Episode 158: What if every day was Christmas?
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On this episode of Absurd Hypotheticals, Marcus Lehner, Chris Yee, and Ben Storms it is Christmas, because every day is Christmas!
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:21 - Ben’s Answer - Christmas Lights
00:12:47 - Marcus’s Answer - Christmas Trees
00:22:42 - Chris’s Answer - Christmas Day
00:30:47 - Would you rather: eat cereal with eggnog OR eat a candy cane sandwich?
00:39:00 - Outro
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TRANSCRIPTION
Marcus Lehner:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Absurd Hypotheticals, the show where we overthink dumb questions so you don't have to. I'm your host, Marcus Lehner. And I'm joined here today by Chris Yee and Ben Storms. Say Merry Christmas guys.
Chris Yee:
Hey, I'm Chris, mas.
Ben Storms:
I'm Ben. That was I, you left me dumbfounded there, Chris.
Marcus Lehner:
I slightly modified our intro for Christmas and our podcast is already deteriorated into nothing.
Ben Storms:
No, Marcus, you were fine. That was okay.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, it is Christmas. So of course we are doing a very Merry Christmas episode. And our question is, what if everything was Christmas? What does that mean? Well, we've each taken a thing and we're like, Hey, what if all of these things are the Christmas version of said thing.
Chris Yee:
Like me. I'm Christmas.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Like what if all Chris' were Christmas Chris'.
Ben Storms:
I have a glass of mulled wine right now. And you're making me need this mulled wine right now, Chris.
Marcus Lehner:
Ben, how about you get us started? What thing did you turn to Christmas things?
Ben Storms:
So, I wanted to figure out: what if all lights were Christmas lights? Which I also very much had a crisis of faith right before we started recording and could not figure out if they were just Christmas lights or Christmas tree lights. I don't know. It was a long day.
Chris Yee:
I don't think people call them Christmas tree lights. I think you just call them Christmas lights.
Ben Storms:
I think you do. But that also feels weird. I don't know. Anyway, they're definitely just Christmas lights. I Googled. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I'll ignore the fact that half of the places in my notes say Christmas tree lights, and just say Christmas lights.
Chris Yee:
What did you Google to find that?
Ben Storms:
Christmas lights. Just to see if there are results. I don't know.
Chris Yee:
Did you Google Christmas tree lights as well?
Ben Storms:
No, I'm just trusting that Christmas lights is fine. We're going to go with it.
Marcus Lehner:
Just say it's your assumption, Ben. Don't doubt yourself.
Ben Storms:
That's part of the question. The assumption is that all Christmas tree lights are called Christmas lights? No. So what if all lights were Christmas lights? So obvious way to read this is just simply any light in your house suddenly is not like a light bulb. It is Christmas lights. Obviously it's going to have some impacts because I don't know if you noticed, but Christmas lights aren't all that bright. So, in terms of measuring brightness, there's a couple ways you can do it. There are lumens, which is the SI derived unit of luminous flux, which is basically just a measure of the total quantity of visible light emitted by a source per unit of time. There's also candela, which is a unit of luminous intensity used to be called candlepower. One candle power was the light produced by a pure spermaceti, which is this waxy substance from the head of a sperm whale.
Ben Storms:
That's why we killed a bunch of whales back in olden times. Pure spermaceti candle weighed one sixth of a pound and burning at a rate of 120 grains per hour, because they had to be super extra like that. And really the idea of lumens versus candela is that, I really hoping I'm pronouncing this correctly, by the way, candela. It's probably not that.
Chris Yee:
Candela? Candula, I don't know.
Ben Storms:
I don't know. It could be like candela. It's coming from candle. So I think it has to be, I don't know, whatever doesn't matter. Candela involves how much area the light that's being produced covers. So, the best way to sort of think about it is that you have a flashlight. That flashlight probably has a lower overall volume of light it's producing than like a lamp. So that flashlight is going to have lower lumens than the lamp would be. But the candela would be much higher because that flashlight is focusing all its light in a small area versus dispersing it all around.
Ben Storms:
So I'm going to use lumens for all of this. Just because one, we want to know if we can just sort of see generally and how we'll do that. And two also, it's just a lot easier to find lumens numbers than candela. So we're going to roll with that. So, an LED Christmas light, which is generally what people are using at this point, it varies the brightness based on the color, but the brightest you can get is a warm white Christmas light, which is about 4.7 lumens, which means absolutely nothing to you. But for comparison, a just 60 watt incandescent light bulb, your standard ass lightbulb produces around 800 lumens of light. So roughly 170 times as much light as one of these Christmas lights. And this is the point where I ran into a problem with answering this question this way, which is that you can do this, right?
