Hi,

Welcome to a special Christmas edition of the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your Christmas time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else, like watching Die Hard.

3 Christmassy things worth procrastilearning over

1. Swedes enjoy burning a goat at Christmas

Since 1966, the Swedish town of Gävle has celebrated Christmas by putting up a massive straw goat in the town centre. It represents the Yule Goat, a pagan symbol, but some may prefer to think it represents the animals in the barn staring at Jesus being born. But since that same year of 1966, it has been the target of arsonists. In fact, setting fire to the big goat has become part of its tradition, even though it is completely illegal and none of the people who put up the goat want it to be destroyed.

If you watch the livestream of the goat (yes, there is a livestream), the comments are mostly about how great it would be to watch the goat get destroyed live.

There's a full record of which years and how it was destroyed (90% of them) on its Wikipedia page. There’s also a lot of footage of it being destroyed on YouTube, including somebody running it over with their car in 2015.

2. Spaniards speed-eat grapes on New Year’s Eve

Back in the late 19th century, there was a huge supply of grapes in Spain but not enough people were buying. Solution? Make up a new annual tradition that forced people around the country to eat grapes. The idea became popular and is today a stalwart of Spanish seasonal traditions.

Proper execution is said to give you good luck in the new year, or all your wishes coming true, and involves eating a single grape every time you hear a dong when the bells are striking midnight. That means you have to eat 12 grapes in 12 seconds. That is tough. Oh and you need to make a wish every time you eat one, so you should probably make a wish list to be ready.

Due to the challenge of the tradition, canny shops sell 12-packs of peeled seedless varieties that can be wolfed down quickly for a premium.

Here's a video of thousands of people in Alicante eating grapes at once as the bells chime:

3. Austrians celebrate Christmas with demons

Seeing as Santa gives presents to good children, what does he give to bad children?

According to Austrians, he has his friend Krampus hit them with sticks. And Krampus is a hideous demon. Austrians love scaring the crap out of their kids with this story, and have public parades in Krampus’ honour.

Krampus is quite a well-known character these days, having featured in his own horror comedy film, and this year featuring in Red One, a new attempt to create an action comedy franchise based around Christmas.

2 Christmas quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip for getting Christmassy online

Make an AI Santa video.

Several AI sites are making it possible for you to put words in Santa’s mouth so you can freak out your kids.

You can make a fairly slick video of Santa saying whatever you want with Synthesia (although they filter for profanity, sadly). There’s also CreatorKit, although I personally couldn’t get them to approve my video script. You can also try Vidnoz, which looks cheaper but seems to be the quickest at giving you something usable. Here's an example:

If you want to go full 2024, you can have a live video call with an AI Santa using Tavus. His elvish servers are often busy, but if you do get through, the chances of you completely gobsmacking young children is pretty high. But do be aware that there is no visible privacy policy, so it’s unclear if they are recording you nor whether they use your chats for anything depressing.

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas. Here's a photo of some twins meeting Santa.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff

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