t for"Journey Indiana" is provided by WTIU members.

Thank you!

>> BRANDON: Coming up.

>> ASHLEY: Taste some sweet holiday treats from the Martinsville Candy Kitchen.

>> BRANDON: Get on the ice with the Circle City Curling Club.

>> ASHLEY: Experience the Museum of Psychphonics.

>> BRANDON: And feel the thrill of the Pokagon State Park toboggan run.

>> ASHLEY: That's all on this episode of -- >> TOGETHER: "Journey Indiana"!

♪ >> ASHLEY: Welcome to "Journey Indiana."

I'm Ashley Chilla.

>> BRANDON: And I'm Brandon Wentz.

And we're coming to you once again from the Santa Claus Museum in Santa Claus, Indiana.

It may not be the North Pole, but Santa Claus, Indiana, certainly feels magical.

Each year a flood of children's letters arrive here from across the world and are brought to the Santa Claus Museum where a host of volunteer elves work around the clock to answer them.

It's a tradition dating back to the 1920s when Santa Claus postmaster James Martin began responding to the letters addressed to Old St. Nick.

A variety of organizations have kept the tradition running and today the Santa Claus Museum, under the leadership of head elf Pat Koch, carries on this tradition, handling tens of thousands of letters each year.

Kids of all ages are welcome to visit the museum's post office and personally drop off their letters to Santa.

>> ASHLEY: So, Brandon, did you ever write letters to Santa when you were a kid?

>> BRANDON: I did.

Did you?

>> ASHLEY: I didn't, and I think that's why I'm so excited about being here.

I love the spirit of the holiday.

>> BRANDON: Yeah.

Did you ever see his, like, footprints coming out of your chimney?

>> ASHLEY: No.

No.

>> BRANDON: Someone was naughty.

>> ASHLEY: Yeah.

You can find out more by going to SantaClausMuseum.org.

Up next, we're going to Morgan County, where producer John Timm shows us how the Martinsville Candy Kitchen makes the holidays a little sweeter.

♪ ♪ Jingle bells, jingle bells ♪ ♪ Jingle all the way >> We are in our busy time of the year.

Every day we make canes until 3, 4, 5:00 in the morning.

♪ Jingle all the way >> Martinsville Candy Kitchen has been here for 102 years now.

My parents bought the store 17 years ago, and they had no idea what they were getting into, but it's been a ride for sure!

♪ Laughing all the way >> We just didn't want to see it close.

It's been in Martinsville for 102 years.

When we bought the store, that's basically what we bought, were the recipes and the tools that they used to make the recipes.

The marble slabs, the hooks, the cook stove, the scissors, everything we use is 102 years old.

>> We make thousands of canes.

When my parents bought the store, we were making around 10,000 candy canes a year.

We now make anywhere between 35 and 40,000 canes a year.

♪ Jingle all the way It takes about three hours from cook time to bag time to make 200 6-inch candy canes.

And we usually make anywhere between 600 and 800 a night.

♪ >> This was not the direction I anticipated my life going.

I worked in the dental field.

So I -- I had no interest in this type of thing.

Complete opposite, yes.

[ Laughter ] So my grandmother actually made the majority of the candy for the first 14 years.

I kind of shadowed her and learned as she -- as I went, and she was amazing at what she did.

I still have no idea how she kept up and did all that she did.

We needed somebody to come in -- in the family, after my grandmother passed, we needed somebody to come in and run the store through the day.

So my dad asked me if I would be willing to do it, and so I -- here I am three years later, still doing it.

I also make a lot of the chocolates.

So I'm here all day long, and helping customers.

And then my dad, when he gets off work in the evening, I make canes with him.

So -- >> Sugar, water, and corn syrup.

That's as detailed as I will get without money.

It cooks on the stove for an hour, and then what people are waiting to see now is for us to pour it on the table.

And then we fold it on the table for a while to cool it down to where we can pick it up with our hands.

And once it gets cool enough, then we'll pick it up, and we'll cut a third of it off, and then put the red coloring in it, or whatever color, and pull that on the hook to mix the color in.

And then I take the rest of it over to the hook and pull that in to make it turn white.

And then once I get it white, I make a square, and we put the stripes on it, and I roll that with my hand.

I pull it out into a rope kind of, whatever thickness we want, and then I roll it with my hand to get the twirl on it.

From there, it becomes candy canes.

♪ >> There's two other candy stores in Indiana that I know of.

One is up in Lafayette, and one is down in Jeffersonville, and they both make candy canes.

I'm not sure how long -- they are close to the same age as us, but maybe -- you know, they may be a year or two older, year or two younger.

I don't know.

People like handmade things.

♪ >> They are really good, and they are completely handmade.

That's a rarity anymore.

You don't see things like that.

