Brian Earl
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Brian Earl’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And where Thomas Nast was doing things for Harper's Weekly, Norman Rockwell and JC Leyendecker were doing covers for the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1920s. And we're starting to see in those images Santa shifting toward more of the notion that we have today, that he's not an elf. He's not this gnome-like little creature. He's a six-foot guy. He's fully human grandfather.
And then it was Haddon Sundblom, who was a commercial artist who worked for Coca-Cola, same guy who did the Quaker Oats guy, started doing Santa Claus in the early 1930s. And he would do at least one or two of these paintings every year. And then it was Coca-Cola's massive marketing budget that allowed them to just propagate this one image of Santa really far and wide.
So there's kind of one of those internet rumors that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus. I think it's more, there's a little bit of truth to that. It's more accurate to say that that's, The work that Haddon Sundblom did is kind of the point that we stopped iterating on our notion of Santa Claus. So it's more like they finalized our image of him.
Well, giving gifts at Christmastime wasn't always a huge deal. I mean, it was in as much as it's common to give gifts on almost any kind of celebration. But Christmas wasn't a major gift-giving holiday until a couple of things were true. Number one, until we started getting the notion that it is, and that was really a matter of there being more goods to sell, right?
You think as we become a more industrial society, you're going to have the media giving merchants an avenue to advertise through that media. And also the merchants and producers themselves saying, oh, this Christmas thing is another way that we can get people to buy goods, right?
so it wasn't until we get to this period of the late 19th early 20th century that christmas became a major gift giving holiday prior to this christmas gifts were something that would be very very small children would get gifts in their stockings that they leave either at the end of their beds or on the mantle adults would give each other gifts to some extent but maybe not much they'd usually be handmade items and they'd almost never be wrapped you'd always just give it over to the other person
Gift wrap, as we know it, can probably trace its roots back to the early 20th century. Merchants would sell tissue paper. They used to refer to it as gift dressings. It was usually plain white. And it was often if something came in a box, if it was a product that you bought from a store, it came in a box, you'd want to wrap it up. Smaller gifts would typically be hung in the tree.
You'd either hang them, stick them in the branches or hang them from something. And it wasn't until an article that came out in Good Housekeeping, and I want to say this was in the early 20th century, that actually recommended putting gifts under the tree.
And in the 1920s, there was an incident at the stationery store in North Carolina where they were selling their tissue gift dressings, but they ran out. So it being a stationary store, one of the owners ran into the back and found some spare paper that they were going to use as envelope liners. It was this bright yellow paper and said, well, I guess this will do. It's better than nothing.
Put it out on the shelves and the stuff just flew off the shelves. They couldn't keep up with the demand for it, even though it wasn't intended as a gift dressing. And most people would say that that is the point where this idea of brightly colored or ostentatious decorative wrapping paper really got its start from that one mishap at that store in North Carolina that was run by J.C.
and Raleigh Hall, who are the brothers who are famous for creating Hallmark.
Well, I think in general, the thing that fascinates me the most about Christmas is that it is so much newer than you probably realize. You think this is based on a 2,000-year-old religious story. It's filled with all kinds of candles and wreaths and Christmas trees, things that feel ancient, things that you think they must have been around for centuries.
But most of how you experience Christmas are made up of things that were produced in the last century. decades. And on the one hand, that's really obvious, right? I mean, white Christmas was written in the forties. You know, my grandparents didn't grow up with that song, but even the Santa Claus that we know really came from the thirties. Again, like my great grandparents didn't know that.
And again, with the Christmas trees, again, They didn't really become especially common in American households until, you know, about the late 19th, early 20th century. Well, that's my great-great-grandparents for someone my age. It's not exactly ancient history. I mean, those are people, I know their names. I have pictures of those people.
So, so much of Christmas is just brand new, and a great deal of the remainder isn't all that much older. And that even is true of certain Christmas songs. You think like Hark the Herald Angels Sing just kind of has this ring to it that it must be this really, really old song. But no, that was mid to late 19th century.
The interesting thing about that is that it did not become an industry until about the late 1930s. And the logic was in the entertainment industry, why are we going to invest in creating a product that people are only going to be interested in for a couple of weeks out of the year? And so you notice there really aren't a lot of great American Christmas songs prior to the 1940s.
Now, Winter Wonderland was written in the late 1930s. The original version is no longer popular. You can find it online, but it just has too much of an old-timey feel. So what changed? Well, the movie industry came along, and a lot of songs were written for movies that either featured Christmas or were about Christmas. This is another interesting thing.
Even though a lot of our favorite Christmas movies come from the 1940s, there really weren't Christmas movies in the 1940s. It wasn't until television came along that you had this annual tradition of watching movies on Christmas. You have to imagine the same couldn't be true before TV came.
That movie theaters would show the same Christmas movie every year and that families would have a tradition of going to the movie theater. That just doesn't make sense. So a lot of these movies like Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life actually premiered during the summer. But that's a bit of an aside. But it was really during the 1940s that...
A lot of these songs were written for movies. And then once that sort of proved the concept, you had a lot more of these Christmas songs being written. All of this, of course, coincided with World War II. And you notice the lyrics to a lot of these songs are like, I'll be home for Christmas. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
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