Ben Storms:
Like, yes, ha ha they're dimmer, but light is additive. So if you had 170 Christmas lights, it would produce as much light as one of those regular light bulbs. And yes, it's awkward to cram 170 Christmas lights into where you'd have a single light bulb now. You can do it. And we could get by pretty much okay just with a bunch of lights everywhere. There are funnier examples too. Like I looked up the lights on the police car can be around 30,000 lumens. So police car would have like a 6,300 lights on it, which would be kind of funny, but like it tops out at kind of funny and that's just not great.
Marcus Lehner:
I do like the police car with the light Afro on it.
Ben Storms:
The police car with the light Afro was very good. And I really wanted to bring that one up because it's a great mental image. But that's kind of where the peak is. So we're going to change tacks a little bit here. Let's talk about how Christmas lights are wired. So when you wire a circuit, you either do it in parallel or in series, whatever component are in your circuit. So in series, you wire everything in series, right? Everything is going, all your current is going from one component to the next, in a chain around your power source. And this means that if one of those components died and the circuit is broken, all of your circuit breaks. You can also wire things in parallel, which is where you don't have this single chain and you'll have like a distinct path of every component. So you don't have that happen. But generally Christmas lights are wired in series. So if a single bulb fails because that current is passing through the bulb, your entire string of flights will fail. In actuality is not quite that simple.
Ben Storms:
One there are Christmas lights that are wired in parallel. They're more expensive because it's a more complicated wiring set up. But you can do it. They do exist. Beyond that, one if they are wired in series usually aren't just straight in series any more. Usually they have some number of basically it's like a little thing that will flip and complete the circuit without actually going through the light if the bulb filament breaks. So that one can burn out that little safety thing will flip down and the circle will continue. And you'll have your one burnt out light you can find then replace. But for a decent amount of time, that was kind of the way things worked was if your bulb fails, your entire string of lights goes out. So what if, instead of literally our lights are Christmas lights. What if instead our lights are Christmas lights in a more general sense in that they are a string of lights that are all connected and all have to be on all at the same time.
Chris Yee:
How many, like how big of a network are you talking about?
Ben Storms:
Let's start with a house. We'll start with a house.
Chris Yee:
Okay.
Ben Storms:
So, you have a house. This isn't that bad. It's not great. I'll freely admit that, but basically just take your current abode, wherever you're living and suddenly every light switch you have turns off or on every single light in your house. Honestly, not the worst thing. A little wasteful. You're going to have lights on where you don't need them.
Marcus Lehner:
Convenient.
Ben Storms:
It is. You do not have to worry about leaving a light on somewhere because you will know. Generally people will be on roughly the same schedules. So everyone's going to sleep around the same time, hit the lights you're good. Someone wants to go to sleep early? Get a sleep mask. I know it's fine. Not that big a deal. The one tricky thing is that when a bulb dies, all your bulbs die and then you have the same sort of deal you have with Christmas lights, where you're going through and changing out the light bulbs and seeing which one failed, except that instead of being a string of lights you can sit on your couch and do bit by bit, it's your entire house and everything's dark. Fortunately, this won't be that common of an occurrence because I looked up the lifespan of LED bulbs, which I'm assuming we would be using in this situation. And generally an LED bulb will run for 6,000 to 10,000 hours before, not technically failing, but just reaching the point where it's no longer viable as a light bulb.
Ben Storms:
And I guess occasionally failing. I mean, they will fail in that point sometimes too, but LEDs are weird. They kind of lose luminance as they go on, it's complicated.
Marcus Lehner:
They get tired. They've been so bright for so long.
Ben Storms:
I mean, it lasts a long time. So like 6,000 hours is like 250 continuous days. So, they'll be bright for a long time. They will eventually go. But occasionally you'll have this fun situation where one of your light bulbs dies and you just have to go through your entire house, figuring out which one it is. Or more likely just at the same time, replace all of your light bulbs because you don't want to do this every...
Ben Storms:
If they're going to fail around the same time, do this constantly for like a month as they fail in sequence. So that's not great, but overall, not too bad. Where things get a little iffy, if we expand things slightly and look at, say a dorm or an apartment building, because suddenly you are not all living together in the same household. And I honestly think that this why you wind up working on a, like building lights on lights off system. And I don't know any other way this could possibly work. Which would suck and probably lead to a lot less people living in apartments.
Marcus Lehner:
It's also really bad because it's like, the system can decide when the lights are on, but anyone can decide when the lights are off.
Ben Storms:
Right. Yes. Yeah, no, I think that in the system, you do not have a light switch.
Marcus Lehner:
Okay. Fair point.
