Christmas lights are a uniquely American tradition. That’s not just because the first electric Christmas lights appeared in America. The tradition embodies a certain American-ness, an ingenuity and hunger for innovation, that’s easily overlooked. America doesn’t just make things. America makes things spectacular.

The tradition of light and Christmas dates further back than America and even further back than Christianity. The holiday, of course, falls just after the winter solstice and the longest night of the year. All around the world lighting, there’s evidence of many ancient cultures fires in order to lure the sun back during this dark time of year. In different religions, the light takes on several different meanings: hope, rebirth, everlasting life. In American history, however, technology played a major role in transforming what was once believed to be a pagan ritual into a worldwide sensation driven by technology.

That little string of lights that you bought at the store and wrapped around your tree just to add a little twinkle to your home during the holidays? That’s as American as it gets. Of course, the glowing Christmas tree tradition started in Europe—but the Americans made it better.

Early 16th century: Martin Luther decorates the first Christmas tree

The original Martin Luther story is simple. One evening in, the leader of the Protestant Reformation took a walk in the woods to compose a sermon, saw the stars through some pine trees, and rushed home. In an attempt to recreate the beauty with his family, Luther set up a small evergreen tree inside the house and wired wax candles to the branches like so:

This is probably just a myth. Decorating homes with evergreen is a practice that goes back at least as far as the Romans and the Druids, but German Lutherans are credited with bringing the tradition of candle-lit Christmas trees to settlements in Pennsylvania as early as the 1747. At that time, New England Puritans viewed Christmas celebrations outside of church—namely Christmas trees—to be a form of “pagan mockery.” Indeed, pagans were into the evergreen thing, too. Attitudes changed once the royals got on board, though.

1846: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert make it fashionable

While German immigrants were being weird in Pennsylvania, Queen Victoria and her German-born husband Prince Albert made an unexpectedly powerful statement across the pond. In December 1848, a sketch of the royal family appeared gathered around a candle-lit Christmas tree in the Illustrated London News.

Two years later, Godey’s Lady’s Book republished the image with some slight variations, namely the removal of Victoria’s tiara and Albert’s mustache. This and other pictures of a family surrounding an evergreen tree decorated with candles sparked a Christmas craze that the United States embraced.

1879: Thomas Edison demonstrates his string of electric lights

This is where America takes charge. While many European scientists had been developing incandescent lightbulbs for years, Thomas Edison changed the game with his efficient, long-lasting carbon filament lamps.

The inventor strung the lights up at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey and invited on-lookers to come view them in late December. Although the official demonstration took place on New Years’ Eve in 1879, many people consider Edison’s innovation to be the world’s first string of Christmas lights.

1882: Edward H. Johnson shows off the first electric Christmas tree

While working as vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company, Edward H. Johnson decided to try replacing the traditional candles on a Christmas tree with electric lightbulbs. This was a great idea because the open candle flame tended to set dry trees on fire and burn people’s house down. Plus the lights would look spectacular.

So in 1882, Johnson had 80 red, white, and blue walnut-sized bulbs specially made for his Christmas tree. He then strung around a Christmas tree which he placed on a rotating pine box at his home in Manhattan and invited reporters to come marvel at what he and Thomas hath wrought. “As the tree turned, the colors alternated, all the lamps going out and being relit at every revolution,” recalled a reporter from Detroit who witnessed the historical sight. “The result was a continuous twinkling of dancing colors, red, white, blue, white, red, blue—all evening. I need not tell you that the scintillating evergreen was a pretty sight—one can hardly imagine anything prettier.” The tree itself, however, was a little bit dinky.

So it turns out the tradition of hanging electric lights on Christmas trees was basically a publicity stunt to help Edison sell lightbulbs. Nevertheless, it was a dramatic innovation that turned a once frowned upon immigrant tradition into nationwide sensation. Of course, for a few years, it was a nationwide sensation only enjoyed by the very rich. Because early Christmas lights needed to be hard-wired into a lighting fixture, it cost the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to enjoy an electric glow during the holiday season.

1895: Grover Cleveland brings electric bulbs to the White House

Over a decade after Johnson’s first electric light Christmas tree, President Grover Cleveland requested that the White House Christmas tree be lit with a similar, albeit more elaborate display. The Wheeling Register said the tree as “very beautifully trimmed and decorated with tiny parti-colored electric lamps in place of the old time wax candles.” Whereas Johnson’s electric lights were meant to attract media attention, the elaborate decorations on the White House tree were probably meant to appeal to Cleveland’s three young daughters.

There’s some debate over the exact date of the above photo from the Cleveland White House, but it’s from around 1895.

1903: General Electric begins selling Christmas light kits

Though many Americans wanted a Christmas tree festooned with electric lights by the 20th-century, they remained reserved for the elite and the electricians who could string them up themselves. However, General Electric (of course) took the trend mainstream when it started selling prewired Christmas lighting set with Edison incandescent bulbs in 1903.

These multicolored lights came in wooden boxes with complete instructions on how to hang the lights and replace broken bulbs. From the wording, you can tell that the Americans who’d be stringing up the lights probably didn’t know what they were doing:

At one end of the lamp conductor will be found a screw attaching plug. This should be screwed into the nearest lamp socket in the room. The lamps are strung in series of eight on these festoons on loops of cord radiating from a junction box. This junction plug can be fastened to the decoration in an inconspicuous place and the festoons of cord with lamps can then be draped about the decoration and entwined as desired.

