'Tis the season for the festive Allusionists!

This year, **I’ll also be reading A Christmas Carol over four sessions on YouTube; details are at theallusionist.org/events, and you can also hit ‘Notify me’ on each video at youtube.com/@AllusionistShow/streams**.

Here’s your playlist of episodes from the back catalogue, which are all also available in your podcast app, of course:

Winterval

It’s a portmanteau that became shorthand for the War On Christmas™, with a side of ‘political correctness gone mad’. But this is very unfair to Winterval.

There's a word that has become shorthand for 'the war on Christmas' with a side of 'political correctness gone mad': Winterval. It began in November 1998. Newspapers furiously accused Birmingham City Council of renaming Christmas when it ran festive ev...

Xmas Man

That mythical beardy man who supposedly gives children presents at Christmas - what’s he all about, and why does he have so many different names? Also, why were Victorian Christmas cards so scary and meaty?

CONTENT WARNING: Be wary of listening to this episode around young children, as there may be life spoilers. Historian Greg Jenner traces the origins of that mythical beardy man who turns up in December with gifts.

How the Dickens Stole Christmas

Charles Dickens wrote about the plight of the impoverished and destitute members of British society. So how come his name is a synonym for rosy-cheeked, full-stomached, fattened-goose, hearty merry “God bless us every one” Christmas? Plus: a trip to Dickensian London, recreated in an expo centre in California.

Dear Santa

Jim Glaub and Dylan Parker didn’t think too much of it when, every year, a few letters for Santa were delivered to their New York apartment addressed to Santa. But then one year, 400 letters arrived. And they decided they had to answer them.

Jim Glaub and Dylan Parker didn't think too much of it when, every year, a few letters were delivered to their New York apartment addressed to Santa. But then one year, 400 letters arrived. And they decided they had to answer them.

It’s a very sweet story, but they’re still doing it and now have a non-profit — if you want to be a Santa for a kid in need, you can donate or get involved at miracleon22ndstreet.com

A Festive Hit for 2020

The usual canon of holly jolly Christmas songs didn’t really fit the mood of 2020. So Jenny Owen Youngs, Martin Austwick and I wrote one that does. And it’s a banger!

The usual canon of Christmas songs may not really fit people's moods in this year 2020, when I'm not sure a lot of us are feeling all that holly jolly. So I drafted in singer and songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs and we wrote a festive song that is suitable for 2020.

Hello! Here’s a playlist of episodes of the show that are good to listen to for Pride month, but also at any time, because they are some of the most interesting and complex language matters that I’ve covered in the show:

Many Ways At Once. The Scots language didn’t have much of an LGBTQ+ lexicon. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.

Polari was a secret language that was used mostly by gay men in London. And now lives on in the non-secret lexicon - you might not realise that you know some Polari words!

Two Or More is about the bumpy life of the word ‘bisexual’, describing things from oysters to space stations to God to hats and then people, where things get really complicated.

Parents is about how some of the vocabulary of pregnancy and parenting might not fit when you’re trans, and how to make the language gender-additive.

Rainbow Washing examines the trends in corporate performative allyship, and considers how to sort the real queer support from the harm-disguise.

Similarly, Queerbaiting follows a term from entrapment to marketing to the failures of onscreen representation.

Name Changers features listeners telling the stories of why they changed their names - often a big feature of a gender journey.

There’s so much more to say about the word Queer, where it has been and where it is going now.

Survival: Bequest is about the Māori word ‘takatapui’, a bit of linguistic evidence that prior to the European colonisation that imposed cisgender monogamous heterosexuality, Māori culture had included myriad sexual orientations, gender fluidity and polyamory.

Survival: Today Tomorrow part 2 is about how new queer words are coined for the Icelandic language.

No Title is about making language gender-free. And there are unbeatable arguments to fell anyone who denies singular ‘they’, should you need those in your arsenal.

Joins is about how the available vocabulary for body parts can be a liability when you’re trans and/or non binary.

Aro Ace is about how newish words like ‘aromantic’ and ‘asexual’ enable people to voice their identities, and to find each other.

Pride, about why the word ‘Pride’ was chosen to be the banner word for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBTQIA rights and culture.

And if you just need to shut off your internal monologue for a bit, you can replace it with a relaxingly scored list of gay animals.