On this festive but delightfully off-kilter edition of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro return from an impromptu cruise with a pocketful of overheard conversations, a temporarily abandoned “walking rock,” and the kind of people-watching moments that make you wonder if Thin Mints are actually the glue holding society together.

Then Jethro descends—figuratively—into the chilling depths of Sweden’s historic Falun copper mine to uncover the true story of Fat Mats, the perfectly preserved miner whose body was found in 1719 after vanishing four decades earlier. Why did he look freshly deceased after 40 years? Why were his legs missing? And how did a simple silver coin become a family heirloom that still survives today?

Kat follows with a world-tour of wonderfully unsettling holiday traditions: a rhyming duel with a Welsh dead horse named Mari Lwyd, a frog-eating, piggyback-demanding winter demon lurking in the Balkans, and Frau Perchta—an Alpine holiday enforcer who rewards the tidy and industrious while punishing the lazy with… well, creatively aggressive disembowelment.

It’s a globe-spanning celebration of strange seasonal folklore, preserved miners, questionable cruise-ship conversations, and precisely the kind of merry madness you’ve come to expect from The Box of Oddities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices