This Christmas, countless Americans will celebrate the holiday with the mesmerizing flicker of a yule log as a backdrop to their domestic festivities, the glow emanating not from a traditional fireplace but from their flat-screen televisions, perhaps “hung by the chimney with care.” Traditional holiday tunes will surely accompany the video, sourced from the catalogues of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, or perhaps plucked from the more recent yuletide earworms of Mariah Carey and Paul McCartney.

The televised yule log has become commoditized, available on countless YouTube channels and streaming services, but all of these videos are knockoffs of the one true filmed fireplace that started it all — the WPIX-TV Yule Log.

In the fall of 1966, Channel 11 in New York City was a scrappy independent television station owned by the New York Daily News. An inventive general manager helmed the station, Fred Thrower, aptly named, as he threw off sparks of creativity to light up the station’s programming lineup when resources were tight and competition was fierce. One of those sparks would light a fire of holiday magic, adding an enduring element to Christmas celebrations, first in New York and, in time, around the world.

Inspired by a Coca-Cola commercial featuring Santa Claus, Thrower envisioned a televised fireplace that would serve as a Christmas gift for his viewers. WPIX’s core audience was in the five boroughs of New York City, where millions of people lived in cramped apartments without suburban amenities like fireplaces. Thrower would bring the fireplace into their urban living rooms, not through a monumental public works project, but via the 198-to-204 megacycles of his station’s analog signal emanating from atop the Empire State Building.

In November 1966, with the holiday just weeks away, Thrower challenged his executive staff to figure out how to produce a televised fireplace, accompanied by music. His team got to work, securing access to a grand fireplace at New York’s Gracie Mansion, the traditional home of Gotham’s mayor, then John V. Lindsay.  The fireplace was shot on color 16-millimeter film that would be looped for the broadcast, and holiday music was selected with involvement from Thrower, relying heavily on the “beautiful music” format of the likes of Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, and other AM-radio old reliables of the era.

The WPIX Yule Log premiered on Saturday, December 24, 1966, at 9:30 p.m., preempting a telecast of a roller derby. The station lost money on the broadcast, as it has on every subsequent broadcast, simply because the Yule Log plays continuously for hours, and commercials, the bread and butter of station revenue, are suspended. For a few hundred minutes a year, commerce takes a back seat to cheer. Take note, Ebenezer Scrooges of the world.

Exit quote: “The Yule Log is a perfect example of ‘slow television,’ something that demands absolutely nothing of the viewer, if we can even call the person a viewer. It is designed less to be watched and more to set a mood and inspire feelings of comfort and joy, all while you entertain guests at a holiday party or open presents around the tree or just sit on your sofa and count your blessings with loved ones at your side.”