Ben Storms:
Your lights turn on at seven am, your lights turn off at whatever hour is, or sorry, your lights turn off at 7:00 AM. No. Wait, how do you do it? Hold on, your lights turn on when it gets dark as the sun goes down and then turn off at like a designated bedtime, I guess there's like, you partially choose your apartment building based on the assigned bedtime. I hadn't actually thought about that, but-
Marcus Lehner:
Man. Yeah. The reds of the learns a bit more, but bedtime's all the way at 11.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. It's worth it. That's this other one is cheap. But the lights out is eight. I can't deal with that. So I mean, it's rough, but you can still kind of work around it. I wanted to look into if there was any way to make this work with, if you take it to this logical extreme conclusion, which is we're treating everything coming out of a power plant as a string of lights and therefore everything [inaudible 00:10:42] from like a single power plant is all on at the same time. One in this scenario, I was going to extend it to all electricity. I'm pretty sure that doesn't work, even if you keep it just lights. I think what you wind up having is basically a national holiday, which is light swapping day. But you just preemptively like every year, everyone replaces, every single light bulb.
Marcus Lehner:
There's probably a statistical thing where it's like, there's X chance a lightbulb's going to be broken at any time and gates on how many light bulbs there aren't. It will never work.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I was thinking the same thing.
Ben Storms:
So I was trying to figure that out. I was really trying to get this work. The complicated thing is that the failure rate is not an easy failure rate because it operates on a.... They call it like a bathtub failure where it's high at the start and then goes down exponentially to where gets very low and then stays very low for a long time and gets high exponentially again at the end. The problem is, I'm pretty sure that yes, just statistically, it's going to be impossible. And that you're going to get some random failure, like an hour into the lifetime of a light somewhere at basically all times.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. If you have a million lights, which is not that many, coming out of a power plant, it's never going to. It's too many.
Ben Storms:
Right. Exactly. So the answer is if that's the case, it doesn't work. I think that's the takeaway. We don't have lights anymore. We're using candles, but on a smaller scale, if all lights were Christmas lights in the sense that they were really annoying strings, that we one burns out and you have to swear a bunch and try to replace a bunch of them, I think we could actually make do all right. Even in the dorm slash apartment situation, even if it would be incredibly annoying. So anyway, that's what I did.
Marcus Lehner:
I'd love to know how big an Afro a lighthouse had. That would be sick.
Ben Storms:
I didn't think about looking at a lighthouse. Oh man. So lighthouses, God getting super nerdy. Lighthouses would be weird because that would be a very like candela versus lumen situation. But it would be hilarious. Anyway, Marcus, what did you do?
Marcus Lehner:
All right. My thing that is now a Christmas thing is trees. What if all trees were Christmas trees? So first thing I'm going to say is there are several species of Christmas tree: firs, Pines, spruces. Yada, yada, yada. I rounded them all to pine trees. I'm going to say pine trees every time I'm not going to differentiate between the species. They are all different types of needley green trees and using Ben's excuses, the information is about pine trees that I found. So all trees are now pine trees. So kind of the first thing I was looking at because we live up in the north, I was like, well, we got pine trees here, but can pine trees survive in places that aren't like, new England and Canada? And yes, in fact they can, they can survive in USDA plant hardiness zones, two through 10, which is out of like, there's only like 13 of them.
Marcus Lehner:
And this covers basically all locations from Alaska to Southern Florida. So the pine trees can survive basically any climate. I think they get out competed in more tropical climates, but you have pine tree forests. I mean all through California and stuff where it's hot and deserty so, you can have different types of pine trees there, so it's not like half the world doesn't have trees. Trees can be everywhere. Then it kind of becomes a question. If pine trees are any better or worse than other trees as a base for like a forest system or just generally surviving and all that. There's two main areas where pine trees make things kind of difficult for life around them. The first one is that the pine needles that fall down unlike leaves are actually somewhat acidic. This makes it pretty difficult for other types of plants to grow down at the base of pine trees.
Marcus Lehner:
So if you see like pine tree forest, you'll notice like, especially immediately around trees and just generally, it's a lot less underbrush and flowers and leaves and grass. It's more like dirt and Moss in pine trees forests, because the soil is a bit acidic. It's harder for plants to grow there. And then the other one that I did not really know is that pine trees can also be a source of significant air pollution. The pine tree smell that you get is actually caused by the fact that these trees emit volatile organic compounds or VOCs into the air. President Reagan was actually infamous for making the claim that pine trees pollute the air, which he was rightfully criticized for this claim, but he wasn't entirely wrong. Based on the information that he had the time he was more wrong than he was now that we know a bit more.
Marcus Lehner:
So just explain that a little bit, the air pollution we're talk about here is actually ozone. Ozone, you may think is good. It's good. It makes up the ozone layer, which protects us from the harmful sun rays. So yeah, ozone is good when it's up in the ozone layer, but it's pretty bad at the ground level where it's known to cause all sorts of illness, disease, all kinds of those bad things. So in order to create this bad ozone, you need three parts. You need sunlight, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide. Pine trees release lots of hydrocarbons. Human pollution fills in as the excess of nitrogen oxides that the hydrocarbons then combine with, get activated by sunlight and make the ozone. So pine trees, yes are part of the process of creating ozone at ground level, which is bad air pollution. But really the main fault is having the nitrogen oxides from all our industry is really what's ... fixing the pine trees is not really the end of the problem you want to fix it from.
