Grampa's Christmas Origins: Christmas Cookies/References

References/Trivia

Cultural references

After Milhouse's candy cane flambé burns Santa's mouth, Milhouse laments that he should have made Paella, a rice dish which is popular in the Valencian region of Spain.
In Grampa's story, Fatty Arbuckle becomes the national spokesman for The Cookie Initiative. In real life, Arbuckle was an actor and comedian, and one of the most popular silent film stars of the 1910s.
The Cookie Initiative leads to the Great Cookie Prohibition of 1929, a reference to Prohibition in the United States. Prohibition was a national ban on the sale, manufacture and transport of alcohol, established in 1920 with the 18th Amendment and repealed in 1933 with the 21st Amendment.
According to Grampa, cookies were not seen again until 1987, when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's vault, referring to the television special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults, which was hosted by Rivera. In real life, after a huge media buildup, the vault was anticlimactically discovered to be empty except for dirt and debris.
Bart mentions that Grampa also has "theories on Easter, evolution, and Kevin James's career".

The pop-culture references (Fatty Arbuckle, Prohibition) indicate that the "origin" portion of the story takes place in the USA in the 1920s.
- Milhouse, Nelson, Dolph, Jimbo and Kearney appear as 1920s version of themselves.
- Abe casts himself in the role of Santa Claus.
Where the story takes place is not specified, but the Shelbyville Orphanage seems to be a reasonable conjecture for several reasons:
- Both Springfield and Shelbyville have orphanages, but the Springfield Orphanage's building doesn't look old enough to have been around in the 1920s.
- Grampa's elder son (and Homer's half-brother) Herb Powell was placed into the Shelbyville Orphanage when he was an infant, showing that the orphanage has been around at least since the 1950s and from its appearance, it looks older than that. Also, since Grampa is telling the story, he may have unconsciously had the Shelbyville Orphanage in mind when he set the cookie story in an orphanage.
- Milhouse's mother Luann Van Houten has mentioned that she was born in Shelbyville ("Lemon of Troy"). It's possible that someone from further back in Milhouse's family tree once lived in the orphanage for a time, which would explain the presence of a Milhouse look-a-like in the 1920s.

The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults aired in 1986, not in 1987 as Grampa indicates. However, rather than a goof, this could be a deliberate mistake on the part of the writers, a sly reference to Grampa's stories' tendency to not have all the facts straight.