Abolitionist cartoonist Thomas Nast had a big role in manufacturing the US version of the Christmas patriarch.
Christmas
Posted inBooks
A Photographer Captures Christmas Kitsch Across the US
With American Christmas, Danelle Manthey presents elaborate decorative traditions as a form of folk art, but one can’t help but help but wonder if White Christmas might be a more accurate title for her project.
Posted inFilm
This Holiday, Stream the Best Movie Adaptations of A Christmas Carol
From an animation by Richard Williams to George C. Scott as Scrooge to the Muppets, there are countless variations on Charles Dickens’s classic.
Posted inNews
Amsterdam Wants Residents to Tone Down Their Christmas Lights
If the proposal passes, yule be sorry if you go overboard with colorful lights or Santa displays in the Dutch city.
Posted inNews
Did You Know the First Commercial Christmas Card Featured Underage Drinking?
May we all be as merry as that boozy child.
Posted inFilm
A Queer Twist on the Incredibly Heteronormative Holiday Romcom Genre
In Happiest Season, Kristen Stewart stars in a Clea Duvall-directed story about a woman head over heels with another who won’t come out.
Posted inArt
Hong Kong’s Protesters Subvert the Holiday Season With Radical Christmas Cards
Hong Kong protesters are remixing the Christmas card tradition under the #freehkxmascard hashtag and decorating cards with memes and slogans from the ongoing movement.
Posted inArt
A Classic of the Christmas Horror Movie Genre
In the lead-up to Christmas, Nitehawk in Williamsburg is screening Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), a controversial and beloved slasher film about a murderous Santa.
Posted inArt
Christmas Cheer from a Lean Year: The 1950 Holiday Cards of Langston Hughes
The Beinecke Library at Yale University is exhibiting Hughes’s typewritten 1950 Christmas postcards, along with holiday cards he received from friends.
Posted inArt
This Colossal Goat Sculpture Is a Swedish Tradition, and Almost Every Year It Goes Up in Flames
Since the 1960s, the city of Gävle in Sweden has annually built a towering Yule goat, and almost every year someone burns it down.
Posted inArt
Merry Christmas from Krampus, Santa’s Demonic Helper
Krampuskarten depict Saint Nicholas’s darker counterpart: the devilish Krampus, whose current image visually carries centuries of folklore.