A very late followup, but I wantet to re-listen to get in the holiday mood.

Im Swedish so this episode was surprisingly close to home. 🙂

About the old norse gods. I’m no expert, but we do learn about this in elementary school and vikings and the old gods are prevalent in our culture. No, Kevin, Oden does not throw lightnings. Thor is the god of thunder and lightning, and he creates it with his special hammer which only he can use. Oden is the leader of all and father of many of the gods, he is king of Valhalla – so even if he is the god of death, war and judgement, he is also kind, loving, wise and a party animal, so to me it seems perfectly normal that he would ride around giving presents to children. (Btw, another norse story is that his vomit after a unusually heavy drinking spree on mead is the origin of beer. 🙂 )

Sami, or Same/Sapmi are not just “Swedish villagers”, they are our idigenous people and have had (and still have) a long struggle against rasism, exploitation and occupation of their land. Many try to live as traditional as possible or at least keep the traditions alive to pass on to their children. Many Sapmi live regular Swedish lives in cities, but the ones who live the traditional way only survive on keeping raindeer. The reindeer have an extremely important place in their culture, lives and religion, even though they kill them and eat them. This explains a little more about the strange case with the reindeer who drowned in the river, and the feelings surrounding their death. I personally don’t know enough about the reindeer keeping to say if they usually kill their animal in a certain way or use the meat for only a special selection of products, but that might very well be the case.

Another fun Swedish christmas fact; Swedes drink coca cola just like everybody else – but not during christmas! We have something called “Julmust” (jul=christmas) which is the same color, but tastes very different. There are lots of ads for coke around christmas, but i’t doesn’t work, we are very loyal to our “must”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julmust

Great episode, as always!

In television, worst Christmas episode ever might go to Captain Power’s season (and then series) finale, ‘Retribution.’ Blastaar and a biomech contingent breach the base blasting everything in sight with only Pilot there to fight them. Blastaar shoots his way into the control room, shoots the Mentor computer (the effigy of the captain’s father), explodes the improvised christmas tree and then severly wounds Pilot, and forcing her to bring the entire base crashing down on top of them while the rest of the team arrive a few moments too late. good bye ex-cybernazi love interest.

up till that point in my childhood the main character tv good guys always survived. goodness i loved that show despite the flaws it had by being this weird hybrid thing.

I would love to pick your brains for the “trench warfare” episode we have in the works

A little late on this, but “Joyeux Noel” (French for “Merry Christmas”) is a 2005 film about the 1914 Christmas Truce. I have used it to teach about trench warfare in high school US History class.

A little late on this, but “Joyeux Noel” (French for “Merry Christmas”) is a 2005 film about the 1914 Christmas Truce. I have used it to teach about trench warfare in high school US History class.