And it's -- it's a neat experience to bring the kids and actually let them watch the cane go from liquid state to a candy cane, and then the kids fall in love with it.

♪ >> When you come in and actually watch the canes be made, we give out a small sample to everybody that wants one, and you get to taste a warm candy cane, and there is nothing in the world that compares to a warm candy cane.

>> BRANDON: Now, the last time we covered this, you got a candy cane.

How was it?

>> ASHLEY: It was so good.

I got multiple candy canes.

And I'm not a big candy cane fan and I loved it, and my son also loved it.

So we're going to have to get you there so you can get one.

>> BRANDON: Oh, man.

To reference Charlie Brown, I've gotta rock!

>> ASHLEY: If you want to get your hands on some fresh candy, just head over to martinsvillecandykitchen.com.

>> BRANDON: Up next, producer Jason Pear takes us to Madison County to hit the ice with the Circle City Curling Club.

>> I've heard curling explained as a couple of things, chess on ice, but I like to think of it as a mix of bocce ball and chess.

The goal is to get your color stones in the house, which are the rings.

You want more of yours closest to the center than your opponent's.

And there's a strategy in there with guards and takeouts, and that's where the chess component comes in, is that you are continually thinking two or three shots ahead.

If they do this, what do I do to respond?

>> Hey, Ryan, try and do the same thing.

>> There's lots of chatter.

I'm yelling sweep, don't sweep.

My sweepers are telling me, okay, the stone is fast.

It's hit this, it's picked, it's taken a different turn.

So they are telling me what the stone is doing as it's coming down the ice, and I'm trying to read where it's going to end up.

The goal of the game, believe it or not -- we're so oriented to scoring all the time.

In this sport, it's cool to give up a point.

And actually, there's called having the hammer and not having the hammer.

Hammer is you shoot last.

So you know what you got to do.

If you have hammer, your goal is to score two points.

If you don't have hammer, your goal is to only give up one point so you get that last shot.

So it's really weird.

It's, like, okay, let 'em score.

And that's hard to wrap around your head, especially for new people.

Like, wait, we never give up points.

Yeah, in this sport you do.

The hardest part is getting that weight down, because the ice changes as the night goes on.

As you breathe, your breath goes on to the ice, changes the conditions, makes it a little slower.

Then it will get a little faster.

The stones get colder as the night goes on.

So they may go faster.

You may find a path, and you wear down that pell by sweeping so much.

So it doesn't do the thing it did in the third end like it did in the first end.

So it's just continually thinking ahead, adapting to the changes, and then, you know, hoping your shots go where you aim them.

♪ The stones weigh about 42 pounds.

They are a granite that comes from a particular island off the coast of Scotland.

It actually looks like a curling stone from the water.

It's crazy.

But that's where most of the granite comes from, because it doesn't absorb the moisture and break.

The stone is concave on the bottom.

You'll see us out there before we started with water packs on our back.

We are pebbling, because if it we're flat ice, it would be like a big suction cup, it wouldn't move.

There's like a little ridge that goes around, about a quarter-inch wide that touches the ice.

Those ride on the bumps or the pebbles.

The sweeping, that melts the ice a little bit in front of stone.

Makes it go a little further and a little straighter.

It doesn't make it go faster.

It just increases the distance.

The slowdown rate is much less.

So that's -- you will see us sweep, not sweep, sweep, not sweep, because we are trying to get it on a certain angle or a certain path.

My shoe is a curling shoe.

There's Teflon on the bottom.

It's worse than skating because with a blade you can, like, push and stop.

With these things, you are going.

You don't have to buy the shoes.

We provide all the gear, the stabilizers, the stones, the sliders.

So we provide all that equipment.

We have curlers that are in their teens.

We have curlers that are in their 80s.

It's funny because we have a lot of Canadian members that grew up in Canada, and it's part of their gym class growing up in grade school, high school, things like that.

So it's second nature to them.

Here, you know, this is kind of new.

I mean, I saw it back in 2008 in the Olympics.

I called USA Curling, and said, hey, I want to start a club.

The stones are a grand a piece.

I need how many?

16.

That's $16,000.

And then you got to find somewhere to put all of these circles.

So I gave up.

And then like a year later, I found out there was a club starting, and I joined.

The next growth for us is getting dedicated ice, because we're renting this ice, playing on what is called arena ice which is curvey and wavy and all that.

Dedicated ice is smooth, level.

We'll be able to host some tournaments, get some other colleges involved, get some high schools involved, and then hopefully get more of the general public.

Most of who you see tonight are just the general public.

People like me, saw it, loved it, said, hey, I want to play.

I know it sounds odd.

We are a USA Curling member club.

If four people here get together, play the right tournaments, win the right tournaments, they can get to the Olympics from here.

I mean, that's a very long shot, but it's doable.

Just a little more.

I love the camaraderie.

