This is an superb compilation of four History Channel/A&E programs dealing with Christmas, all wrapped into one DVD.
Buy,Download, Or Stream The History of Christmas! Click Here
1. “Christmas Unwrapped” (available as an individual DVD) is a exquisite history of the holiday from pagan times to the explain, along with the origins of several Christmas customs.
2. “It’s a Amazing Time to be Outlandish” is a holiday offering from the approved series Outlandish U.S. where the queer and original are documented from coast-to-coast. It’s a Wacky Wonderland of Christmas.
Buy,Download, Or Stream The History of Christmas! Click Here
3. “Santa Claus” (available as an individual DVD) is from the BIOGRAPHY series and traces the roots of Father Christmas through the centuries.
4. “Christmas Tech” is a holiday episode of the series Unusual MARVELS that explores the high-tech aspect of the celebration, such as the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and Macy’s festive store windows.
Getting these four programs for less than the heed of either one of the previous individual releases, is 2008 holiday bargain.
I’d recommend enjoying each program individually, rather than sitting through a Christmas overdose of 200 minutes. However, as a gigantic fan of all things Christmas, I found the four flowed quite nicely all in a row.
These are rarely found in stores, so have Amazon set this DVD in Santa’s sleigh this holiday season.
The History Channel has compiled this modern DVD from four previously-aired documentaries relevant to Christmas. The first is Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas, which was originally released in 1997. It traces the tradition of celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25 to the fourth century and how various cultures have developed recent ways in honoring the holiday. England’s traditions around Yuletide became more and more raucuous and profane with every century between the early Middle Ages and the inception of the Industrial Revolution; one of the commentators states a contemporary observer would mistake British Christmas rites of these years for our Halloween or Mardi Gras. Debauchery, dipsomania, and depravity overruled any sense of divinity or devotion. Dear oh dear…
When the Puritan separatists established themselves in the Unique World, they outlawed Christmas entirely–as did Oliver Cromwell in England in the years following their exodus to America. Another historian on the program muses that one of the reasons for the Restoration of the Monarchy with the enthronement of King Charles II in 1649 was that the English missed their frail Christmas revelries, which had been brutally suppressed by the Protectorate.
Due to its Pilgrim heritage, the United States would continue to largely ignore Christmas altogether. Congress even sat in session every 25th of December from 1789 through 1856. It was not until immigrants from other parts of Europe–Germany in particular, and, later, from southern and eastern regions–began arriving in tremendous numbers starting in the mid-19th century that Christmas observances truly took root in America.
History Channel’s Biography presents the life stories of celebrated people, and in 2003 it focused on the most recognizable ambassador of the Christmas season: Santa Claus. From the real-life St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra (in original Turkey; he died in 346), a patron of diminutive children, came the modern-day elf. St. Nicholas has historically been essential during the Christmas holiday because his feast is kept on December 6. As a celebrated help-mate of sailors, he found keen fidelity among the Dutch, whose name for him–Sinter Klaus–was the forerunner of the English “Santa Claus”. Another alias, Kris Kringle, comes from a German moniker–Christkindl–an understanding of Martin Luther’s, a patriarch of the Protestant Reformation. Luther taught that the Christ Child (Christkindl in German) was the bringer of children’s Christmas gifts rather than St. Nicholas, whose Roman Catholic overtones he wished to dispel from his original church.
Descriptions of Claus varied wildly (I particularly enjoyed the sketch of a Santa looking like an inebriated vagrant being drawn in a sled…by a gigantic turkey…) until Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, “A Visit From St. Nicholas”, appeared in a Unusual York newspaper in 1823. Most of us would notice the most illustrious Christmas poem of all time by it’s first line: ” ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house”, etc. His appearance as jolly, portly, and merry location the tone for his personality; Moore also both introduced and named Santa’s legendary flying reindeer. The clergyman also founded Santa’s modus operandi for entering domiciles: down the chimney.
Weird U.S. is another History Channel program, with hosts Brand Moran and Ticket Sceurman roving across America in search of unfamiliar and bizarre historical tidbits, folklore, and traditions.
“It’s A Unbelievable Time to Be Odd” (aired in 2005) focuses on sundry off-kilter Christmas activities seen across the land. They visit NORAD (the national aerospace defense system) in Denver, Colorado, where Santa’s celestial progress is monitored and reported annually. The federal agency’s area in the national Xmas schema dates to the mid 1950s. Denver-area children began calling a local telephone number advertised as a announce line to Santa Claus, but due to a misprint, the newspaper had advertised NORAD’s emergency line instead. The staff, contented to be given the opportunity to play Father Christmas’ go-between with the youngsters, have charted his global positions every year since, and now incorporate it into their official website on Christmas Eve.
Mark and Label also embark on a pilgrimage to Minnesota to glance the broken-down Yuletide dish of lutefisk among Norwegian Americans. Translated literally, the dish means “lye fish”–truth in advertising, as the jellied destroy product is indeed whitefish treated with the harsh chemical (a key ingredient in drain cleaners–good heavens!) . Humorist Garrison Keillor, a native Minnesotan, recalls this pungent dish in an excerpt from his illustrious Lake Wobegon Days:
“Every Advent we entered the purgatory of lutefisk, a horrid gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, distinguished as if survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the frigid creeps as Advent approached, shimmering that this awe delicacy would be establish before me and I’d be told, ‘Just have a puny.’ Eating a miniature was like vomiting a cramped, honest as unpleasant as a lot.”
Their peregrinations engage a local turn when the duo interviews Pastor Harry Walther, a radio personality and minister from Media, a suburb of Philadelphia. Pastor Harry enthusiastically decries the very mention of Santa Claus in any manner, claiming he is an incarnation of obnoxious (and yes, he is in earnest, although I found him and his lunatic-fringe creed impossible to retract seriously) . He even sells burnable effigy Santa dolls on his website, encouraging people to light bad Santa’s likeness aflame in revolt against “the Satanic lie of Santa” (and I’m quoting him directly!) . Brand and Effect react with ample indignation and amusement upon leaving Harry and his Santa-driven tirades late them.
The final selection, Christmas Tech, checks out the nuts-and-bolts backstories to some of the season’s outward manifestations. It explains how the massive evergreen found each year in Rockefeller Center is selected, acquired, moved, and erected. The much-touted street-level windows of the broad Macy’s Department Store of Manhattan are graphically described, from view notion to final implementation. And the processes frail to originate such ordinary Christmas festoons as tree lights, glass ornaments, and fruitcake (I know–most people recoil when faced with the prospect of this faded Yuletide confection, but I happily anticipate nibbling on some every December) are exhaustively researched.
All in all a very thorough, curious, and erudite (the Marks from Outlandish U.S. even visit a Columbia University Professor of Physics, who calculates how Santa Claus gets around the world in time to verbalize hundreds of millions of Christmas treats–a segment I walked out of the room during because I wreck out in a rash if exposed to anything mathematical…) treatment of all things Yule, and one I consider most would be pleased.
breastfeeding guide
fibromyalgia cure
I hope you have a expansive time watching this DVD like I did!