The General Electric kit sold for $12 for a three-festoon set—that would be about $325 today—kits could soon be found for as little as $1.50. Other companies like the American Eveready Company (now known just as Eveready) also sold socket-ready strings of lights for high prices. Consumers could also rent lights from local stores.

1919: GE introduces the flame-shaped bulb

From this point on, the American Christmas light industry was all about innovation. Strings of lights became brighter, longer-lasting, and cheaper after tungsten filament was introduced into the market around 1916. By 1919, GE strayed from the traditional globe-shaped bulbs and started selling cone- or flame-shaped bulbs sold under the same Mazda brand it used to sell regular-sized tungsten filament light bulbs.

The bulbs would become a fixture in NOMA kits for years to come. GE discontinued the round globe bulbs altogether in 1922 and introduced the ribbed flame-shaped bulb in 1925.

1920s: Thermostat technology is used to create first blinking Christmas light

While it seems incremental, this was a big innovation for Christmas lights, one that had huge implications in American holiday culture for decades to come. In the 1920s, inventors filed a number of patents for blinking Christmas lights. Most relied on the same simple technology used in thermostats at the time.

Basically, electricity would heat a small strip of metal that completed a circuit inside of the bulb. When the metal became hot, it would bend and break the circuit, turning the light off. As it cooled, it bent back and reconnected the circuit turning the light back on. This technology is still used in some blinking lightbulbs today.

1925: The NOMA Electric Company is born

As many trends in America go, first the rich tried Christmas lights, then the politicians followed. Finally, an enterprising teen figured out a way to make it work for everyone. So goes the legend of Albert Sadacca and the founding of the NOMA Electric Company anyways. Supposedly, after Christmas tree candles caused a fire in New York City in 1917, a 15-year-old Sadacca got the idea to repurpose the white novelty lights his parents sold for use in Christmas tree by adding colored lights to the strings. Again, this is a legend.

Regardless of the origin story, Sadacca and company went on to band together with about 15 other Christmas light manufacturers to form the National Outfit Manufacturer’s Association (NOMA) in 1925.

Until the 1960’s, NOMA more or less dominated the industry and introduced a number of important innovations to Christmas lights like all rubber cords and fused safety plugs. You might say that Christmas lights look they way they do today because of NOMA.

1946: NOMA brings bubble lights to the United States

While they first appeared in the England, bubble lights lights became a national craze in the United States, after NOMA introduced an American-patented version in 1946. (See how the pattern of America taking European traditions and making them awesome continues?)

The mechanics of the tacky decorations is relatively simple. An incandescent bulb encased in plastic heats a liquid with a low boiling point—usually methylene chloride—until it bubbles inside of a candle-shaped vial. Watch them bubble!

1950s-60s: Aluminum Christmas tree fad pits commercialization against tradition

If you know any baby boomers, they’ve probably pulled presents out from underneath an aluminum Christmas tree at some point in their life. Marketed as a permanent tree that never needed water, the aluminum Christmas tree became the shining example of how consumerism could ruin Christmas tradition.

First introduced in the 1950s and reaching peak popularity in the early 1960s, these gleaming beacons of capitalism were perfect for the Space Age. A 1963 Sears Christmas Booksreads:

Whether you decorate with blue or red balls… or use the tree without ornaments — this exquisite tree is sure to be the talk of your neighborhood. High luster aluminum gives a dazzling brilliance. Shimmering silvery branches are swirled and tapered to a handsome realistic fullness. It’s really durable… needles are glued and mechanically locked on. Fireproof… you can use it year after year.

While the fireproof marketing message endures, the aluminum trees were obviously huge conductors so electric Christmas lights couldn’t be hung. Rotating likes like this were instead used to project light onto the chrome-colored tree. Inevitably, the Christmas lights industry took a nosedive, and in 1966, NOMA filed for bankruptcy. It was the largest Christmas tree lights company in the world at the time.

1966: GE blankets suburbia with foreign-made Merry Midget lights

This is when things get really nuts. With the American holiday light industry gutted, manufacturing moved overseas, and the lights got cheap. GE also combined a number of innovations and introduced the very familiar—and still available—Merry Midget light sets. These affordable kits were first manufactured in Japan and then in Taiwan.

The Merry Midgets were the first of many icicle-shaped mini-lights to appear in stores, and the outdoor-friendly design took suburbia by storm. Before long, you couldn’t drive through a neighborhood in middle America during the holiday season without seeing a tract house trimmed with mini-lights.

1970s and 1980s: Utter chaos

Once Christmas lights were tough enough to go outside and cheap enough to be disposable, Americans went nuts. Little innovations like lights that fluctuated according to sound and flickering flame light that used semiconductors appeared in the 1970s. For the most part, though, the holiday season became a competition of who could blow the most money on the most ridiculous holiday decorations. The dad who built the biggest spectacle wins.

Of course, at this point in time, the trend had traveled around the world. America took the European tradition of hanging lights on trees and turned it into an opportunity of technological innovation (and profit).

1990s to today: America deals with the hangover

After so many decades of pumping electricity into tiny lights to make our Christmas trees pretty, Americans started to catch on to the potentially damaging effects of such consumption. The first fully programmable lighting system was patented in 1995, making it easier to control light displays and conserve energy.