Marcus Lehner:
But more recently, it's actually been discovered that pine trees can also release nitrogen oxide themselves and contribute to ozone creation all by themselves. So you don't even necessarily need human activity. Obviously it accelerates things, but if we have lots and lots and lots of extra pine trees, they're going to be fueling themselves as well. And you can see this. You'll see evidence of like forest fogs in these pine tree forests, these Redwood forests. And it looks cool. And it's like, Ooh, morning misty. But no, it's like just unhealthy ozone really. And so this is kind of all natural processes. Like the order of magnitude of how bad this air pollution is, is not going to be very extreme. It's kind of a self-regulating process too, where at a certain point, like it'll be a little bit saturated with these things and produce less ozone over time.
Marcus Lehner:
It kind of caps out a little bit, but there is one more factor that could drastically increase this amount of ozone is producing. And this is bark beetles. I don't know if you guys remember hearing in the news from like kind of start in 2005 or so. And it pops up every few years, these nasty bark beetles that come in and they invade these pine forests and they just mess it up pretty badly. They devoured 46 million acres of the 850 acres of forested land in the United States, which is like 5%. But 5% of all the forest is a big fricking number for beetles to mess with. So basically like these beetles, they like bore into the true trees and like build all these little tunnels and pathways. And through this, they'll eventually kill the tree by just stopping its ability to get nutrients to the rest of it.
Marcus Lehner:
And then the tree dies, increases the risk of forest fires. We've had plenty of those lately. Increased bark beetle infestations is going to be bad overall, but also pine trees its defense mechanism when it feels it's getting invaded by a fungus or a bug or something along those lines is to increase the production of its volatile, organic compounds. It's to increase its pine smell by up to 20%. Because that generally will repel bugs, but not bark beetles. So if we have air pollution start kicking up and now we have a planet ripe for all these bark beetles, we might be dealing up more and more of this air pollution. So pine trees might suck having as all the trees. But being a pine tree is not the only thing that makes a tree at Christmas trees of course, I don't look at a pine tree and say, oh, look at Christmas tree.
Marcus Lehner:
They also need lights. So I'm saying right here that if it's not lit up, it's not a Christmas tree. So all the trees are pine trees and all these pine trees need lights. So let's start with a how much lights you need for a tree. A seven and a half foot tall tree typically needs about 650 incandescent mini bulbs at an average of 0.4 or 5 Watts per bulb, total of 290 Watts or roughly 0.29 kilowatts for when your tree is on. So if you're using your tree using about 0.29 kilowatts of energy every hour to put into perspective compared to like your house's energy budget, the average house uses on average about 1.24 kilowatts per hour. So when you have your Christmas tree running, it's kind of increasing your house energy used by like 20, 30%. It's not insignificant.
Marcus Lehner:
So yeah, the energy use is going to go up in the houses around Christmas time, but there's only 1.16 billion homes worldwide. There are 3.04 trillion trees in the world. So let's say all the trees are this seven and a half foot tall tree that I have numbers for. If we just multiply out that 0.29 kilowatts by 3.04 million trees, we end up with 881.6 Terawatts of power we're using per hour, which brings it up to 7.7 million Terawatt hours per year. Which again doesn't mean anything to anybody. So how much energy does the world produce in a year, 173,000 Terawatt. So we will need more than 44 times as much energy that we produce right now to light up all our Christmas trees. And that's if there all small sized. That's all if they are house size seven and a half foot tall trees. If we don't shrink our trees down, which would make a whole host of other problems, I didn't get into, if we take the average height of a tree, which according again, to the internet, 87 and a half foot based on the largest tree database that they have.
Marcus Lehner:
If you scale that up instead of 44 times as much energy, we need over a thousand times as much energy to light up all these trees, Which is tricky, increasing our energy supply by that much is going to be difficult, but not something we haven't tackled before on this show. But putting that aside for a hot second with all of these lights on all of these trees, one other thing to consider is we're also going to be causing a huge amount of light pollution. This is obviously bad in a general sense. It was a little bit weird because studies on light pollution tend to focus on like mental health and circadian rhythms, which are annoying, but generally minimal effects. Probably the most impactful thing will be it's going to mess with animals pretty severely that are relying on this day/night cycle. I guess it's kind of a bad day to be a bat or a bug that's attracted to lights. So there's going to be a whole lot of weird stuff going on like side effects of having just kind of light everywhere during the night around the whole globe.
