at that point, we had some cats. And we went to work one day and we came home and not only was the tree obviously trashed, but two of the branches were in our bed. Okay. There was just like I was like, did someone break in? Like it was so bad? Yeah, yeah, it was so bad. And it was like, I don't understand what's taking place here. And I of course fingered the usual suspect and I was like, you are the bad cat. This is clearly your doing. But we didn't take the tree down, probably because we were just like too lazy, m And we went to work. The next day, we came home and there was more mayhem. And on the third day we came home and the culprit was asleep in the trashed out tree okay, and it was not the one I thought. It was one of the sweetest cats we've ever had, how funny. And when I awakened him from his slumber, which he had had to thread himself through some branches because so many were missing at that point, like he had to do acrobatic work to find a place that would support his weight because he also was not a tiny cat, and it was not mister Burns. Don't anybody think it. It was one of our lovely Siamese. And when I awakened him, it was one of the only times he was ever insolent, and he looked at me like, what are you doing? Call the manager like he was like irritated it me for being mad that he had destroyed the tree and made a clubhouse. We eventually started putting up a tree when when those cats, our Siamese were quite young, then they were only like two, and when they hit about seven or eight, they had chilled out a little bit, and so we started putting up a tree again. And it's been fine. Yeah, And now we just had the two boys left, and I this is where I confess to like a problem in my life. Okay, okay. First of all, I love our Christmas tree. It's per and it's fun and we put toys on it and it's great. But I like other colors. And apparently in a fugue state, which sometimes happens to me, I get up in the morning and while I'm waiting for my coffee to be ready, I get on my phone and I do things that I'm not even aware of and don't remember. Right, long story short, I now also have a pink tree and a black tree, and I don't know where they're gonna go. That's great. We have no idea where there's those are gonna go. But we'll find this space somewhere. But it's we're going to have fun. Now. This brings us to the important grown up part of the discussion. I did not realize until I was working on this episode how much vehement arguing has gone on since the sixties and continues to go on about whether it is better for the environment to have an artificial tree or a natural tree. Both sides of the argument continue to be so completely confident that I don't know because right, like the various parts, there's more to it. I'm certainly not going to be able to parse out the whole thing quickly and casually. But like, obviously, like the idea of cutting down trees is part of what people are like, we are destroying a natural resource. Why would you do that? The earth needs trees. They're being grown for that purpose though, right, And also like then you have to throw it away and it becomes a trash thing. And yeah, there which again that there are other things that can be done with that. A lot of places like chip it and use it for mult or whatever. Yeah, my community has a tree pickup day that it then mulched. Whereas you know artificial trees, people are like, well, yeah, but that is part of big industry. It's creating you know, industrial waste and manufacture. And now most of the trees you would get in the US are made overseas. And not only is that like does that mean we don't necessarily know about all the regulations around how they're made, but also you have a pretty significant footprint in terms of transporting those items to homes in the US, and that is bad. Now there are still companies in the US that make artificial trees, and there are people that are like, no, but that has created a lot of jobs. Listen, there are arguments on both sides. I just wanted to acknowledge that people argue about it. Yeah, I the tree that we are using we bought the year we bought this house, and we are going to continue using it until it's no longer functional. Like yeah, like that's how that's going to work. And occasionally I will see arguments about whether something is really sustainable in quotation marks that goes into something like the amount of energy it takes to make a reusable coffee mug versus the amount of energy it takes to make a you know, wax lined or whatever paper coffee cup. Right, And it's like, okay, but did you factor in the fact that people are going to use that mug that mug until they die? Right? That's the thing there. There isn't a lot of good information on usage cases that extrapolate along like the potential lifetime of such a thing. We had. The artificial tree that we had for a long time was the one that I grew up with. Yeah, yeah, and we inherited it, and frankly, we finally got rid of of it because and when I say I grew up with that, I mean that thing was probably made in maybe nineteen seventy. It has taken on a weird odor m hm, like not musty, but a unique the way plastics breaking down start to smell, and it had started to melt in places when it was around lights that weren't even necessarily that hot. Yeah, And I was like, safety gone, Like we have gotten you know, thirty five years out of history. I think it's okay to say goodbye. Yeah, so, yeah, I I like the fantasy colors, is my problem? Yeah, I think that sounds very fun. I love a pig tree. I love our purple tree very much. Can we talk briefly about the German pickle situation? Okay, you know about the pickle right, hiding the pickle in the tree ornaments, right, which I had always heard. You know, if you go to Epcot in the Germany pavilion, they'll sell y'all a pickle ornaments. But I was reading a blog written by a German person who claims that is belgoney and that if you ask anybody who is actually from Germany, they'll be like, we don't know where this pickle thing started. So that leads me to the question of then is it a German American thing? I don't know, which is really why I'm putting this at the end of our discussion, because I'm putting a call out. Yeah, if you know the history of the pickle ornaments, you have delivered on smart orange cats, you have delivered on fabulous personal ghost stories. Do you know a German person that knows about the pickle ornament? If you don't know what we're talking about for context, just as many glass ornaments, you will sometimes see one that looks like a pickle, and you're probably like, what is the pick allowed to do with Christmas? Although now you can find a glass ornament of any Yeah, here's a cheeseburger. It's a pickle. Same thing, but allegedly in the tradition that people claim comes from Germany or possibly German Americans, like the kid that could find the pickle ornament kind of hidden in the branches of the tree would like get a special gift or something. And then sometimes there's the addendum of like the first adult to spot it will have extra good fortune in the new year to come. Like there are other things, but that's the German pickle it just in case anybody listening had not heard of it before. And I found this person writing a German blog and claiming they really did not love the German pickle story because it seemed to them like a bunch of stuff people in the US made up. It's not even appropriation, it's what Yeah, So if you know the real real, if you are from a German households, I want to know if you know about the pickle. Yeah, if you're from a German American household. I want to know if you know about the pickles. Yeah, I just want to I just want experiential evidence of actual human beings, right, and not catalogs as correct. Yeah, I will say I will sometimes see discourse on whatever app about whether this or that thing actually comes from a place, and a lot of times it's like, yeah, that doesn't come from that place. That is something that has developed within the communities of immigrants from that place riving in the United States, and that has its own worth and value one hundred percent one percent, and it does. I mean, I start to think of it in terms of like, how could this have played out, and like at a time when you know, Christmas ornaments also not cheap for a long time, and even now, like you can buy cheapy ones, but like nice ones can be really pricey. And I could see a family being like, this would be a fun way to add add something special to our tree that costs next to nothing. Huh. It will be a fun thing for an hour on Christmas morning or Christmas Eve or whenever they do their tradition, right. That's the other thing. One of the things that people say is the detractor is that the way that story is told often in the US it is when the kids wake up on Christmas morning blah blah blah. But in Germany you don't usually do your gift thing on Christmas morning. That's a Christmas Eve situation, and so they're like, that's your first clue that this is wrong. So again you've delivered on the orange cats that are smart, I believe. Now now with the German pickle, we are now past Christmas. So I hope that if you celebrate Christmas, that you had a very beautiful Christmas that was filled with love and joy and delicious sugar cookies if you're in Tracy's and many other families, or other delicious things, because the best part of Christmas is feasting, in my book, and that you feels that you've gotten some rest and relaxation out of the deal. If you are headed into your weekend right now, I hope you get a little more of that. And if you're not headed into your weekend, I still hope that you find some time to recharge and that you have had great holidays, and that the new year, which is coming up quickly, will also be good. We will be right back here tomorrow with the classic episode, and then up Monday with something brand new. 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