Dec 25 2024
There is something almost perfectly suited to Christmas about the sound of Oscar Peterson at the piano. His playing can be brilliant and technically dazzling, but it can also become warm, intimate, playful, reflective, and quietly elegant. On An Oscar Peterson Christmas, released in 1995, those qualities transform familiar holiday songs into jazz performances that …
Dec 24 2024
For a brief, glittering moment in the middle of the 20th century, the traditional evergreen Christmas tree faced competition from something that looked as though it had arrived from another planet. Aluminum Christmas trees shimmered beneath rotating color wheels, reflected the glow of living-room television sets, and fit perfectly into an era fascinated by rockets, …
Dec 22 2024
Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” may be one of the most instantly recognizable pieces of Christmas music ever written, but in 1960 Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn took its delicate, otherworldly melody somewhere entirely different. They slowed it down, darkened the atmosphere, added a relaxed jazz pulse, and transformed the Sugar Plum Fairy …
Dec 02 2024
Frosty the Snowman had already discovered the magic of coming to life, befriended a group of children, survived a dangerously warm greenhouse, and headed north before he melted when Rankin/Bass decided that his next television adventure required a new problem. Frosty was lonely. That simple idea became the heart of Frosty’s Winter Wonderland, the 1976 …
Dec 21 2023
Few Christmas decorations capture the look of a mid-century American holiday as instantly as a box of Shiny Brite ornaments. Their colors seem almost impossibly cheerful: cherry red, icy silver, emerald green, turquoise, pink, blue, gold, and combinations striped, stenciled, glittered, flocked, or molded into deep reflector indents. Hang them among strings of colored lights …
Dec 18 2023
There is something wonderfully unnecessary about a Christmas bubble light. A tiny incandescent bulb heats a glass tube filled with colored liquid until bubbles begin rising through it, over and over, accomplishing nothing except making the Christmas tree more magical. That lack of practicality may be exactly why bubble lights have remained so memorable. For …
Dec 06 2023
On December 6, 1964, American television viewers met a glowing-nosed reindeer, an elf who wanted to become a dentist, a prospector obsessed with striking it rich, an enormous snow monster, a collection of unwanted toys, and a talking snowman voiced by Burl Ives. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer premiered on NBC as part of The General …
Dec 21 2022
The Night Before Christmas (1951) was directed by the prolific Soviet animation duo of Valentina Brumberg and Zinaida Brumberg, who were also known as the “Brumberg sisters” as well as the “grandmothers of Russian animation.” Some of their most well known films are Little Red Riding Hood and Ivashka and Baba-Yaga. Not your typical Christmas story, it begins …
Dec 14 2022
To celebrate the season, here’s a vintage style Christmas Coca Cola ad by the Academy Award-winning, Soviet born animator Aleksandr Petrov. The commercial was created in 2001, and was based on Haddon Sundblom’s jolly Santa illustrations, which first debuted in 1931 Coke ads.