Marcus Lehner:
But one other interesting effect of light pollution is that it can also increase regular air pollution to compound our previous air pollution problems. Because it seems at night under normal circumstances as the temperature's drop and things as you know kind of slow down a little bit, the levels of nitrate radicals in the air increases. And these nitrate radicals help reduce the amount of smog and fumes that we generate with our cars and whatnot. Light pollution has actually been shown to destroy these nitrate radicals. So it actually hinders the ability of our cities to kind of naturally reduce the amount of smog and fumes in the air. So now if we're just applying that everywhere, we're going to have yet another contributing factor to all this air pollution. So really if all trees are Christmas trees, we're going to increase the pollution via the trees themselves, via the light they emit and definitely by trying to produce enough energy to power them. So we're just really descending into a pine scented smokey hell. So Merry Christmas.
Chris Yee:
Who knew trees could be so bad for the environment?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I know it's fricking ridiculous. Chris, what did you end up tackling?
Chris Yee:
So the thing that I made Christmas was days. What if every day was Christmas day. So, to tackle this question, I want to sort of boil down the essence of what makes Christmas, Christmas. And then analyze it like that. I think Christmas lights are a pretty big part of Christmas. So are Christmas trees, but since you guys already tackled them, I didn't really look into them that much. Obviously it would be a little different in my situation if like I don't ruin the environment with mine.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's like the same normal amount that we just have during the holiday season.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Right. But some other things that you do on Christmas, are you watch Christmas movies. You listen to Christmas music. So all that stuff would basically be like all the media and entertainment that you consume would be Christmas themed, which it would maybe get a little annoying. I like Christmas stuff. So I would like it, I think, but it's not really that big of a deal. It doesn't really impact that many things. But one thing that does is the tradition of giving presents to people. So, if Christmas happened every day, that means you'd have to give presents to people every single day. And that's going to add up, that's going to be pretty expensive. So I want to see like how much money would you have to spend? So the average money spent on Christmas gifts. I found statistics. I think it was on a survey based on a survey in the US.
Marcus Lehner:
God, no matter what this number is, unless it's exactly how much I spend on Christmas gifts, it's going to make me feel bad.
Chris Yee:
In the year 2021 people said they expected to spend an average of $886 dollar total in gifts, which is actually pretty high.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, thank God. That's exactly how much I spend, perfect.
Chris Yee:
Yes, to the dollar.
Marcus Lehner:
To the dollar, to the dollar. Oh. But I haven't gotten stocking stuff, so that's out the window. Now I feel like I'm being too generous. Going to have to return something.
Chris Yee:
So that means you're going to have to spend that much money every single day on top of everything that you're already spending for like food and stuff and rent and mortgages and stuff. And the thing is Christmas is a federal holiday. So, that means that most people aren't working on Christmas, but they do get paid on Christmas. Most people. So they are still making money, but they're not necessarily making enough money to spend that much money every day on gifts, which could end up being a problem. Now, because it's a federal holiday, not everyone is working. We did do an episode earlier, it was a very early episode. It was episode nine where we asked what if everyone stopped working for a week? And in that episode, a lot of bad things happened like...
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, it didn't turn out just fine?
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Like I think I said the purge happens. So, this scenario is a lot longer than a week. It's actually forever where people aren't working, but it's also not everyone. So on Christmas, some people do work. Mostly retailers, but there was a 2011 Heartland monitor poll said that one out of every four Americans works on Christmas. And this includes in industries like the restaurant industry, retail, emergency responders, hospital workers. Basically anyone that's considered essential works like Dunkin donuts and Starbucks. They work on Christmas.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, on Thanksgiving, I got a coffee in the morning from a Dunkin Donuts that was up open. I was like, oh man, why are you guys open today? Oh wait, because of me.
Chris Yee:
Yes. So, a lot of the things that we said would happen in episode nine, don't actually happen. Like the purge won't happen because law enforcement is still working to prevent that.
Ben Storms:
And also its Christmas. You can't purge on Christmas.
Chris Yee:
Well, didn't they, I haven't seen the purge movies, but isn't there a Christmas one.
Ben Storms:
I think there was, it doesn't matter. Anyway, you shouldn't be on a purge on Christmas. That's my point, dammit.
Chris Yee:
So like yeah, all people that are considered essential workers are working. Nobody else is working. But basically those essential workers are the only ones working forever, which is interesting. And in addition to that, the stock market also closes on Christmas day. So publicly traded companies, no longer can trade stocks and they no longer have investors. It leads to companies sort of not being able to grow anymore, but they still have of their employees. Because it's a federal holiday they're supposed to.
Chris Yee:
So that means that most companies are going to collapse financially because they have a steady outflow of money and no inflow money. Because people aren't like buying their things. They're buying gifts instead. And this will eventually lead to economic collapse. And it'll be weird because all the money will be going straight to retailers and retailers and restaurants will basically become like the upper class, because the employers are paying the employees and the employees are spending it at the retailers. And then once it's in the retailers, then it's basically just cycling between the retailer and the retailer employees back and forth. It's a weird cycle. Now, Christmas is also a religious holiday. So not everyone celebrates Christmas, in America it's actually pretty high, 93% of American celebrate Christmas. And although Christmas is a religious holiday, lots of people do celebrate Christmas as a cultural holiday instead of a religious one. There was a 2017 survey that said only 51 per percent of Americans who celebrate Christmas actually attend church.
