Thread by @OnKBHR

Good morning Cicely. This is Chris in the Morning on KBHR coming at you on a chilly, chilly morning - it's 12 degrees out there, kids! #northernexposure (thread)

Khruangbin - August 10 via @YouTube

As the Holiday Season is upon us, my mind turns to what was once referred to in Old English as 'Christes Masse' - the Festival of Christ. Of course, these days, that holiest of days is less a celebration of the Messiah and more of consumerism...

But you know, who am I to judge? Today's Playstation 5 is yesterday's frankincense and myrrh...

Beyond being a time of anxiously awaiting to see what old St. Nick has stuffed in your stocking, this is also a time of storytelling.

Take that most famous of Christmas tales, A 'Christmas Carol', which brings us one of the true baddies in all of popular culture: Ebenezer Scrooge. I mean, this guy was essentially the Darth Vader of the Victorian age.

Now old Scrooge was Malthusian to the core, once commenting of the poor, "If they would rather die, they had better do it & decrease the surplus population." You see, Dickens had a bone to pick with the theories of economist Thomas Malthus who was critical of aid for the poor.

So Dickens had his boy Scrooge stand in for Thomas Malthus - and get his comeuppance sort of like what our own Dr. Joel experienced once with Rabbi Schulman posing as the ghost of Yom Kippur when he was forced to confront some of his past indiscretions and lack of charity.

You see, Malthus believed that prosperity was linked to virtue and that providing for the poor would only result in inflation and degradation of the economy writ large. Pretty influential guy too, that Malthus, inspiring Darwin and half of our own modern-day congress.

And speaking of Malthus' contemporary, Charles Darwin, it's not a long trip to get from Malthusian 19th century capitalism to 'survival of the fittest' and judgements over which among us should get to carry on. If it works for Galapagos finches, then it applies to us too, right?

So what does this all have to do with Christmas? Well, I've been thinking about how, back in the day, Charles Dickens basically told Malthus to stick it through his own brand of social commentary that highlighted the plight of the impoverished through wildly popular narratives...

And how he specifically used Christmas as a vehicle to tell what is possibly his most popular story regarding the societal benefits of charity. And here we are, Christmas time again, and our politicians can't seem to figure out how to help a country economically crippled...

And if you'll indulge me one more tangent on this theme: a brief segue back to Darwin and nature. It's now also sounding like Darwin didn't have it all quite figured out as well. Not everything in nature is about competition and survival of the fittest...

Enter Professor Suzanne Simard who studies forest ecology. She has discovered that trees communicate underground, through their root structure & the network of fungal organisms that live upon them.

And get this. When some trees become nutrient depleted due to a variety of reasons - when they become impoverished if you will - their neighbors come to their rescue & shuttle sugars and carbon dioxide to them. And the entire forest, the collective, benefits.

Suck it, Malthus.

So if you're putting up a Christmas tree this year, Cicely, think about how all that conifer's deciduous neighbors helped her grow and thrive, and how she never would have made it without a little charity. Related, if you can this year, give a little to someone who needs it.

This is Chris in the Morning on KBHR 57AM...the lines are open.

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