Louboutin Saddles & Slinky Origins

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Show Notes

Happy Holidays! Patricia and Nicole close out 2025 with a short episode of the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice. They share some weird Christmas trivia and as always, share what’s filling their cups.

Mentioned on the show:

Find the full show notes with all the books mentioned in this episode and official transcript on our website: https://eedapod.com/

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Sound editing by Jen Zink

Transcript

Music: [Intro Music] 

Patricia: Hey there, figgy puddings! Welcome to Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, the podcast for folks who would rather curl into the fetal position than lean in. I’m your host, Patricia Elzie-Tuttle. 

Nicole: And I’m ready for a Christmas ghost story. I’m Nicole Elzie-Tuttle. We’re recording this show on December 19th, 2025.

Patricia: Ah, yes. I love the ghost story where all the ghosts haunt the rich guy until he gives his money to people. 

Nicole: Absolutely! 

Patricia: Remember, this podcast is independently run and we are hoping to be supported by listeners. Downloading, sharing, and giving us reviews and ratings are free ways to show us support. If you have a few bucks to donate, our Patreon memberships start at $3 a month and there are three tiers to choose from. And it’s that time of year for us to remind you that you can gift a subscription to our Patreon to someone as well as to the Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter.

We make a great gift. 

Nicole: If you are looking for other gifts, even though you’re probably listening to this on Christmas Day or after, 

Patricia: I mean, it comes out on Christmas Eve. 

Nicole: Yep. Well, good job everyone. If you’re still looking for gifts, best of luck to you. If you, uh, want to order something that’ll get to someone late. Any book we’ve mentioned on this show ever, can be found at our bookshop.org affiliate link, which you can find on our webpage. 

Patricia: We also have a merch shop that you can find on our webpage, eedapod.com, and we have a rainbow prism up there and we also have some stickers up and ideally more things in the new year.

Nicole: Ooh. 

Ooh! We did a thing recently! 

Patricia: We did a thing because it was your birthday recently. 

Nicole: Oh, you’re telling everybody? 

Patricia: Yeah. I’m not telling ’em what day. 

Nicole: Okay. It’s in December. 

Patricia: It’s in December. 

Nicole: It’s part of Decemberween. 

We went to the Lightscape at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, with some friends.

Patricia: Yeah, with some friends. And we, what they did was like, they hired maybe a dozen different artists to do light installations. 

Nicole: And light and sound. 

Patricia: Right. 

Light and sound installations. So every part of the botanical gardens that you walked through had a different vibe. It had a different, like different lights, different music.

It was really cool. 

Nicole: Yeah. There would be like one tree looked like it had fluorescent lighting on it, like up the trunk and each branch had like 

Patricia: in different colors. 

Nicole: Color, yeah. There was another space where there was like a lawn and it had lights set up that would look like it was like flowing 

Patricia: mm-hmm.

Nicole: Towards you, like a little river or something. That was really cool. You really liked the light beams through the trees with the dance music. 

Patricia: Yeah, it was like almost spinning lasers. Not quite lasers. 

Nicole: No. 

Patricia: They were light beams, but they were very thin and targeted and they were just like kind of swirling through this area that had branches over it and, yeah.

Nicole: And fog. 

Patricia: And fog, yeah. 

Nicole: Yeah. 

Patricia: It was pretty cool. 

Nicole: There was also just a moon hanging out. In like a glade? A small meadow? 

Patricia: Like an inflatable moon over like a pond or something. 

Nicole: Oh. 

Patricia: Was it a pond? I don’t know. 

Nicole: It was just a moon hanging out there. It was good. 

Patricia: But yeah, that was, that was some of our holiday festivities.

Nicole: Oh. At the end of it, there were food trucks and I had a churro waffle. 

Patricia: You did have a churro waffle. 

Nicole: And it was really good. 

Patricia: Yeah, sometimes the food trucks, like they went through their whole thing and I think they’re hit or miss now. Like… 

Nicole: Some food trucks are like, okay, they’re fine. 

Patricia: Mm-hmm. 

Nicole: But we do occasionally find a good one.

This one had a good churro waffle. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: I was very excited by it. 

Patricia: Taco trucks excluded. Taco trucks always A+. A+ taco trucks. 

Nicole: Yeah.

Music: [Transition Music] 

Patricia: Today’s episode is going to be a light one because like we said, it’s being published on Christmas Eve and I have in the past few years found myself with two Christmas almanacs. One is The Great American Christmas Almanac: A Complete Compendium of Facts, Fancies, and Traditions by Irena Chalmers, and it was published in 1988.

