Word: yules
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...programming that evening "in order to present a WPIX Christmas card to our viewers." (The roller derby, Thrower noted, "we can easily knock out.") That Christmas card, he proposed in a November 1966 memo, would be a closeup shot of a cheery fireplace, complete with Christmas stockings and flaming Yule logs, "which would be repeated (via a looping process) over and over continuously" accompanied by Christmas music. It would serve, he hoped, as a comforting holiday backdrop for those New York apartment-dwellers with no fireplace of their own. The WPIX Yule Log debuted...
...York Times called it "the television industry's first experiment in nonprogramming." It was a surrealist's joke, a postmodernist's dream - the television, literally, as the family hearth - and an immediate success. The Yule Log became a TV mainstay in New York that regularly won its time slot; dozens of other U.S. cities either picked up the WPIX footage or shot their own. The Log did have its drawbacks, however. The original 16mm footage (shot in Gracie Mansion, home of New York Mayor John Lindsay) was only 17 seconds long, and the flames skipped noticeably every time it looped...
...Yule Log, which is the one most viewers are familiar with (and which was finally filmed in a California fireplace in the sweltering heat), ran until 1989. By that time the show - if you can call it that - had been cut back to two hours; to many station executives, the Yule Log was an antique, and its long-running, commercial-free format a financial drain. The fire was snuffed out in 1989. The Yule Log spirit, however, proved harder to extinguish. In ensuing years, and especially following the growth of the Internet, fans of the original Log began clamoring...
...Yule Log is now available on demand, in HD, and as a downloadable podcast. It's been the subject of a TV documentary, A Log's Life. Visitors to Stephen Colbert's website can watch their own Book Burning Yule Log. And for the full meta effect, there's even a YouTube video where you can watch the Log burning on a TV screen on your computer...
Though more than 30 million live Christmas trees are sold in the U.S. every year, almost all Christmas trees are raised on commercial farms--which makes them a renewable resource more akin to a stalk of corn than to a wild Douglas fir in the forest. When a yule tree is chopped down and sold, farms will plant another one in its place, making that part of the process carbon-neutral. The fossil fuel burned to transport the trees from farm to hearth is another matter. But given that most artificial trees are manufactured and shipped from China, fakes have...