“Lo! Your TV set becomes a blazing fireplace . . . the flames dancing to the season’s most beautiful music for four uninterrupted hours . . . setting living rooms and hearts aglow with the warmth and spirit of Christmas . . .”
Ellipses theirs, such were the words of a WPIX print advertisement touting the station’s most lasting invention, the televised yule log fireplace on a continuous seven-minute loop, accompanied by the holiday tunes you know and love.
The ad, maybe from Newsday, maybe from TV Guide, dates to 1976, 10 years after the log’s first appearance, filmed at Gracie Mansion when handsome John Lindsay was mayor, then reshot in 1970 at a nearly identical hearth somewhere in California. (Thanks for the tidbit, pix11.com.) My older brother out on the coast forwarded it to me as a harkening back to our television-watching youth.
Gen Xers who spent too much time in front of the boob tube growing up will on occasion compare its effects to kids’ iPhone addictions today, equally occasionally concluding that what’s worse now is the portability and isolation. My brother and I in fact had a lot of laughs and memorable experiences together despite the extremely limited choices available, say, sucking down bad instant coffee in an attempt to stay awake past Johnny Carson on Friday nights in the early 1980s to catch NBC’s 90-minute SCTV episodes, with John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and the rest, the reward being the best television comedy ever made.
Channel 11’s yule log was a happy background novelty, but after-hours programming became a dead zone at Christmastime back then. We once had to entertain ourselves with a midnight Mass broadcast from one of the great cathedrals of Europe, one with a smoking censer the size of a wrecking ball swinging from the rafters to, by tradition, rid the cavernous nave of the congregation’s body odor. We imagined the pope making his entrance that way, like Slim Pickens astride the falling nuke in “Dr. Strangelove.”
This year my plan was to spark up the TV log on Roku, which lately offers its own version any number of ways, with music, without, just a fire crackling, dubbed “Zen.” But that came to naught as many extended family members filed into our crowded house on Christmas Eve.
It would be remiss, however, not to call out the relatively newly listenable WLNG for praise, as with limited interruptions the Big Signal kept a choice selection spinning all night to aid the festivities, from the Royal Guardsmen’s 1967 “Snoopy’s Christmas,” co-starring a Red Baron who stills his guns, to a choral “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” written in 1849 by Edmund Sears, Unitarian pastor, pacifist, abolitionist, and early advocate for women’s equality.
Lo! Where has his kind gone?