Nicole: The other one is from 2003, and it is The Christmas Almanac edited by Natasha Tabori Fried and Lena Tabori. 

Patricia: So I thought today we would share some Christmas trivia, lore, facts, whatever we’ve picked out of these books. We’ll each just share a thing. I’ll be working from the 1988 Christmas Almanac, and Nicole will use the 2003.

I want to note that one of these books is 240 pages. And then the other is around 300 pages. And honestly, weird things from these books could be a whole long running podcast itself. 

Nicole: I don’t know. I feel like yours had a lot more fun facts in it. Mine had like lists of like where to buy wine. 

Patricia: Which is hilarious.

Yours also had a list of like where, where to shop for teens and it was like Old Navy. 

Nicole: Yeah. 

Patricia: And I was like, what? 

Nicole: It was like The Gap. 

Patricia: The Gap. 

Nicole: I was like, really? Okay 2003. 

Patricia: Yeah. I think that’s what I found charming about it though. 

Nicole: Yeah. 

Patricia: So for my fun fact, I learned in 1960, Neiman Marcus, like the luxury department store, started doing a thing called Gift of the Year.

And this gift of the year was not a normal thing, like, not even like a normal luxury thing. It wasn’t a cashmere scarf or a diamond tennis bracelet. So let me give you a few examples. In 1963, you could purchase his and her personal submarines. The mini sub mark sevens for $18,700. And actually this book has a picture, I’m gonna post it on our Instagram so that you could see what like this advertisement was for this submarine. 

Nicole: That sounds like a bargain. Did we look up how much that would be in like today dollars? 

Patricia: I didn’t, but we should. 

Nicole: We’ll look that up. 

Patricia: In 1967, the gift of the year was his and hers camels for just over $4,000 bucks a piece. 

Nicole: Huh. You know a camel. 

Patricia: You know a camel.

They said the camels would be, I guess they were raised in California and would be flown anywhere in the lower 48. 

Nicole: Did they say if they had one or two humps? 

Patricia: No, but I think there’s pictures in this book again. 

Nicole: Okay. 

Patricia: There might be a picture. 

1978, This one I didn’t even know was a thing. Like I didn’t know it was a thing.

His and her natural safety deposit boxes. So, they had this cavern in Utah’s Wasatch Range, and this cavern has surveillance and security and a 50 year lease for you to have a safety deposit box. Like deep in this cavern. $90,000. 

Nicole: His and hers safety deposit box sounds unnecessarily gendered. 

Patricia: Oh, all of, all of these ads are so unnec, they all just say his and hers.

Nicole: I really wanna know what the difference is between the his and hers safety. Deposit boxes. 

Patricia: One’s pink. One’s blue, duh. You’re Looking at me….

By the way, this is still going. They no longer call it the gift of the year. They call it like fantasy holiday gifts. And Neiman Marcus has the 2025 Fantasy holiday gifts on their site, and I’m totally going to link it in the show notes. And it says a portion goes to the Heart of Neiman Marcus Foundation.

This year, there are a number of things to choose from. I’m not going to name them all. You should know though, there is a Christian Louboutin custom saddle for $47,000. 

Nicole: Is the underside of it red? 

Patricia: Oh, good question. I don’t know. They have pictures up. 

Nicole: Oh. 

Patricia: But I think, yeah, this is like, a horse riding saddle, right? And, or you can get a portrait session with Annie Lebowitz for, you know, $500,000. Or the one that had me crying with laughter is a custom sculpture of your pet made out of Crayola crayons for $64,000. 

These all have photos. I’ll link it in the show notes because it’s so wild. 

Nicole: I’m just, I can’t. 

Okay, so speaking of gifts, I’m gonna go back to the number one selling toy of 1945. 

Patricia: Okay. 

Nicole: And the number one selling toy of 1945 was the Slinky. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: The book said it was developed for the Navy as a way to help keep shipboard instruments steady while at sea.

I was skeptical because I cannot see like the slinky itself 

Patricia: as a scientific instrument 

Nicole: stabilizer. 

Patricia: Yeah.

Nicole: It does not seem very stable. So I had to do some research. You were laughing at me ’cause this set me off on such a side quest. 

Patricia: Absolutely. 

Nicole: But I found a Smithsonian Magazine article about it. And this book was not quite right.

The inventor of the Slinky is Richard James. He was working on a device to stabilize instruments, 

Patricia: and he was in the Navy. 

Nicole: He was in the Navy. 

Patricia: Okay. 

Nicole: He was a Navy engineer and while working, he knocked over some springs or coiled wire and the way they like bounced around or like moved around the floor, gave him the idea for the slinky.

