Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas

What Victorian anxieties have to do with Coke, candy canes and mythbusting the Bible.

How did a holiday that began in pagan Rome become the centerpiece of the Christian tradition and even a secular global celebration of consumerism across faiths? In Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas, a fascinating 1997 History Channel documentary, historian Harry Smith traces the origins of Christmas and how many of the relative newcomer traditions like candy canes and the Christmas tree came to be. From how cartoonist Thomas Nast defined the look of Santa Claus to how Coca Cola subsequently appropriated it to the profound socioanthropological learnings from Dickens’ classic Christmas Carol, the documentary reveals the rich and surprising history of a holiday that has become a pillar of the modern calendar.

Christmas Unwrapped is available on YouTube in five parts or, for the quality aficionados, as a full-length DVD film from the A&E archives.

The church knew it could not outlaw the pagan traditions of Christmas, so it set out to adopt them. The evergreens traditionally brought inside were soon decorated with apples, symbolizing the Garden of Eden. These apples would eventually become Christmas ornaments.”

The documentary features commentary from renowned historians Stephen Nissenbaum, author of The Battle for Christmas and Penne L. Restad, who penned Christmas in America: A History.

If the shepherds are out in the fields, watching their flock by night, we’re not talking about one of the cold spells in the heart of winter.”

The film also dives into historical scholarship to debunk some fundamental premises of Christmas: For instance, a closer look of the Christian scriptures reveals Christ was likely born in the spring, not in December.

[Dickens'] Christmas Carol showed the Victorians what could be the use and the reading of Christmas in a society which was quite pleased with itself in a way but which, nevertheless, had fears about inequality, about materialism, about, perhaps, too rapid change.”

Certainly today, most of the churches revel in the celebrations as completely as do the corporate malls. That’s not a bad thing — it actually goes back to the sources of this kind of holiday, where we recognize that people have deep needs at this time of year to connect with that which is very important, but also to celebrate.”

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James Burke’s Connections: A BBC History of Innovation

What the sociology of the Industrial Revolution has to do with combinatorial creativity.

In 1978, BBC aired a 10-part series entitled Connections, in which science historian James Burke made a compelling case for what’s essentially our founding philosophy: That ideas and innovation don’t occur in isolation, and that creativity is a combinatorial force. (Something more recently echoed by Paula Scher, Nina Paley and Steven Johnson.) True to the program’s subtitle, An Alternative View of Change, Burke debunks the myth of historical progress as a linear force and instead explores the interplay and interconnectedness of events and motives as the origin of modernity’s gestalt.

It’s about the things that surround you in the modern world and, just because they’re there, shape the way you think and behave; and why they exist in the form they do; and who — or what — was responsible for them existing at all.”

The entire Connections series is now available for free online, including the two sequels to the original 1978 program — Connections² (1994) and Connections³ (1997).

For a higher-quality experience, each of the three parts is available as a 5-disc box set, all of which we’ve promptly wishlisted.

The series was also adapted in Burke’s excellent 1995 book Connections, a fascinating 320-page journey into the history of innovation.

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Walt Disney’s Man In Space: Retrofuturism from 1955

Before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Walt Disney took audiences there. Man In Space is a fascinating and rare 1955 Disney program exploring humanity’s obsession with the cosmos with equal parts scientific futurism and historical investigation. The entire segment is now available on YouTube in four parts, gathered here in a convenient playlist for your retrofuturist bemusement.

From prehistoric rockets to the science of the moon to space medicine, each segment explores a different aspect of man’s last frontier of conquest. The series culminates with a vision for launching man’s first foray into space, a purely hypothetical and, for many, unimaginable proposition at the time. The cherry on top: The segments is narrated by Dick Tufeld, the voice of the robot from cult vintage TV series (and subsequent 1998 film adaptation) Lost in Space.

Man In Space appears on the excellent Walt Disney Treasures – Tomorrow Land: Disney in Space and Beyond — a priceless two-disc collection of the “science factual” Disney programming that aired in the 1950s, covering multiple facets of the pre-modern fascination with outer space.

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