ONE OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’S FUNNIER 21st CENTURY SEGMENTS: 2005’s Christmastime For The Jews.  “Just watch it. And you don’t have to be Jewish. My WASP husband gets almost every joke.”

Related:

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.

YES, VIRGINIA: Media Myth Alert: Getting it right about a legendary newspaper editorial.

OH SANTA, I’ve been waitin’ on you.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: The Season’s Upon Us.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Enjoy this morning Open Thread. Don’t worry, there will still be one tonight.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Sit here, you can use mine.

WILL COLLIER: Into the Santaverse. How a couple of New Yorkers teamed up with Japanese animators to define Christmas specials for generations.

During the first several decades of their existence, Christmas specials were, for their intended audience of pre-teens, very special indeed. They aired once and only once a year, and with no VCRs or DVRs or streaming or rerun-happy cable channels, if you weren’t in the right place at the right time, you were out of luck until the next December, sidelined while your classmates debated whether the Abominable Snow Monster would beat the Winter Warlock in a fight.

Sixty years after the first animated Christmas special (Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, originally airing in 1962), the genre is as much of a holiday staple in the United States as Black Friday sales or Mariah Carey songs, and almost as ubiquitous.

The paragon of the form is of course 1965’s timeless A Charlie Brown Christmas, the sublime excellence of which is so well-documented that we can acknowledge its place at the head of the line—the bright star on top of a gaudily decorated tree, if you will—and move on.

The silver medalist of Christmas specials is a split decision between Chuck Jones’ wonderful 1966 adaptation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a colorful stop-motion confection based on a popular song.

The latter special shares a theme with Charles Schultz’s understated masterpiece: both A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1964’s Rudolph are about the little tragedies and unlooked-for joys on the emotional rollercoaster of childhood. But unlike the Peanuts special, Rudolph eschews any mention of the Biblical origin of the Christmas holiday, opting instead to build on a much more contemporary foundation: an American child’s conception of Santa Claus.

From that basis, two New Yorkers, Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass, with the incongruous assistance of a Japanese animation studio, constructed a whimsical modern mythology that grew—and simultaneously diminished—in the telling, one sequel and rerun at a time.

Neither Rankin nor Bass nor anybody else knew it in 1964, but their creation would presage today’s popular entertainment world of shared universes and interlocking stories and even an over-the-top team-up movie.

But we’ll get to that. For now, let’s have a look at where this Santaverse came from.

Read  the whole thing.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: No one can sing like Bing.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: Want to know “How to spend a secular Christmas?” The Washington Post has you covered!

MERRY CHRISTMAS INSTAPUNDIT READERS!

IT’S HARDER TO BE MERRY AND BRIGHT WHEN THEY KEEP TURNING OUT THE LIGHTS: Climate Alarmism Behind Christmas Energy Shortages: Never forget that Ebenezer Scrooge was inspired by Thomas Malthus.

As recently as December 1, PJM’s grid operators said they could handle the winter cold. “PJM Interconnection and its members,” it claimed, “are prepared to meet the forecast demand for electricity this winter.”

But the nonprofit North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned in November that this would happen. “Limited natural gas infrastructure can impact winter reliability,” it wrote. It pointed to the closure of coal and nuclear power plants as threatening shortages.

In other words, the underlying reason for the electricity emergency is the lack of natural gas, nuclear, and coal, which can provide reliable electricity in all weather conditions, unlike solar panels and wind turbines.

It’s true that solar panels and wind turbines can still operate in cold weather. There is often still sunlight and wind when it is cold. Snow can be brushed off of solar panels, and it is possible to de-ice frozen wind turbines.

But the sun often doesn’t shine during the hours people most need electricity and wind is not reliable enough to provide electricity during the winter. Right now, PJM is generating very little electricity from wind and has had to resort to burning oil, which is dirtier and less efficient than coal, and far worse than natural gas or nuclear.

It’s as if green policies are designed to fail.

NEW YEAR SALE is here. #CommissionEarned

MERRY CHRISTMAS! If you don’t celebrate, may your day still be merry and bright.

OPEN THREAD: Not-so-silent night.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Can space-based solar power really work? Here are the pros and cons.

When it comes to space-based solar power, “there is no science to solve,” Cash told Space.com. “We have it all worked out pretty much since the 1970s, when NASA with the U.S. Department of Energy conducted a very large-scale study. We’ve proven the physics behind this ever since we first launched a communication satellite into geostationary orbit. You’ve got solar wings, which face the sun. And you have the body of the satellite, either with a parabolic dish or a phased array antenna, which faces the Earth. All the principles are the same; you’re converting solar energy to electricity, converting it to microwaves and beaming it to Earth. The only thing that’s different is the scale of the apertures.”

Andrew Wilson, a researcher at the Advanced Space Concepts Lab at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, who led a study looking into the feasibility of space-based solar power, agrees: “I don’t think there’s technology that needs to be developed as opposed to just advancing through the technology readiness levels,” Wilson told Space.com. “There’s nothing really that needs to be invented.”

There is, however, rather a lot of engineering work that remains.

If you really care about the planet you should support it, although in the meantime we should be rushing to build nice, clean, reliable nuclear plants.

FARAHN MORGAN: On the Clinchfield Route: 80 Years of Generosity in the Coalfields. (Bumped).

OF COURSE IT IS: Cluster Headaches Affect Men More Often, But It’s Women Who Are Hit Hardest.

TWO ATOMS WALK INTO A BAR. “I’VE LOST AN ELECTRON.” “ARE YOU SURE?” “YES, I’M POSITIVE!” Electrons on the run: On chirality, tunneling and light fields.

FASTER, PLEASE: New bacterial therapy approach to treat lung cancer.

PLANETARY DEFENSE: NASA begins construction on asteroid-detecting space telescope.

READER FAVORITE: EFAYCRR Steampunk Table Lamp. #CommissionEarned

I MIGHT NOT POST THIS EVENING, BECAUSE DOING FAMILY-LIKE THINGS, BUT:  Merry Christmas and a Free Gift.

WELL, GOOD: Lawful Self-Defense: Nevada Homeowner Shoots Shotgun-toting Home Invader Who Kicked In Their Bedroom Door.

READER FAVORITE: Klipsch Heritage Wireless The One II Tabletop Stereo Walnut. #CommissionEarned