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Silent Night · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
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  Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
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  Speaker 1: of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
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  Speaker 1: for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: It would be over by Christmas. That was what everyone said.
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  Speaker 1: When Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his beloved wife Sophie were
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  Speaker 1: assassinated in nineteen fourteen. Their marriage wasn't supposed to happen,
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  Speaker 1: as the sitting Emperor of the Austro Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph,
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  Speaker 1: disapproved of his nephew and heir's choice, but true love
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  Speaker 1: won out and the happy couple were married for fourteen years.
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  Speaker 1: Austria Hungary, like most European nations throughout the nineteenth century,
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  Speaker 1: had a taste for empire. They occupied large swaths of
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  Speaker 1: Europe and believed that they had firm rights over territories
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  Speaker 1: and people they ruled, even though their subjects disagreed. Revolutionary
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  Speaker 1: groups sprang up all across the empire in resistance to
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  Speaker 1: the rulers. It was the assassination that never should have happened.
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  Speaker 1: No amount of planning in the world could have helped
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  Speaker 1: the revolutionary group the Young Bosnians more than the luck
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  Speaker 1: they had that day. After multiple blunders on both sides,
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  Speaker 1: it was Gavrillo, princip standing on the wrong street corner
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  Speaker 1: at the right time, who managed to get the job done,
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  Speaker 1: firing two shots at point blank range. This was the
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  Speaker 1: modern day shot heard round the world. The assassination of
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  Speaker 1: the heir of the Austro Hungarian Empire by a Serbian
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  Speaker 1: kicked off a chain of reactions and alliances that would
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  Speaker 1: destroy the world as they knew it. Admittedly, no one
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  Speaker 1: knew that at the time. After all, almost all of
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  Speaker 1: European monarchs were cousins through Queen Victoria. Back then, war
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  Speaker 1: was treated as something romantic, adventurous, and even grand. It
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  Speaker 1: was solemn, for sure, but also something exciting that roused
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  Speaker 1: national pride. When the war was officially declared in July
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  Speaker 1: of nineteen fourteen, most people thought that it would be
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  Speaker 1: over by Christmas, but it was soon abundantly clear just
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  Speaker 1: how wrong they'd been. In both weaponry and tactics, this
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  Speaker 1: war was nothing like any they had ever seen. Before.
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  Speaker 1: It wasn't confined to the battlefield either. It consumed farms, towns,
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  Speaker 1: and even cities, and along the way it destroyed an
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  Speaker 1: entire generation of young men and exhausted resources and national morale.
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  Speaker 1: Many of the young men who joined up were looking
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  Speaker 1: for adventure, glory, and maybe a chance to move up
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  Speaker 1: in the world. What they got instead was speedy training
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  Speaker 1: that didn't equip them for what was to come. They
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  Speaker 1: were stuffed into muddy, wet trenches, choked and blinded with
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  Speaker 1: chlorine and mustard gas, plagued by trench foot and shell shock.
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  Speaker 1: By Christmas of nineteen fourteen, all those boys really wanted
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  Speaker 1: was to go home, but they were stuck there in
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  Speaker 1: the freezing mud. Pope Benedict the fifteenth, who took office
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  Speaker 1: not long after the war began, put out a call
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  Speaker 1: for a truce that Christmas. Maybe he hoped a break
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  Speaker 1: from the fighting would bring leaders to their senses. If so,
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  Speaker 1: he was sadly disappointed when it was officially rejected from
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  Speaker 1: both sides. But then a funny thing happened. No one
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  Speaker 1: really knows how it started or where, but at around
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  Speaker 1: eight thirty PM, an officer from the Royal Irish Rifles
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  Speaker 1: sent a report to HQ saying Germans have illuminated their trenches,
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  Speaker 1: are singing songs and wishing us a happy Christmas. Compliments
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  Speaker 1: are being exchanged, but I am nevertheless taking all military precautions.