The latest innovations have less to do with getting incandescent bulbs to do new things than with getting rid of them altogether. Suburban America is now hungry for long-lasting, energy-conserving LED lights. Meanwhile, they’re coming up with all kinds of creative ways to recycle those old incandescents. Because once we get good at inventing something, we get better at making it cheap and disposable. Eventually, we make something better and throw the old things away. But hey, in America, we even throw things away with pride these days.

GIF by Jim Cooke

Vincent Peone’s “The Sea Is Blue” is a lovely tale about a girl’s journey, with the requisite voiceover telling the tale. As it should be, when you’re dealing with fairy tale mixed with myth.

With his writing/directing partner Josh Ruben, Peone is better known for his comedic work. Ruben and Peone were founding members of College Humor’s video department and recently directed three episodes of Adam Ruins Everything. In “The Sea Is Blue,” they do something else. Peone wrote it while he waited for his sister to come out of a medically-induced coma. He finishes his director’s statement by saying, “The short is about loss, learning to appreciate what you have, and new beginnings. It gave me hope when I needed it, and now I’m pleased to share it.”

[via Short of the Week]

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

Americans love to go eat to out, and have for a long time. But the way we like to do that has changed quite a bit in the last five decades—and in one way in particular.

The USDA recently released data on the $700 billion market for eating out—and how that differs from what we saw fifty years ago. There are some changes that are unsurprising. Vending machines have lost much of the luster from when they were first shiny and new; hotel food has stayed largely constant; and students prefer takeout when they can get it over the school cereal bar.

What’s really striking here, though, is the growth of what the USDA calls “limited serving eating places”. From being less popular than a college cafeteria in 1963, they are today just a few points behind full-service restaurants, America’s most popular eat-away choice.

Why? The reason, most likely, has to do with a change not in American eating preferences, but in the category itself.

“Limited serving eating places” five decades ago largely were limited to a burger counter or a self-serve buffet—perfectly good, but few options. Today, burgers and buffets are still part of it, but the category has largely been taken over by fast-casual, a much more encompassing category that serves in more situations. “Limited serving eating places” now include everything from food trucks to takeout-only joints to all the fast casual chains: Chipotle (with all their recent troubles), Panera, and more.

What this all tends toward is a basic shift in how we think about restaurant foods: Eating out is no longer necessarily either an event or an emergency—it’s now just as often a basic, completely normalized, often daily part of the way America feeds itself. That, more than anything else, is what this data is really showing us.

Top image: Burger and fries / pointnshoot ; Chart: USDA/ERS

It’s expected to cost a staggering $20,000 if it ever goes into production, and its battery can only power the device’s 36 fans for about six minutes. But unlike all the other hoverboards grabbing the media’s attention these days, Arca Space’s hoverboard actually hovers.

The private space company—one of the 26 teams that competed for the Ansari X Prize back in 2004—isn’t exactly a household name. But a video it posted to its YouTube channel this morning showing off the company’s functional ArcaBoard hoverboard could soon change that.

Instead of somehow cheating physics and gravity using a clever scientific breakthrough, the ArcaBoard takes the brute force approach to lifting the platform and a rider almost a foot off the ground using 36 electric fans to generating 430 pounds of downward thrust.

That’s why the ride time is currently an abysmal six minutes. The 272 horsepower generated by those 36 fans chews through a lot of power, and you can only pack so many batteries inside the ArcaBoard before the platform gets too heavy to lift itself, never mind a passenger.

Riding the ArcaBoard looks even trickier than mastering those two-wheeled imposters that are all the rage now, but that’s not stopping from Arca Space from letting anyone pre-order its hoverboard for $19,900 with a promised delivery of April of next year. Expect that to come with a safety waiver or ten you’ll need to sign before delivery.

To get around the ArcaBoard’s limited flight time, which requires a six-hour charge in-between your hovering adventures, the company has also developed a $4,500 dock accessory that reduces your hoverwaits to a mere 35 minutes of charge time. In other words, it’s pretty much a must-have accessory if you want to hover for more than 24 minutes every day.

If and when the ArcaBoard does ship next April it will undoubtedly be a toy for the super-rich, those who don’t mind risking life and limb for a six-minute thrill, and die-hard Back to the Future 2 fans. But without a doubt it will be the first working hoverboard you can actually buy that can be ridden almost anywhere (except on water) which admittedly, is pretty cool. [Arca Space via The Verge]

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Well this is certainly convenient. If you’ve always wanted to be a Jedi (or a Sith) but weren’t born with an abundance of Midichlorians, someone has finally bottled the Force and will happily sell it to you for a mere $16.

Sounds like the bargain of the century, right? Unfortunately there’s a catch, and it’s a big one. Instead of dispensing some magical aura, this jar only dispenses Jedi wisdom, courtesy of Master Yoda, every time you press the lid. Now whether or not the true path to the Force starts with knowledge and wisdom is unknown, but since staring at your TV for hours while you will it to turn itself on has yielded no Jedi-like results, what’s the harm in trying this? [Kohl’s via Bleeding Cool]

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We often associate jukeboxes with 1950s teenagers and rock and roll and such. At least I do. But the rise of the jukebox actually occurred long before Elvis was ever cued up at any Milwaukee soda shop.

