Word: popularizers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Everybody" by Slade, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid); a novelty track ("Mr. Blobby" by, er, Mr. Blobby, "Can We Fix It?" by Bob the Builder); or, for the past four years, a song by the newly minted winner of The X Factor, Britain's wildly popular version of American Idol. Indeed, the chances of any act upsetting X Factor creator and judge Simon Cowell's latest protégé has been so unlikely that bookmakers wouldn't even offer odds on it. Until...
...past: in the mid-1800s, the hot toy was the naked, china Frozen Charlotte doll, modeled on a girl who went out to a party one winter night without her wrap because she wanted everyone to be able to admire her pretty dress; by the time she arrived, the popular folk song went, "Fair Charlotte was a stiffened corpse/ And word spoke nevermore." How charming. In 1889 a puzzle game called Pigs in Clover, which involved tilting balls through metal rings, was such an addictive obsession among children and adults alike that President Benjamin Harrison was ridiculed for playing...
...good fortune on your neighbors. No one is quite sure when the custom began, but it did give us the song, "Here We Come-A-Wassailing" - sung as carolers wished good cheer to their neighbors in hopes of getting a gift in return. ("A Wassailing" also evolved into the popular "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" - its last verse, "Bring us some figgy pudding" stems from the wassailers' original intent...
...merge with Christian folk music. At that time, it was far from a Christmas tradition; festivals like May Day were deemed worthy of caroling, too, but the repertoire as well as early records of this are pretty unclear. In the 19th Century, as Christmas became more commercialized and popular, publishers began churning out anthologies of carols, many which were ancient hymns, also circulating them in broadsheets...
...Sean Goldman case sounds so much like the Elián González case, in fact, that Brazil has opened itself to charges of especially egregious hypocrisy. It's no secret that Brazil, especially under hugely popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has become a hemispheric counterweight to the U.S. And it loves to play tit-for-tat with Washington. Because Washington still insists Brazilians secure a visa before entering the U.S., Brasilia makes Americans pay for a "reciprocal" permit to get into Brazil; after the U.S. started thumb-printing foreigners in immigration lines after 9/11...