Chris Yee:
So that's one of the reasons why I think the percentage is so high in America, but because it's a religious holiday, that means like it's a Christian holiday. So like fundamentally Christians are the only ones that are celebrating Christmas and 32% of the world population is Christian. And then the rest are not. 19% are Muslim, 13% are Hindu. And there probably are some non-Christian people that do celebrate Christmas. But I kind of just said that the 32% is a good estimate of how many people celebrate Christmas. Now, where are these 32% of the world population? How are they distributed throughout the world? Like where are they located? So 36.8% of Christians are in the Americas. So like north and south America, 25.9% are in Europe. 23.6% are in Sub-Saharan Africa. 13.1% are in Asia and only 0.6% are in northern Africa and in the middle east.
Chris Yee:
So, that's like sort of how they're distributed. And the thing is not all countries get Christmas day off. So some countries actually get more than one day off. They get like two or three days off. But this doesn't really affect our hypothetical because we're just saying every day is Christmas. But Christmas is not considered a public holiday in parts of Asia in the middle east and Northern Africa. Mainly because the Christian population is so low in these areas. So, that means that they don't get the day off in these places. This includes China, which is 18% of the population.
Chris Yee:
So what's going to happen is these parts of the world will basically continue like normal. Like everyone will work and be normal and live normal lives and they'll thrive economically. They'll be the only ones getting stuff done while everyone else just celebrates Christmas. And they'll basically become the new superpowers of the world. And then every other country that recognizes Christmas as a national holiday will become a weird dystopian place where the retailers and the restaurants are the upper elite class. And then everyone else is super poor and they have to like, re gift everything in order to survive. And that will be America at least we'll probably turn into that.
Marcus Lehner:
How long will it take the rest of the world to notice?
Chris Yee:
Yeah, they might not even notice, but that is Christmas every day.
Marcus Lehner:
Collapse of Christian civilization. Got it. On those happy Christmas notes. It's time to hops over to our, would you rather question. Chris, are you ready?
Chris Yee:
I am ready for Christmas.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, you're getting, would you rather instead.
Chris Yee:
Oh.
Marcus Lehner:
But it is Christmas themed. Would you rather eat your cereal with eggnog instead of milk or eat a candy cane sandwich?
Chris Yee:
So I've still never had eggnog.
Ben Storms:
How have you ever had eggnog?
Chris Yee:
I don't know. We've had this discussion before.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. It's come up.
Chris Yee:
Probably on a different Christmas episode.
Ben Storms:
Probably on every Christmas episode.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I still have not tried eggnog yet.
Ben Storms:
Can we define a candy cane sandwich?
Marcus Lehner:
I think it's a sandwich with like crushed up candy canes as the middle part.
Chris Yee:
Is there anything else in it? Are there any other ingredients?
Ben Storms:
That was my question.
Chris Yee:
Just bread and candy canes.
Marcus Lehner:
Let's say it's one half of the sandwich. You can modify the other piece of bread with something to improve it.
Chris Yee:
Do we get to choose the bread?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, Sure.
Chris Yee:
I'm leaning toward eggnog, even though I don't know what it tastes like really. I have an idea of what it tastes like. It's creamy, right?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's noggy. It's eggy.
Chris Yee:
That seems like it would go with cereal. Does it have alcohol in it? This version.
Ben Storms:
Could. Your choice.
Marcus Lehner:
It doesn't. Eggnog doesn't naturally. You could add alcohol as well to your cereal if you'd like.
Ben Storms:
I mean, I'm going to go ahead and tell you this right now. That's an option you have every single day of your life.
Chris Yee:
I thought alcohol was a part of eggnog.
Ben Storms:
So people make it with alcohol, but you don't have to make it with alcohol.
Chris Yee:
Okay. Traditionally though, it's not?
Marcus Lehner:
Like if you go to the store and buy eggnog in a carton and that's like, Hey, this is what eggnog is. It does not have alcohol in it. If someone says, Hey, would you like some eggnog at a holiday party? It's fairly safe to assume it's an eggnog mixed drink with alcohol in it.
Chris Yee:
But like, that's the same. You can go to a store and buy margarita mix. And that's not what a margarita is. You need the alcohol.
Ben Storms:
Right. But Like there are alcoholic and non-alcoholic homemade eggnog recipes.
Chris Yee:
Well, if the alcohol is not required, then I think it's pretty easily eggnog is the better choice.
Ben Storms:
All right. What if I suggest a peppermint stick sandwich? It is some good sort of sweet hallah bread layer of Nutella. And then your crushed candy canes.