I've had the same two or three teammates for three or four years, and really, it's about the only -- we don't see each other a lot in the off-season, but when we play, we have a lot of fun.

We joke.

We have some adult beverages as we play.

We have them after.

It's called broom stacking.

Just hanging out, having fun.

It's like a -- it's an extended family.

It really is.

Talk about, oh, if I would have made that shot, and man, that was a terrible shot.

And, yeah, how bad the ice is, and it's the ice's fault that we screwed up.

So, yeah, it's just like the 19th hole in golf.

I mean, we are a very casual club.

We're not out for blood.

We just have a lot of fun.

I think that's the big thing is it's a blast.

It's a hoot.

I mean, a bad night of curling is better than a good day of work.

>> Great shot.

Great shot.

>> BRANDON: It's astounding to me that little things like the water particulate from your breath can affect how you perform in this sport.

>> ASHLEY: Yeah, I don't know if that would be the only thing that would affect how I would perform in this sport.

>> BRANDON: Want to learn more?

Head to circlecitycurling.com.

>> ASHLEY: Up next, producer Jacob Lindauer takes us to Marion County to experience the Museum of Psychphonics.

♪ >> Welcome to the Museum of Psychphonics, the sound of the soul.

We aim to bring you into a place where normalcy is disregarded.

This is a mechanical garden, a portal to the imagination.

Everything that you wondered about sound, spiritual realm, all of those things.

You may find answers here, or you may find more questions.

The important thing is to come in.

[ Record scratch ] ♪ >> We first put the museum together in what had been the former storage space of a record shop, which was located right across the hall from our present location here in Fountain Square in downtown Indianapolis, at the glorious Murphy Building, which is a hub for the arts community in Indianapolis.

Michael Kaufmann came up with the idea of creating this tiny museum, specifically to showcase our main object of interest which is the baby mothership from the band Parliament-Funkadelic.

But he also wanted to create a place in Indianapolis that focused on some of the more esoteric aspects of our local history and also our connection with music and American culture in general.

♪ >> Ever since probably late in high school, I have been obsessed with museums, in particular, the German word wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosities, cabinet of wonders.

So through the years, I have always wanted to build my own.

I was talking to a friend of mine here in Indianapolis, a gentleman named Tom Battista, who is a roady stagehand, stage manager for a lot of musicians previously for David Bowie and for Parliament-Funkadelic.

And I learned that he had what is called the baby mothership in storage here in Indianapolis.

And I knew quite a bit about the baby mothership.

Been a fan of Parliament-Funkadelic for a long time.

♪ >> I often refer to the baby mothership as our Mona Lisa.

It is the main attraction, the one object that people line up outside the door just to see.

It is a real stage prop that was commissioned by and used by the band Parliament-Funkadelic.

They did huge arena shows where they would travel around the country and perform to these large audiences, thousands of people would pack the stadiums to see Parliament.

Their stage show was so fantastic and so incredible.

They created this very, like, basic old-timey theater illusion where it's a study in perspective.

So something that's small is perceived as far and distant.

So they had the small version of the mothership that would be, like, flown out on a wire above the people in the crowd.

The pyrotechnics shooting out of it, spotlights on it, the crowd is going wild.

And it would sail over their heads and then disappear into this fog cloud above the stage, and gradually the lights would come up and the big version of the mothership would descend down and land on the stage.

♪ >> The museum focuses on a lot of different narratives or different ideas that unify around this idea of music as a force.

Psychphonics being psych of mind, phonic sound.

And so those two, the sound of mind.

This idea that sound informs your mind, and that there's also maybe this, like, deeper more mysterious intelligence that is a -- the unifying threads of the universe and of our existence is the idea that it's -- it's sound that's holding things together.

So a lot of the objects have some reference to music.

We have a Burger King ashtray where -- it was the Burger King where Elvis was spotted after his death in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

There's little points of references to musicians and different musical history, both here and beyond.

A lot of times when you go to museums, everything is labeled, everything is ordered a specific way.

There's a taxonomy to the whole experience.

And that taxonomy is fairly arbitrary.

It's an assortment of how we decided to classify and categorize things, and I think there's a danger in accepting that always as the overriding logic or wisdom.

So sometimes messing with that taxonomy, you know, getting rid of certain labels or combining objects in a new way, is an important exercise for us to think about the world in new ways.

There's a didactic, which is a printed newspaper, that's sort of -- usually when you walk into a museum, you read the didactic first and it tells you what you are about to see.

But we like the idea that you read the didactic after you've been to the museum so that you can draw your own conclusions.

♪ The main fun part is watching people's reaction.

We have children.

We have older people.

We get the full spectrum of citizens that come in here, and it never fails to put a smile on my face seeing how people react to it, especially when they are walking out, and they are reading the didactic or they are talking to each other about their experience.