In this photo from April of 1948 we see engineer Myron Holbert, who’s showing off the Seeburg Select-O-Matic jukebox. The machine held a relatively enormous library of music — 200 selections! And although the jukebox became a symbol of the postwar teen music explosion, it predates the 1950s by decades.

In fact, it was during the 1930s that America saw an incredible rise in the number of jukeboxes filling dance halls and diners.

From the book Jukeboxes: An American Social History by Kerry Segrave:

In 1933 there were perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 jukes in America. The spectacular rise began the next year with approximately 300,000 jukeboxes on site by the end of the 1930s.

Postwar innovations allowed more music to be stored in a single machine.

“It stores and automatically plays 200 selections which are accomplished by merely setting a lever to play either side or both sides of any record in the whole library and the whole library can be played without anyone touching the records,” the Associated Press proclaimed in 1948. “A revolutionary development is the playing of both sides of the record without turning it over.”

The jukebox concept of communal listening for a fee was far from new in the 1940s, as different jukebox-style devices existed as far back as the late 19th century. But what made the Seeburg machines so revolutionary were their vast selection in a single machine.

Today, the jukebox has gone digital. With just a couple taps of a touchscreen virtually any song ever recorded is delivered to many modern day jukeboxes via the internet. The internet swallows everything in its path. So it should be no surprise that it would overtake the jukebox one day.

Image via Associated Press

Wicked City was a serial killer show on ABC that relied heavily on 1980s Los Angeles nostalgia—including, but not limited to, setting crucial scenes on the Sunset Strip. It was also filled with unlikable characters and a cops-n-killers parallel storyline that never found its stride, and viewers tuned out in droves.

http://truecrime.gizmodo.com/wicked-city-of...

Don’t recall it? Well, it was a 2015 show—but only three episodes made it to the airwaves. I watched them all, and it was pretty terrible from the start ... and went downhill from there. But dammit, they filmed eight episodes total and Hulu is going to stream them all, for completists, the morbidly curious, and super-duper devoted Ed Westwick fans.

(Shoutout to io9 commentor CultureCannibal for the asute observation that “Ed Westwick is the hammiest ham in all of hamville.” And indeed, even while the former Chuck Bass is playing a supposedly ruthless serial killer, this is a true fact.)

Wicked City executive producer Laurie Zaks tweeted the news, which was reported by Deadline. Here is the Hulu link to watch the first seven episodes; Zaks notes on her Twitter that the eighth and final episode will also be up shortly.

The biggest challenge for the new Star Wars was to make us love Rey and Finn as much as Luke and Han. Mission accomplished! But most of the time, when a venerable franchise introduces new characters, it’s a horrendous failure. Here are 10 long-running series that actually made us care about new characters.

There are plenty of lists cataloguing the times that a series added a brand new character who ruined everything. The Scrappy Doo effect. But what about the cases where new characters (or a whole new cast) came along and everyone embraced them?

Here are our picks, in no particular order:

1. Donna Noble on Doctor Who. This show has survived for 50+ years, in large part, by adding new supporting characters every year or two. But Donna was the textbook example of a new character who stole everyone’s heart and captured our imaginations. Even if we kind of hated her at first.

2. Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Sorry, she’s just on our minds right now. She’s still our favorite new character of 2015, and we kind of want another Furiosa movie more than another Mad Max movie.

3. Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She came along pretty late in the show’s run, considering, and unlike some other other late additions (cough, cough, Dawn) she became one of our favorites among the Scooby Gang. I still think Xander should have married her.

4. Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This could have gone so horribly wrong. Adding a previously unknown character who studied with Anakin between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith was a terrible idea, on the face of it. But she turned out to be one of the best things ever to happen to Star Wars, and even made Anakin way more interesting.

5. Rodney McKay in Stargate. We still have a shrine in our hearts to the chatty, uber-geeky, sometimes arrogant Canadian who joined SG-1 and then ruled the spin-off, Atlantis.

6. Root and Shaw in Person of Interest. It’s almost hard to remember at this point that the psycho hacker and the psycho killer weren’t part of this show’s cast from the beginning. They were relatively late additions, especially Shaw, but at this point they’re the heart of the show.

7. Queen Divine Justice in Black Panther. This wise-cracking Chicago teen who turnes out to have a vitally important family legacy was introduced relatively recently, during Priest’s indispensible 1990s run. And she’s now our favorite supporting character in the Black Panther cast. Let’s hope she turns up in the movie!

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Panther-...

8. Stephanie Brown in Batman. The 1990s were full of new characters being added to your favorite comics, and most of them were total losses. But Stephanie Brown, aka Spoiler, is one of the most interesting characters in the Batman mythos at this point. The daughter of a supervillain, she hates secrets and lies, and wants to make things right. Plus in this day of intense spoiler-phobia, having a vigilante named “Spoiler” is kind of perfect.

9. Henry Jones, Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This is another thing that could have turned out abominably. Indiana Jones is one of those characters who’s pretty much perfect and fully formed—so let’s introduce his semi-estranged father! Ugh, no. But the combination of witty writing and Sean Connery’s chemistry with Harrison Ford makes this the best thing ever.