Chris Yee:
See the main issue I have with the candy cane sandwich is that candy canes are mainly not a chewing experience.
Ben Storms:
I will say disagree with that. I like crunchy things in sandwiches sometimes. Like if you take like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and throw some like pretzels in there, that is good.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. But pretzels are a chewing experience.
Ben Storms:
No, I know. I understand that. But like it's not that far. You put like potato chips in the sandwich. That's delicious.
Chris Yee:
Chewing experience.
Marcus Lehner:
If you can get them crushed up enough. It is probably legit. I like Nutella as a combination option. That's probably the right texture.
Chris Yee:
I do like peppermint bark. I do like that.
Ben Storms:
Right? It's like a pepper bark sandwich. There you go.
Marcus Lehner:
Here's here's the other thing I'm thinking. How far off flavor wise is eggnog from post cereal milk? Like what I crave in the morning. I actually, and I've not grown out of this, a bowl, lucky charms. And you have like that slightly blue milk at the end. That milk tastes so good, because it's a lot of sugar in there.
Ben Storms:
Okay. I was just going to ask what cereal you would put your eggnog in and you say Lucky Charms. I know you weren't saying that's what you would choose, but just that mental combination of Lucky Charms with eggnog in it made my mind break a little bit.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. See I'm almost a little bit in Chris's boat where I usually drink eggnog over the holidays. But for some reason my brain refuses to like cement in it exactly what eggnog tastes like, except that it's just like milk adjacent and a little bit, I don't know.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. It seems pretty similar to milk.
Ben Storms:
I think if you had a pretty neutral, if you had just like Corn Flakes, I don't think that would be that bad with eggnog.
Chris Yee:
What do you think would be bad?
Ben Storms:
I don't know. Like.
Chris Yee:
I think most cereal would go with eggnog. It's all sweet.
Ben Storms:
No, I think most sugary cereal just be way too much. I think you need something that's kind of bland. Like if you put like, even just like Frosted Flakes, it's just going to be a lot. It's going to be like, at least for me just way too much. But I think if you have like just regular ass Corn Flakes or something or like Chex I don't know. Something like that.
Marcus Lehner:
Is Miniwheat's the best or the worst?
Ben Storms:
Oh. So the problem with Miniwheats is they get kind of soggy. Like all cereal's going to get soggy obviously, but those specifically get soggy very quickly and I don't want to eat like a squishy eggnog sponge.
Chris Yee:
I think cereal gets soggy slower in eggnog than in normal milk though.
Ben Storms:
I guess, because it's thicker.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Ben Storms:
That kind of makes sense.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, I don't like thinking about it being thicker.
Ben Storms:
I don't either. I hadn't considered that.
Chris Yee:
I mean, I don't think that's an issue really.
Ben Storms:
It's not ideal. I'll tell you that.
Chris Yee:
I mean the textures on both are going to be weird.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I don't think either of these are like a typical, you want to eat this or this where they're both. So astronomically bad that you couldn't like. If I was offered either of these at a Christmas party where I felt some obligation to the host to try it, I would try both of these items.
Ben Storms:
I can see someone making like peppermint finger sandwich or something. The idea that you're just giving out a styrofoam cup full of Corn Flakes with eggnog in it is hilarious to me.
Chris Yee:
See, I was going to say the opposite. I was going to say that like I could see the eggnog cereal being like a TikTok fad or something, where the candy cane sandwich is just like, why did you do that?
Ben Storms:
The candy cane sandwich is a joke from Elf that got cut, where he took us lunch to work.
Chris Yee:
Oh, is it?
Ben Storms:
No. That wasn't.
Chris Yee:
Oh, I was like, that could be possible.
Ben Storms:
Right? Exactly. Like that's effectively what it is. I'm going to say I would actually try either of these I think.
Chris Yee:
You can't say both though. That's cheating.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. We should probably stop talking about it before I get actually curious that what this is.
Ben Storms:
All right. I'm not going to say I'm going to try one of these on a behind the scenes' episode. But I might try one of these behind the scenes' episode. I'm not committing myself yet. I did not say that, but it's a possibility.
Chris Yee:
He's doing both.
Ben Storms:
No, I didn't say that.
Marcus Lehner:
Ben, if you do one, I'll do the other.
Ben Storms:
Oh, I like that deal.
Chris Yee:
Do you get to choose which one you do? Is it, does that depend on what you choose right now?
Ben Storms:
Oh man. So wait, I get to choose which when I do it, the situation?
Marcus Lehner:
We'll work it out.
Ben Storms:
We'll figure it out.
Marcus Lehner:
We'll figure it out.
Ben Storms:
All right. We'll figure it out. Well, we should decide on this now. I think we've discussed this at length.
