Follow the trail of familiar melodies from medieval Europe to American front porches: a story of banished festivities, Victorian reinvention, wartime solace, and booming radio hits. Along the way you’ll meet Puritans who banned Christmas, a songwriter who never meant to write a carol, and soldiers who found peace in a simple hymn.

In this episode we weave together the human moments behind the music — Dickensian charity, sleigh races in New England, immigrant voices, and modern pop reinventions — to show how these songs became the soundtrack of an American season.

Tune in to discover the surprising origins and emotional stories behind the carols you thought you knew, and learn why these songs still matter to families, choirs, and even astronauts.

Picture a Christmas that smells of smoke and fear instead of cinnamon and spice: villages lit by bonfires, masked figures pounding through the night, and a goat-demon whose rattling chains make children hide behind shutters. This episode peels back the cozy remaster and walks you through the original holiday — a season forged by the terror of winter and the rituals people invented to survive it.

We trace the story from sun-calling solstice festivals and Roman chaos to Alpine Krampus runs, Icelandic cat-gorging legends, and Puritan attempts to erase the whole thing. Along the way the narrative shifts — punishment morphs into redemption with Dickens, then into shopping lists and performance, leaving us with a holiday that hides its darker roots under lace and store windows.

By the end, the monsters feel less like villains and more like mirrors: reminders that the holiday has always been about surviving darkness together. Join us for a short, haunting history that makes your quiet, imperfect Christmas feel part of a long, strange tradition — and maybe a little less alone.”

In this captivating episode of Time Tellers, Dan and Renee delve into America's tumultuous history with the metric system—a tale filled with twists, turns, and unexpected drama. From the chaos of pirates intercepting metric shipments to the political maneuvers that stymied a full conversion, the duo unravels why the United States remains one of the few countries resisting the global embrace of the metric system.

They recount the peculiar past of measurement mishaps and missed opportunities, highlighting key moments like the Mars Climate Orbiter debacle that resulted from metric-imperial confusion. This isn't just a story about numbers—it's about national identity, inertia, and political chess games that have led to today's hybrid measurement chaos.

Join the hosts as they navigate this intriguing narrative, revealing how America's stubbornness in clinging to inches and pounds persists amidst a world dominated by the ease and logic of meters and liters. Tune in to explore whether the U.S. will ever fully transition to the metric system, the factors at play, and the humorous contradictions that define America's measurement story.