10. Castiel and Crowley in Supernatural. Again, these characters were introduced relatively late in the show’s run—towards the tail end of creator Eric Kripke’s tenure, anyway. But this rebel angel and scheming demon basically became key members of the supporting cast. And they’re a great pairing, whenever they have to work together. Even if the show did sort of run out of things to do with them after a bit.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

It was 101 years ago this very night that something miraculous happened along the Western Front. After months of bitter fighting, soldiers on both sides gathered in no-man’s-land in a spontaneous show of peace and goodwill. Here’s what happened on that historic day — and why it marked the end of an era.

In December 1914, the war was entering into a new phase: an extended siege fought along static trenches stretching along a 750 km (466 mile) front. During the previous four months, soldiers were killed at a horrendous pace, and with no end of the war in sight. But during Christmas, things suddenly became quiet — at least for a little while.

‘We No Shoot!’

The night before Christmas, a British captain serving at Rue du Bois heard a foreign accent from across the divide saying, “Do not shoot after 12 o’clock and we will not do so either,” and then: “If you English come out and talk to us, we won’t fire.”

Commonwealth troops fighting in Belgium and France started to hear odd sounds drifting from across no-man’s land; German soldiers were singing Christmas carols like “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night, Holy Night”). Allied troops applauded and cheered, shouting out for more. Soldiers on both sides began to sing in unison, trading verses in alternating languages.

Writing in his diary at the time, Regimental Sergeant Major George Beck made this note:

Germans shout over to us and ask us to play them at football, and also not to fire and they would do likewise. At 2am (25th) a German Band went along their trenches playing “Home Sweet Home” and “God Save the King” which sounded grand and made everyone think of home.

The next day, some soldiers dared to poke their heads up to look across no-man’s land. Bits of evergreen could be seen in observance of the occasion. Some Germans, in an effort to prompt a temporary peace, hoisted lanterns above the trenches while calling out to the British. If no shots were fired, it was taken as a sign of truce. At one point, a German was heard calling out, “We good! We no shoot!”

The Troglodytes Come Out

Then, very cautiously and with great courage, unarmed German and Allied soldiers climbed out of their trenches to stand atop their defenses. Near Neuve Chapelle, an Irish soldier brazenly walked across no-man’s-land where he was greeted not with machine gun fire, but with a cigar. His act of bravery inspired others in his troop to do the same. Similar scenes were repeated elsewhere as soldiers walked towards each others trench, or to simply meet half-way.

And when they met, the servicemen exchanged Christmas greetings as best they could. They began to give each other gifts in the form of mementos, cigarettes, and foodstuffs like bully beef, wine, cognac, black bread, biscuits, ham, and even barrels of beer. They showed each other photographs of family and loved ones back home. Some soldiers even started to play soccer with makeshift soccer balls.

A reenactment of the 1914 Christmas Truce produced by Sainsbury in partnership with the Royal British Legion.

Remarkably, similar scenes occurred at dozens of distinct points from the North Sea to the Swiss border.

Colonel George Laurie’s brigade headquarters, after learning what was going on, sent him a cable. Peter Murtagh from Irish Times writes:

Brigade HQ cabled him: “It is thought possible that enemy may be contemplating an attack during Xmas or New Year. Special vigilance will be maintained during this period.”

Nonetheless, Col Laurie...gave orders not to fire on the enemy the following day, unless they fired first. At 8.30pm on Christmas Eve, he signalled brigade HQ: “Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and are wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” No shots had been fired since 8pm, he added.

Col Laurie went on to describe how soldiers from both sides were mingling. The Germans, he wrote, were “fine men, clean and well clothed. They gave us a cap and helmet badge and a box of cigars. One of them states the war would be over in three weeks as they had defeated Russia!”

Brigade HQ replied at 12.35am – Christmas Day – saying: “No communication of any sort is to be held with the enemy, nor is he to be allowed to approach our trenches under penalty of fire being opened.”

Colonel Laurie later reminisced, “You have no idea how pleasant everything seems with no rifle bullets or shells flying about.” And writing in his diary, Lt. Kurt Zehmisch of the 134th Saxony regiment wrote that, “Not a shot was fired.”

“British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches,” taken from from the Illustrated London News of January 9, 1915 (A. C. Michael - The Guardian/CC)

After the event, soldiers were eager to share their accounts with loved ones back home. As Rob Hughes of the New York Times writes:

Henry Williamson, then a 19-year-old private in the London Rifle Brigade who survived the war to become an author, sent a letter from the front to his mother. “In my mouth,” he wrote, “is a pipe presented by the Princess Mary. In the pipe is German tobacco. Ha ha, you say, from a prisoner or found in a captured trench, Oh dear, no! From a German soldier. Yes a live German soldier from his own trench. Marvelous, isn’t it?”

The truce also allowed the troops from both sides to collect and bury their dead, which was no small matter. Fewer things were more jarring to a serviceman than knowing that the remains of fallen comrades were still out in the open.

Pockets of Resistance

But the truce was not honored everywhere.

In an incident that only recently came to light, three soldiers — two British and one German — were killed despite the temporary peace. Contrary to most accounts, it was not quiet and calm in all sectors along the front line separating Allied troops from the Germans. At least 250 servicemen died on Christmas Day, including 149 Commonwealth soldiers, though the majority of them succumbed to previously-inflicted wounds.