It's always fun just to hear what one thing stood out in one person's mind versus what somebody else noticed.

♪ >> If you have an open mind and an open heart and come in through this door, you'll find something that will inspire or entertain or maybe just amuse you.

Mike Kaufmann is extremely adept at making connections with people in other places, and he is especially good at bringing people to Indianapolis that helped expand our sense of who we are as a community, who we are as individuals, and what is our place within the context of a smaller city in the Midwest that has so many facets, so many things that people don't readily understand, so many people who have dismissed the history of Indianapolis as a boring city.

Well, it certainly is not boring, and it never was.

And the Museum of Psychphonics is one of those ways that we can help illuminate people's understanding of Indianapolis and Indiana and the Midwest as a whole.

♪ >> BRANDON: You know, I can feel from the vibrations of that piece that you can find out more by going to the address on the screen.

[ Laughter ] Up next, we are in Steuben County, where producer Jason Pear takes us for a ride on the Pokagon State Park Toboggan Run.

♪ >> Pokagon State Park is located in Northeast Indiana, and we are Indiana's fifth oldest state park.

So we were established in 1925.

We are about 1200 acres, and we are kind of known as Indiana's winter playground since we are so far up north.

We have programs all throughout the winter at the nature center.

So we lead guided hikes and things like that.

When the lake is frozen, people enjoy ice fishing and ice skating.

The toboggan run is probably our most popular winter feature.

>> Woo!

>> So in the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps came to Pokagon State Park to build a lot of our structures and put in roads and trails.

And those young men who were working here, they were 18 to 25 years old, and their first winter here, they were just kind of bored and looking for something to do.

They found this awesome hill right outside their camp, and they actually made the first toboggan run, just for their own enjoyment.

And by 1938, the park manager decided to open that up to the public.

In 1940, we added a second track.

At that time, it was refrigerated by manually putting ice on the track.

So they would have to cut ice out of the lake and pack it down on the track.

So every time it would thaw, they would have to repeat that process.

So in 1970, the track was refrigerated.

So now we have technology, where we spray the track with water, and it cools itself from the inside out.

♪ So you walk your sled up to the top of the tower.

Our staff up there will help seat you in the toboggan.

They will kind of go over the rules with you.

>> All right, guys, no leaning, no reaching, no waving.

If you lose something like a hat, let it fly.

We will get it for you.

And stay seated until the sled comes to a stop.

Got it?

Got it?

>> And then they send you down.

You are going to go down a quarter mile track.

From the top of the tower to the end of the track, there's about a 90-foot vertical drop.

So you are on the toboggan for 20 to 30 seconds, and usually average speed is about 35 miles an hour.

I always compare it to a roller coaster in the wintertime.

So you kind of have the butterflies in your stomach when you are right at the top and you are looking down and you can see that first big drop.

♪ It feels so much faster than it's really going, and that cold wind hits your face and kind of takes your breath away a little bit, but it's thrilling.

It's a lot fun.

♪ It's a tradition for a lot of families that come here.

Christmastime, you know, they might have a family gathering, and they make this part of that tradition.

So we hear from people that have been coming back year after year now with their children and their grandchildren.

And then we hear from a lot of folks that it's their first time going down it.

We had a family here last week from Florida, who had never done such a thing.

And so that was pretty thrilling for them to be able to go down the toboggan.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, I think they would be thrilled.

You know, they spent so much of their time building a lot of our other structures, that are certainly important and well-loved, but the one thing that wasn't meant to be open to the public is the one thing that we're known for.

So I think they would just be thrilled that now 100,000 people ride it every year.

[ Laughter ] >> Woo!

>> Oh, God, that was a ton of fun!

>> ASHLEY: That toboggan ride looks like it goes pretty fast!

I can't imagine being a child and going down that.

I think I would be pretty scared to go down that.

Would you?

>> BRANDON: I feel like the older you get, probably the more scared you would get to do it because you realize how fragile and breakable you are.

>> ASHLEY: That's true.

So we would probably be pretty scared when we go up there.

>> BRANDON: Oh, man, I'd still do it.

Want to take a ride for yourself?

Plan your visit at the address on your screen.

>> ASHLEY: And as always, we'd like to encourage you to stay connected with us.

>> BRANDON: Just head over to JourneyIndiana.org.

There you can see full episodes, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram and suggest stories from your neck of the woods.

>> ASHLEY: We also have a map feature that allows you to see where we've been and to plan your own Indiana adventures.

>> BRANDON: All right.

I know we are a little bit past Christmas, but I think we're going to take a little more time and get some more pictures with Santa.

>> ASHLEY: I think that's a great idea.

And we'll see you next time on -- >> TOGETHER: "Journey Indiana."

♪ >> Production support for "Journey Indiana" is provided by WTIU members.

Thank you!