Season 4, Episode 6 – “The Trouble With Angels” (Pennsylvania)

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For the Festive Fans, Christmas is an international journey. We venture into foreign lands, finding the holiday in the most unexpected places. We love discovering how various cultures celebrate the season, and learning about the unfamiliar traditions, strange customs, and the diverse foods that make it unique in every corner of the globe. The spirit of Christmas, as we have seen, is able to ignore borders, cross oceans, and overcome different languages.

But after so many of these adventures abroad, the Fans are coming home.  Despite the universal appeal of the holiday, we feel it is important to revisit the places, the people and the experiences that helped shape the understanding, the gratitude, and the joy we feel for Christmas. It is time we turn our focus back to the United States, and, more specifically, on our own home states. Before we became the international Christmas podcasters you know today, we were just children enjoying it in our own backyards.  And those backyards seemed to spark the magic of the holiday just as much as anywhere else we have traveled in the world.

This is what makes our next two episodes different. We aren’t exploring how other people celebrate Christmas, instead we are considering ourselves. We come from different states, so while our Christmases may have familiar ingredients, the individual recipes are not quite the same. For our first homecoming episode, we are handing the microphone over to Mark and heading to Pennsylvania, the state where his Christmas story began.  This episode will be a personal journey through his Pennsylvania upbringing, with its distinctive regional influences and rich Christmas heritage. It is an opportunity to understand what he actually experienced. This time, we aren’t asking Mark to tell us what Christmas looks like in another country, we’re asking him to take us home to Pennsylvania.

There is something special about returning to the Christmases of your childhood, even if they weren’t that great or memorable. Not everyone grew up with extraordinary Christmases. Not every home was filled with giant family gatherings, mountains of presents, or annual traditions like you see in a Hallmark movie. Some of our Christmases might have been quiet, boring, maybe disappointing. But that doesn’t mean those Christmases were without magic. What is impressive about the human mind is how it can expand on the excitement and the anticipation that we felt, while also suppressing any hint of disappointment or unhappiness.  Some of the smallest and most ordinary details — the glow of the neighborhood Christmas lights, the crowds and the Christmas music at the malls, or the annual specials on TV – are preserved as treasured memories.

We are not doing this because we have run out of foreign places to explore. Quite the opposite. We have spent our podcast exploring Christmas around the world. Now we are discovering that one of the most fascinating destinations has been waiting for us all along. Home.

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Season 4, Episode 6 – “The Trouble With Angels” (Pennsylvania)