In the case of the three dead soldiers, it all started at dawn when servicemen in the professional British Guards Brigade shot a German lantern as it was being hoisted — a statement of refusal to recognize the proposed truce. As quoted in The Telegraph, Corporal Clifford Lane of H Company Hertfordshire regiment recalled the incident:

There was a great deal of commotion going on in the German front line 150 yards away. After a few moments there were lighted objects raised above the German parapet, looking like Chinese lanterns to us. The Germans were shouting over to our trench. We were ordered to open rapid fire which we did. The Germans did not reply to our fire and carried on with their celebrations. They ignored us and were having a very fine time indeed and we continued in our wet trenches trying to make the most of it. They did make overtures but the Guards Brigade had the highest discipline in the army and you couldn’t expect them to fraternise at all and that is why we were ordered to open fire. Apparently regular troops did respond to their overtures and engaged in this truce. I greatly regretted it afterwards because it would have been a good experience.

So, with some stretches of the front in a state of temporary truce and others not, soldiers were placed in great peril. In Lane’s sector, a German sniper shot Private Percy Huggins who was serving sentry duty at a forward listening post a mere 20 yards from the enemy’s position. In retaliation, Sergeant Tom Gregory assumed his position, managed to locate the sniper, and took him out. A few moments later, while searching for more snipers, he himself was shot and killed by a second German marksman.

Interestingly, the event inspired the British to “study the art of sniping,” who soon after added the “tactics of the hunter” to the science of shooting.

The Last Gasp Of A Dying Era

Such was the Christmas Truce of 1914. In some places, it continued for more than a day. But the generals, when they learned of it, made sure it would never happen again. And despite sporadic attempts in later years, it never really did.

Back to business. A German artillery barrage at Ypres.

A century later, it’s easy to dismiss all the remembrances and tributes as being overly sentimental and maudlin. What’s often forgotten, however, is what the temporary peace represented in the larger scheme of things. There’s a very good reason why a truce never happened again in this war and in subsequent wars — and much of it had to do with the changing nature of military strategy, the changing role of soldiers and how they engaged with the enemy, and the high stakes involved for industrialized nations embroiled in a war without compromise. Moving forward, politicians and military leaders could no longer tolerate such fraternizing in consideration of mass armies existing in an age of revolutionary fervor. It suddenly became an issue of control.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 can also be seen as the last gasp of the romantic 19th Century, the final gesture of an era that featured “gentlemanly” soldiering and gallant heroes who could confront their adversaries face-to-face. Professional soldiers in WWI were replaced by recruits with no sense of military tradition. Battlefields, like the factories back home, had turned into industrialized workplaces.

Wars were no longer defined by movement and decisive battles. Instead, it became a battle of attrition where armies of millions would be pitted against other armies of millions. Meanwhile, the multitudes back home rallied the home front to provide material support with their industrial might.

Finally, the soldiers hadn’t really learned to hate each other. Many of them saw themselves as pawns in a game they didn’t understand, fighting against an enemy for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious. An article at CBS News puts it well:

This was Christmas 1914, just a few months after the outbreak of hostilities. A lot of these troops were green, not yet bloodied by the horrors to come.

At the Imperial War Museum in London, historians like Alan Wakefield say the bitterness and hatred had not yet taken hold.

“The war hadn’t got that sort of, as you say, dirty at that stage,” said Wakefield. “It’s really 1915 that things like poison gas comes along. Zeppelin airships are bombing London, Germans sink the liner Lusitania with civilian casualties. And the propaganda machine hasn’t really fed on that and actually created those sort of hatreds between the two forces.”

Indeed, war started to become a vengeful and highly impersonal activity. And unlike the Second World War, in which ideological motivations were evident to nearly everyone, the Great War was for many a strange, wasteful, and senseless conflict.

The onset of the First World War marked the true beginning of a new era, but it was the Christmas Truce of 1914 that most certainly drew the final curtain on a dying age.

Sources: G. J Meyer: A World Undone | The Telegraph: “Christmas truce of 1914 was broken when German snipers killed two British soldiers.” | Raf Casert with Virginia Mayo: Christmas 1914 | Irish Times: 1914 Christmas Truce | New York Times: Tale of 1914 Christmas Day Truce | CBS: The World War I Christmas Truce | Dorset Newsroom: View the 1914 Christmas truce through the eyes of a soldier from Dorset

This is a slightly modified version of an article that appeared at io9 last year.

Email the author at george@gizmodo.com and follow him at @dvorsky. Top image by Jim Cooke.

Kylo Ren had a huge legacy to live up to in the new Star Wars, because Darth Vader is one of cinema’s all-time great villains. But Vader’s legacy is also a huge part of what makes Kylo Ren so fascinating—because he’s everything that Anakin Skywalker should have been in the prequels.

A warning: there will of course be major spoilers for the plot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens below. If you’ve not seen the movie, turn back now.

The Star Wars movies have always featured villains who are cold, calculating and in control of their emotions. Vader, the Emperor, Dooku, Maul—the Sith always acted with a chilling precision. But Kylo Ren is anything but precise. He’s brash, raw, sullen, and just bursting with emotion. This is something we’ve seen before in the Expanded Universe of books and comics, but never in the movies.

