As the host and co-creator of This American Life, Ira Glass has been choosing themes and bringing us different kinds of stories on those themes week in and week out for more than 20 years now. Now it’s our turn, with a seasonally appropriate roundup focused on the show that dominated first radio and then podcasting. As I type this, the 634th episode is about to drop — and wouldn’t you know it, some of those have dealt with Christmas. By my count, 14 episodes have delved into that most celebrated of all holidays, and I thought it would be helpful to point the Isthmus readership in the direction of a few that may have slipped off your yuletide radar.
First, we have to address the gorilla in the room: "Santaland Diaries." I don’t need to say too much about David Sedaris’ most famous memoir of a misspent season toiling away as an elf for the Macy’s Santa, do I? Count yourself lucky if you have yet to experience this, because listening for the first time is revelatory. But it’s become a traditional listen for more than a few families I know, so I won’t waste too much of anyone’s time on it here — other than to say that it still lives up to the hype somehow, even two decades on, and is well-deserving of its status in the canon of contemporary holiday stories.
For those looking to branch just a little bit off the well-beaten path, the Christmas episode from 1999, "The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Suit," is a perfect time capsule for listeners who may be nostalgic for the show’s early years, and offers up some fascinating intersectional explorations of Santa’s myth and meaning.
It’s got everything you could want: Sarah Vowell sinking her teeth into the scandalous side of holiday pop songs, an early contribution from Mike Paterniti (posing here as a salt-of-the earth Santa trekking from sea to shining sea), Riz Rollins connecting the dots between a black Santa in Chicago and his personal sense of holiday identity. Plus another excellent nonfiction bit from David Sedaris, and (best of all?!) a thrilling adventure from the white-winged warrior Chickenman.
By 2005 This American Life was a sleek machine, and that year’s Christmas show, "The This American Life Holiday Spectacular," lived up what that title promised. Move over Clement C. Moore and Charles Dickens, and let the deep bench of TAL talent — Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, David Sedaris, John Hodgman, Jonathan Goldstein — replace Rudolph, the Grinch, Frosty, and all that other dreck we’ve been telling kids for too long. Segment by wonderful segment, the whole episode pulls off the astounding alchemical feat of blending the sacred with the profane, but Goldstein’s closer, "What Would Joseph Do?" gets the most mileage for my money. His skewed retelling of Jesus’ birth from Joseph’s perspective as a doting dad addresses the outright silliness of the Nativity story while keeping one foot firmly planted in straightfaced sincerity. It’s such a tricky balancing act, but the effect is equal parts humorous and wholesome.
This third Christmas entry in my personal TAL canon might be a stretch for any purists out there, but I’m going for it. First aired on January 5th, 2001, "Babysitting" brought us Susan Burton’s story “In The Event Of An Emergency, Put Your Sister In An Upright Position.” A belated bit of Christmas tinsel, it’s the story director Paul Feig would eventually turn into the film Unaccompanied Minors. The movie was panned by critics, but the original segment is ripe for rediscovery. Here’s the pitch from the TAL page: “Every year on the day after Christmas, divorced kids all over America fly from one parent to the other. In 1988, lots of them got snowed in at O'Hare Airport in Chicago.” Relistening to it the other day, it’s more slight than I remember, but in that sketch of a plot Burton manages to capture the unique unstuck-in-time feeling that happens during holiday travel and couple it with the fragility of inter-sibling relationships in the context of parental uncertainty. Plenty of the holiday segments from This American Life succeed at picking away at the nuts and bolts of these end-of-the-year experiences, but in recounting those long liminal hours Burton spent with her sister at O’Hare almost 30 years ago, she comes the closest to pinning down that seasonally specific bittersweetness you can only appreciate as an adult.
These are just some of my favorites, but there are a dozen other episodes of the show worth rediscovering, so check these out and wade even further in to the backlog of Ira Glass and Co.’s unique brand of holiday joy. It doesn’t look like we’ll be getting anything under the tree this year (unless you asked Kris Kringle to put some nuclear paranoia in your stocking?), so feel free to start with last year’s "Just What I Wanted" by Maile Meloy and work your way back from there.