He then actually mathematically worked out the ideal amount of spring and the size of the coil that could walk down stairs or declining planes. He actually patented this. You can see like all of the maths in it and everything. 

Patricia: I love that. 

Nicole: There’s a picture of like a, a declining plane and like a diagram of the slinky walking down it.

Patricia: Oh my gosh. 

Nicole: Yeah. So there you go. A lot more maths went into the slinky than you thought. And shock of all shocks, the 2003 Christmas Almanac 

Patricia: wasn’t quite a, wasn’t quite right on that one. 

Nicole: Wasn’t quite factually accurate. 

Patricia: I mean, and that’s, you know, a lesson, like you mentioned a lesson on fact checking and we always say like, oh, it’s in a book, it must be true. Like people put a lot of weight on that. But I think it’s sometimes it’s worthwhile to dig on your own. 

Nicole: Dig a little deeper. 

Patricia: That’s what we got. 

This is our last show of 2025, and when you hear from us next, we’ll be checking in on if we met any of those 2025 goals. ‘Cause I still have a few more days to get some reading done. And what ones we decided to set free.

And we’ll also talk about what we hope to do in 2026. 

Nicole: We hope the rest of the year treats you well.

Music: [Transition Music] 

Nicole: But we’re not done talking yet. 

Patricia: Nope. 

Nicole: Patricia, what has been filling your cup? 

Patricia: A couple of things. So one, I may have, I know I talked about it on the Patreon, I don’t know if we talked about it on the show, but I had an extensive nail polish collection. And we had gone through it, and there were 159 bottles I was ready to let go of.

And I found a buyer and she drove up and we met in a public place and she took all these nail polishes off our hands, gave us some cash, and I feel really good about that. 

Nicole: I wanna note, you said you had an extensive nail polish collection. We got rid of these 159 bottles of nail polish. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: I would say you still have an extensive nail bottle collection.

Patricia: I mean a nail bottle collection? 

Nicole: Yes. 

Patricia: Okay. 

Nicole: Bottles of nails. 

Patricia: Bottles of Nails.

Yes. Yeah, we still have that too. We just thinned it out a bit. 

Nicole: Yeah. 

Patricia: Weeded it, as we say in the library profession. 

Nicole: Yeah. Uh, narrowed it down to the ones we’re more likely to use. 

Patricia: Something else that, uh, is really filling my cup lately. We sent out a lot of holiday packages and since we bought a printer over the summer, being able to buy shipping online, and I also got a shipping scale, and just like buy shipping and print out labels and box everything up, and then just dumping these boxes at the post office without having to wait in line is magical. It is phenomenal. It is filling my cup to the brim. 

Nicole, what’s been filling your cup? 

Nicole: I feel like we’ve been doing a lot to get ready and prepare for the holidays with family and friends. And I know it sounds strange, but like doing a lot to get ready is kind of filling my cup with the knowledge that it’s gonna be worth it in the end. 

Patricia: Yeah. 

Nicole: So it’s kind of like anticipatory cup filling. 

Patricia: Yeah. Okay. 

Nicole: If you will. 

Patricia: Well, that’s our show for today. We’d like to thank our awesome audio editor, Jen Zink. You can find her at loopdilou.com and we’ll leave a link to that in our show notes. 

Nicole: You can find the full show notes and transcript at eedapod.com. That’s E-E-D-A-P-O-D dot com. There you can also find a link to our Patreon, our Bookshop link, and a link to the ongoing Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter.

You can also find us on Instagram and Bluesky at eedapod, and email us at eedapod at gmail dot com. 

Patricia: We are nothing if not consistent. 

Nicole: If you would like to get us a gift, you can subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts that allow for ratings. It’s the gift that keeps on giving because it really helps other people find us.

And if you just wanted to drop us a little note or a comment, you can do so at any of the places I just named or email us. 

Patricia: We would also appreciate anyone who can subscribe to us on Patreon. Support there is going to help us keep the show going, especially without ads. You can find us at patreon.com/eedapod.

In the meantime, we hope you find ways to be kind to yourself, drink some water and read a book. We’ll be talking to you soon.

Nicole: I am just kind of amused at the concept of like diamond tennis bracelets. Who’s like, ah, yes, I’m going to go play tennis. I must put on a precious jewel bracelet. 

Patricia: I don’t know if that’s why they’re called tennis bracelets. I don’t know if it means you play tennis in them. 

Nicole: I mean, maybe I’m just showing my like lack of living in luxury in life, but… 

Patricia: Ah yes, this is my tennis playing bracelet.

Nicole: I mean, that’s what I assumed. 

Patricia: I don’t actually know.