Kylo Ren howls and loses his mind, whenever anything goes wrong. When he discovers that the First Order failed to capture BB-8 on Jakku, he ignites his lightsaber and eviscerates a nearby computer console. When Rey escapes her confines on Starkiller base, he destroys an entire room in a fit of rage (almost comically so, as two nearby Stormtroopers decide to patrol in the other direction when they see smoke coming out of the cell—and yes, you’ve probably seen that Twitter account everyone’s chuckling at, too). Image via Beck-Solo

Kylo Ren harbors a bitter resentment for the expectations thrust upon him in his former life as Ben Solo, Jedi-in-training and a son of legends. Even his lightsaber itself is unstable and angry, flickering with sparks and heat—just like its owner.

When you think about the angriest another Star Wars villain has been in the other films, the closest I can think of is Vader choking Admiral Ozzel for bringing the Empire’s fleet out of hyperspace too early in Empire Strikes Back. Even then, Vader’s rage is contained and suppressed—he calmly strangles the life out of Ozzel while telling Piett that he’s just gotten a promotion. This isnothing like Kylo’s roiling internal turmoil, which makes him unpredictable and scary every time he’s on screen. Kylo’s internal conflict is easy to see on the surface, and this makes him one of Star Wars’ most emotional, and hence most resonant, villains.

But that’s what the dark side is meant to be, right? Anger. Hate. Suffering—and above all those, passion. That’s not passion in terms of romance (although it can be), but the strength, the amplification, of your emotions. In George Lucas’ original conception, the Jedi were meant to be the warrior monks, skilled and precise and in control of their feelings. They harness power from that control. The Sith are the ones who give into their passion and seek power from jumping into that swirling sea of emotion. They’re angry and sullen and screaming at the world, at the legacies handed to them, because that’s what empowers them.

It almost sounds like a certain Skywalker, doesn’t it?

Because really, when you think about it, on paper the young Anakin of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith has a lot in common with the angst of his future grandson. Young Anakin is torn between the dark and light, compromised by his feelings for other people—feelings that send him on a path to the Dark Side. A man who’s angry at his lot in life, at the people around him, with a sense of betrayal and abandonment that eventually solidifies into a decision that he can never take back.

But “on paper” and “on film” are two different things, and the Anakin we see in the prequels is infamously whiny and pathetic, rather than the tumultuous sea of emotions that he was meant to be. Due to the fatal mix of a less than stellar performance from Hayden Christensen, and George Lucas’ sterile approach as a writer and director, mean the moments of raw emotion that are meant to punctuate Anakin’s fall, and resonate with the audience, never quite hit right. Anakin’s emotional journey in the prequels simply doesn’t work, because there’s so little real, believable emotion there.

When you think about those big moments—Shmi Skywalker’s death, Anakin’s confession to Padmé about slaughtering Tusken Raiders, the death of Mace Windu, confronting Obi-Wan on Mustafar—none of them really hit home. A flat performance here, a clunky line there, it all makes Anakin’s arc fall completely flat. He’s clearly supposed to be a passionate, tempestuous young man whose emotions are too intense for his Jedi discipline to control.

In Revenge of the Sith, we ought to be seeing the darkest moments in his life, but Anakin is moaning that he wasn’t made a Jedi master, or sent to hunt down Grievous. The closest we ever get to seeing him feel any emotional conflict is the moment when he breaks down in the Jedi Temple, alone and separated from Padmé—arguably the most effective scene in the movie, but one that can do nothing to compensate for the dearth of real emotion elsewhere.

We never feel Anakin’s conflict, or his resentment towards the Jedi’s static ways. We barely even see it. His fall to the Dark Side becomes a bullet point, something that we know has to happen because he becomes Darth Vader in the original trilogy. It’s left to ancillary material like the Clone Wars animated series to fill int he gaps. And the Clone Wars cartoon does a remarkable job with Anakin, to the point that it makes his slow descent into rage and sadism actually stomach-turning at times.

Compare the two young men’s crucial “no going back” moments: Kylo’s murder of his father Han, and Anakin’s march on the Jedi Temple. For Kylo Ren, it’s a painful, almost pitiful moment, as he delivers a grand and heartbreaking speech to his dad about being torn apart by indecision and the pull between light and dark—only to twist things around at the last moment and use his father’s devotion as a lure to bring him in for the kill, to seal Kylo’s path to darkness.

The march on the temple is... well, it’s a march. We don’t get to see Anakin’s reaction, feel something about it, or even understand why he’s doing it (other than the fact that it’s simply what Palaptine tells him to do). He just silently ignites his lightsaber in front of some Padawans. There’s no personal connection there for the audience to understand, or even be shocked by, like you are with Kylo’s sudden twist. No anguish. For a man meant to be driven by his emotions—his love of his wife, and his need to do anything to keep her safe—it’s such a sterile moment that it feels perfunctory. The raw edge that is meant to catapult Anakin from promising young Jedi to powerful Sith is simply never there, and when you see rawness in almost every moment Kylo Ren is on screen in The Force Awakens, its absence from the prequels becomes even more apparent.

There’s something a bit ironic in the fact that Kylo Ren’s ultimate desire is to become the man he thought his grandfather was—because as an outsider looking in on The Force Awakens, to me he’s already a far more interesting, and therefore more tragic, version of the man that would become Darth Vader than the Anakin Skywalker we saw in the prequels ever was.