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  Speaker 1: And then there was Bruce Bairn's father. He was a
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  Speaker 1: British machine gunner of the first Battalion of the Royal
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  Speaker 1: Warwickshire Regiment. He was sick to death of all the mud,
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  Speaker 1: the sleeplessness, and the stale biscuits. And on Christmas Eve
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  Speaker 1: of nineteen fourteen, as he later recorded in his memoir,
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  Speaker 1: at about ten pm, he heard a commotion from the
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  Speaker 1: German trench. They were singing. Bairn's father wrote that when
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  Speaker 1: they started singing back, there was confused shouting from the
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  Speaker 1: other trench. Then, in an accented English voice, one of
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  Speaker 1: the Germans asked the British to send a man over.
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  Speaker 1: Both sides cautiously agreed to meet halfway in no man's land,
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  Speaker 1: and climbed out of the trenches, taking a few careful
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  Speaker 1: steps into the contested territory. And there they met with
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  Speaker 1: smiles and handshakes. They traded songs, alcohol and tobacco, and
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  Speaker 1: had a party under the stars together. Once the soldiers
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  Speaker 1: on both sides had met, they realized that not one
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  Speaker 1: of them really hated the other, not yet anyway, And
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  Speaker 1: it turned out that their little slice of the front
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  Speaker 1: line wasn't alone. Up and down the line, carol singing
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  Speaker 1: had broken out. The Germans sang silent Night and were
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  Speaker 1: answered by British troops. Rendition of the first Noel. Stories
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  Speaker 1: of the Christmas Truth don't appear in any official documents, though,
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  Speaker 1: because it was never sanctioned. Instead, the soldiers who were
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  Speaker 1: doing the fighting and dying, who had lost their ideal as,
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  Speaker 1: decided to take a chance and see what might happen.
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  Speaker 1: They talked about home, their families, even soccer, and yes,
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  Speaker 1: of course, the good didn't last. Hostilities resumed just a
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  Speaker 1: few days later, and the worst was yet to come.
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  Speaker 1: But to me, the Christmas Truce is a beautiful reminder
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  Speaker 1: of humanity's ultimate desire for peace, no matter how short
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  Speaker 1: lived it might have been. Every year as the holiday
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  Speaker 1: season approaches, Columbia University holds their u log festivities. The
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  Speaker 1: party includes food, drinks, a bonfire, and a reading of
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  Speaker 1: one of the most famous poems in American history. It's
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  Speaker 1: called a Visit from Saint Nicholas. But you'll probably recognize
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  Speaker 1: it by its opening lines, twas the nights before Christmas,
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  Speaker 1: when all through the house not a creature was stirring,
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  Speaker 1: not even a mouse. The reading is an homage to
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  Speaker 1: the season and to an old Columbia University professor Clement
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  Speaker 1: Cmore Moore wrote A Visit from Saint Nicholas in eighteen
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  Speaker 1: twenty two as a Christmas gift to his young children.
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  Speaker 1: Or at least that's the story. The authorship of this
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  Speaker 1: American classic is actually the subject of a nearly two
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  Speaker 1: hundred year old debate. You see, the poem first appeared
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  Speaker 1: in print in eighteen twenty three. It was published anonymously
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  Speaker 1: in a New York newspaper called The Troy Sentinel. People
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  Speaker 1: love the whimsical verse so much that other newspapers began
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  Speaker 1: circulating it too. As the poem took the country by storm,
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  Speaker 1: Clement Seymore remained quiet. It wasn't until eighteen thirty seven,
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  Speaker 1: a full fourteen years later, that the piece was formally
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  Speaker 1: attributed to him. It was featured in an anthology called
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  Speaker 1: The New York Book of Poetry and published under the
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  Speaker 1: professor's name. However, even back then, seeing people weren't sure
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  Speaker 1: who penned those now famous lines. In eighteen forty three
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  Speaker 1: of Washington, DC newspaper attributed the poem to someone named
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  Speaker 1: Joseph Wood. Word got out about this to more, and
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  Speaker 1: in eighteen forty four he wrote a letter to the
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  Speaker 1: editors correcting their mistake. He said he had written the
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  Speaker 1: poem and I quote not for publication, but to amuse
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  Speaker 1: my children. Whatever his original intention was, Clement Seymour now
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  Speaker 1: wanted credit for his work, except sometime in the late
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  Speaker 1: eighteen forties, a woman claimed that it wasn't his at all.
