Oh, ho, ho. Santa here.

Coming to you from the North Pole,

where the elves in our podcast division

of just completed work on this season's best gift

for public radio lovers.

NPR Plus, give the gift of sponsored free listening

and even bonus episodes from your favorite NPR podcasts,

all while supporting public media.

Learn more at plus.npr.org.

Hey, it's Amanda Oranchic.

The year is almost over.

You've heard a lot of pitches asking you to support NPR.

To the many of you who have given, thank you.

Now, if you are sick of these pitches, chances are you are a

heavy podcast listener that you get a lot out of NPR podcasts like Planet Money, The Indicator,

up first, the NPR Politics podcast. In order to make all our shows possible, NPR has sponsors,

sponsors slot messages into podcast episodes. You hear them every show

unless you don't. That is just one of the things we offer supporters who sign up for NPR Plus.

Sponsor-free episodes of more than 25 different NPR podcasts, including this one.

And those sponsor messages add up.

If you listen to two or three NPR podcasts each week, we could be talking about 12 hours worth of sponsor messages in a year.

So just consider, like, what is 12 hours of your time worse? And imagine spending that

...