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Podcast: Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
Episode: A Very, Very Star Wars Christmas
Description: The holiday you know wasn’t born under twinkle lights. It was assembled—piece by piece—out of Star Wars, Sol Invictus and Saturnalia, immigrant folklore and Protestant pushback, department store spectacle and the irresistible pull of a good story. We follow that winding path from Rome’s calendar to America’s shopping aisles, showing how gift giving shifted from communal ritual to commercial engine and why the myth of a “pure” Christmas never really existed here.We dig into the colonial bans and 19th-century legalization that set the stage for a retail renaissance, when newspapers sold Santa, window...