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  Speaker 1: She said her father, Henry Livingstone, had penned the poem
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  Speaker 1: in eighteen oh eight. However, by the time she was
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  Speaker 1: saying all of this, Livingston was dead. He'd never publicly
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  Speaker 1: claimed to have written the piece, and there was no
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  Speaker 1: proof to back up the idea that he had. Not
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  Speaker 1: until later, one hundred and fifty years later to be exact.
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  Speaker 1: You see, in nineteen ninety nine, Henry Livingston's descendants were
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  Speaker 1: still arguing that he was the poem's true author, and
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  Speaker 1: they went to a surprising person for help proving it too.
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  Speaker 1: Don Foster, a forensic writing analyst best known for his
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  Speaker 1: work on the Unibomber case, and for Don the mystery
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  Speaker 1: ended up being far more intriguing than he ever anticipated.
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  Speaker 1: He wrote an entire book called Author Unknown, in which
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  Speaker 1: he argued that Clement C. Moore absolutely could not have
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  Speaker 1: written a Visit from Saint Nicholas. According to Don, there
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  Speaker 1: were aspects of the writing that made Henry Livingston the
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  Speaker 1: more likely author. For example, Livingston often wrote poems in
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  Speaker 1: anapestic meter, which means two unstressed syllables followed by one
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  Speaker 1: stressed syllable. That's the same meter a Visit from Saint
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  Speaker 1: Nicholas was written in, and it's also one that Clement C.
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  Speaker 1: Moore almost never wrote. There was also the matter of
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  Speaker 1: the reindeer. In the original version of the poem, Donner
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  Speaker 1: and Blitzen are named dunder and Blixom, which are the
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  Speaker 1: Dutch words for thunder and lightning. Livingston spoke Dutch, Moore
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  Speaker 1: did not. And aside from all this text based evidence,
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  Speaker 1: Don Foster also got a little personal. He claimed that,
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  Speaker 1: based on his research, Clement C. Moore was a haughty,
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  Speaker 1: high strung man who hated children. The idea that he
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  Speaker 1: would write such a jaunty holiday verse for his kids
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  Speaker 1: was simply out of the question. Now, since Don Foster
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  Speaker 1: published his book, others have come forward arguing against his evidence.
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  Speaker 1: Just because More rarely wrote an anapestic meter doesn't mean
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  Speaker 1: that he never did. Moore had friends who spoke Dutch,
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  Speaker 1: so he might have picked up some words, and the
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  Speaker 1: attacks on his character were, according to many historians, wholly unfounded.
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  Speaker 1: Wherever the truth lies, one thing is certain, twas the
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  Speaker 1: Night Before Christmas is one of the most recognizable lines
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  Speaker 1: in American poetry. It played a big role in making
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  Speaker 1: Christmas what it is today. Before A Visit from Saint
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  Speaker 1: Nicholas was published, Santa Claus as we know him didn't
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  Speaker 1: really exist. The legend of a jolly old man who
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  Speaker 1: sneaks into your house through the chimney carrying a bag
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  Speaker 1: full of presents originated with the poem, and still we
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  Speaker 1: don't know for sure who the poem's author was, and
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  Speaker 1: that certainly makes for a very curious Christmas. I hope
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  Speaker 1: you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Q Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
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  Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. This show
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  Speaker 1: was created by me, Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
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  Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
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  Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show and
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  Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
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  Speaker 1: dot com. And until next time, stay curious.