Marcus Lehner:
So yeah, I kind of got sold by Ben's good sandwich idea. I kind of in for the candy cane, Nutella sandwich. That seems pretty legit in my book. So I'm going to go for the candy cane sandwich. Chris?
Chris Yee:
I am going for the eggnog cereal. I think both textures will be weird, but like eggnog cereal is closer. It's pretty close to just normal cereal. I think it's just a little weird.
Marcus Lehner:
Also. You got to try eggnog at some point. So I might as well do it there.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, I know.
Ben Storms:
I do like that you're committed to this, not having had eggnog before, but yes.
Chris Yee:
I don't know. I think I sort of know what it tastes like.
Ben Storms:
You get the idea. Yeah.
Chris Yee:
But candy canes. Like I just don't like the idea of chewing candy canes. Even though I do like peppermint bark. The one part of that I don't like is like, when you chew it, it gets stuck in your teeth. I don't like that. So I feel like I would not like a candy cane sandwich.
Ben Storms:
That's the thing about the candy canes is that they're not just crunchy. They're like chewy crunchy. It's weird.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. They're not meant to be chewed.
Ben Storms:
I may. Yes. That's the answer. I think I may also go with the cereal.
Chris Yee:
That was surprising. I thought you were going to choose the other one.
Ben Storms:
I really thought I was too. But the more I think about the cereal, it's just like people had to have made it at some point. Kellogg must have made like a eggnog Frosted Flakes at some point. They just have like like nutmegs and stuff on it. That's definitely a thing that someone's done at some point.
Marcus Lehner:
I mean, eggnog is basically just like what milk, eggs and sugar?
Ben Storms:
Yeah. Like it's basically Cinnamon Toast crunch, but nutmeg toast crunch.
Marcus Lehner:
You can just pour a bowl of Lucky Charms, pour regular milk in and crack an egg in and you're getting the same thing?
Ben Storms:
Oh my God. No one do that. Don't ever do that. If you do, please add rum.
Chris Yee:
Oh, the Simpsons did eggnog cereal.
Ben Storms:
Wait, seriously.
Chris Yee:
Season seven, episode 11.
Ben Storms:
That's incredible.
Marcus Lehner:
And they did candy cane sandwich in season 48, episode 13.
Ben Storms:
But yeah, I think I would go with eggnog cereal.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh man. Well, even though the Simpsons did it, you may be able to see a real life person eat some eggnog cereal. So it is the perfect excuse to hop on to our Patreon, www.patreon.com/absurdhypotheticals and become a patron for just a singular dollar. You get access to all our additional content that we produce each month, specifically exclusively, especially for our absurd hypothetipals on the Patreon. So you can go there. If you want to help the show in non monetary ways. One, leave review, just be like, wow, this was cool. I listen to this whole thing and I really enjoyed it. Boom, five stars, write exactly that. Throw it in, five stars helps more people find the show. Helps the show grow. Very good. Tell your friends, tell your family word of mouth is the best way for a podcast to grow as well.
Marcus Lehner:
Every way is literal the best way for a podcast to grow. Everything helps. Get the word out there about this cool show. And then you'll be able to explain away why you know some weird ass facts at your holiday Christmas party. If you want to be directly a part of the show through your own thoughts, send us a question. We love to get listener questions. Listener would you rathers and if you have a cool idea for a hypothetical question for us to answer, send it in. Probably best is via email, absurdhypotheticals@gmail.com or send us a message through the Patreon, if you happen to be a patron.
Chris Yee:
Or if you're on YouTube in the comments, because that's probably easier for you. You don't have even had to click away. You just scroll down.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. If you're on YouTube just right down there, you can't see me pointing, but I'm pointing down below the video. God, it being audio only form. That's terrible. Can't point to anything.
Ben Storms:
Well you can. Doesn't do much.
Marcus Lehner:
So once you've done all the of 17 different things I ask for as a Christmas gift to us, you can join us next week where we do our 2021 Remixes episode.
Chris Yee:
Hiatus, hiatus.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, but after that remix episode. Yes, real life gets busy around the holidays. We do this podcast in our spare time, so it is difficult to get all together during the holiday season. So we will be on a one month hiatus. So we will have next week's episode. And then after that, we'll take a break till we return in February 7th. Mark it on your calendars, we'll be returning there with fresh new hypothetical questions for you, the listener.
Chris Yee:
But we will still have our Patreon episodes during that.
Marcus Lehner:
Yes, that does happen. If you miss us, Patreon's the way to go. You can pay to not miss us anymore. This isn't a... There's probably some psychological trick you could do to make people do this. It's not gas lighting, but it feels like it. Get you hooked and then take it away and then demand money for it. Extortion? Is that what we're doing?
Ben Storms:
I don't know what you're going for here, dude.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
All right. Join us next week where we tackle our very, very exciting 2021 remix where we mash up episode from this year into super Frankenstein monster questions. It's crazy. It's a good time. We'll see you there.