What The Frock

There are moments in the modern age when one must pause, stare into the middle distance, and ask a question of profound existential importance. Not questions like “Why are we here?” or “Is there life on other planets?” but the truly unsettling ones. Questions such as, “Why does my phone know what I want before I do?” and “When did Christmas become a logistics problem?”

This episode of What The Frock? begins exactly there. Not with sleigh bells or gentle nostalgia, but with the quiet horror of realizing that joy is not Prime eligible. You can order choy, books, kettles, socks, and oddly specific replacement parts for appliances you no longer own. You cannot order meaning. Meaning has a longer shipping window and requires human involvement, which Amazon has wisely decided is inefficient.

Rabbi Dave and Friar Rod approach this problem the way all great philosophers do, by wandering into it sideways. One armed with a lifetime of Salvation Army kettles, Christmas bands, and Denver cold. The other armed with mall food courts, McDonald’s rushes, and a deeply held suspicion of Kohl’s checkout lines. Together they ask the question people keep asking the wrong way around. Did Amazon ruin Christmas, or did it simply reveal that we were already halfway there and grateful for the assist.

Along the way, the episode detours through nostalgia, which turns out to be less a historical record and more a highly selective memory editor. Christmas shopping used to involve crowds, parking, irritation, and stories you told later as proof of character. Now it involves a button, a tracking number, and a peculiar emotional flatness that feels suspiciously like relief. Not joy, not sorrow, just a soft clicking sound and wrist fatigue.

The discussion refuses to settle for easy villains. COVID accelerated things, sure. Technology reshaped habits, absolutely. But beneath it all is a deeper unease. When efficiency replaces ritual, something goes missing, and nobody quite notices until the mall is inexplicably empty on Christmas Eve. When gifts arrive without stories, when experiences are optimized out of existence, we are left wondering whether convenience has quietly eaten the holiday while we were busy saving three dollars and twelve minutes.

This episode does what What The Frock? does best. It wanders, it mutters, it remembers, it questions. It veers from kettles to banks that refuse to make change without biometric confirmation, from dead malls to future nostalgia that has not happened yet. It does not conclude with answers, because answers are overrated and usually wrong. Instead, it leaves you with a better question.

If Christmas survives every technological revolution, and it always has, then what exactly are we trying to protect? The ritual, the inconvenience, the story, or just the feeling that something mattered enough to be difficult?

Click fast. Think slow. And welcome back to What The Frock?