Tomorrow is Life Day, and as you’re steering your starship to Kashyyyk to celebrate with your Wookiee relatives, take a moment to reflect on the best possible way to commemorate this intergalactic holiday: By watching the Star Wars Holiday Special.

This week, Mental Floss published a comprehensive oral history of the 1978 special. Well, let’s put it another way: They have some comments from the people involved who actually admit to working on it. A few of the stars are no longer with us of course (RIP Bea Arthur). But some flat-out deny they ever appeared in this piece of televised art, and others say they use it to repel houseguests who stick around too long.

Here are just a few details from the oral history that I didn’t know before and I’m not sure I’m happy to know now:

• George Lucas came up with the concept, which he thought would be a good way to sell toys. “His idea was basically for a Wookiee Rosh Hashanah. A furry Earth Day.”
  
• Lucas told screenwriters that Han was married to a Wookiee, “but that we couldn’t mention that because it would be controversial.”
  
• Lucasfilm and Kenner produced prototype action figures of Chewbacca’s family (including his child, named Lumpy) but they were never released.
• Bea Arthur, who sings a song in the cantina scene, didn’t know anything about Star Wars or the characters. “She was pretty much [her television character] Maude.”
• Jefferson Starship appears in the special, but the team was also working on another project with Lucasfilm and the Bee Gees. Nothing ever came of it.
• When the high-budget television special aired, it lost the ratings war to The Love Boat, “with a marked drop-off following the conclusion of the cartoon at the halfway point.”

If you haven’t seen the special before, it’s definitely worth one of those pajama-clad, gift wrap-strewn Christmas afternoon viewings. Disney’s been quashing uploads on YouTube but we found one version in its entirety.

Enjoy. And thank the maker that the Star Wars franchise has been wrested away from George Lucas once and for all.

[Mental Floss]

Follow the author at @awalkerinLA

Photo via Star Wars Wikia

Today advertisers use futuristic tech like jetpacks and robots in their TV ads so that potential consumers think of their brand as forward thinking and innovative. In the 1920s, the cutting edge gadget that advertisers most wanted to associate themselves with was television. But, since the technology was still in its infancy, they faked it.

The August 1926 issue of Science and Invention magazine included two illustrations showing ways that businesses could create “fake” television demonstrations to lure customers inside their stores.

The illustration above depicts a bogus TV demo in a store window, divided by a wall. On the left side of the window display, people saw what was meant to look like a TV projector being sent a wireless signal by a woman sitting in the right side of the display. Instead the projection was just a movie made earlier with the same actress, who did her best to mimic the pre-recorded actions.

Another method of creating fake TV broadcasts was to use a series of mirrors. In the illustration below, unneeded wires give the impression that the TV signal is being sent between the two rooms. In reality, mirrors have been strategically set up so that the actress’s image appears on the fake TV set in the next room.

Businesses that couldn’t stage fake TV demonstrations still used television as a theme in their advertisements. The illustration below hung at Martin’s Lunch Room at 15 Wall Street in Norwalk, Connecticut around 1929. The poster’s message was that even though technology is developing at a rapid pace, you can still find great customer service with a human touch at their restaurant.

As we’ve looked at many times before, the idea of TV being a purely broadcast medium (rather than a point-to-point service which today we might call videophone) wasn’t yet a certainty until the late 1940s. In fact, TV had many false starts before it would become a practical reality in American homes after World War II. But fittingly enough, it would be TV itself — along with the dwindling influence of the downtown department store — that would cause advertisers to abandon storefronts, opting instead to promote their wares via commercials. Of course, what was promised in those commercials wasn’t always genuine... but that’s a story for another time.

This post originally appeared at Smithsonian.com.

The same way you really only buy sugary breakfast cereals for the smattering of marshmallows they include, this $20 tin of Justice League paperclips is still worth every last penny even if you toss all but the ten Batman clips it comes with.

That’s not to imply that other Justice League characters like Superman, the Flash, or the Green Lantern aren’t cool. It’s just that Batman will always be cooler, and so will any stack of documents held together with a bat logo paper clip, by association. [ThinkGeek]

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When you hear the name Houdini, you probably get a very specific image in your head. That of a man in a straight jacket escaping something. But a new movie will explore a side of the legend many people don’t know existed: The skeptic.

STX Entertainment just bought the rights to make a film based on the book The Witch of Lime Street by David Jaher. Mama director Andres Muschietti is attached, with Jaher himself adapting the screenplay.

The Witch of Lime Street tells the true story of Harry Houdini’s rivalry with Margery Crandon, a spirit medium, who Houdini believed to be a fraud. In the 1920s, the famous escape artist formed a council to prove just that and made it a personal goal to debunk the world of mysticism and spiritualists as fake.

Considering there are still very famous mediums in the world, the story feels pretty timely, in addition to the nice historical hook of Houdini. In a statement from STX, president Oren Aviv says many studios were pursuing rights to this book:

“This is a spellbinding and exciting true story that weaves a fantastic mystery and lots of intrigue with history involving some of the most renowned and iconic figures of the era. The timeless question ‘is there life after death?’ is explored through a scientific quest to investigate and validate supernatural phenomena. Ultimately, the film leads to an epic showdown and otherworldly confrontation as the world-renowned occult master Harry Houdini takes on the world’s greatest psychic, Margery Crandon.”

Muschietti has a bunch of potential projects on his plate but I would hope this one happens sooner rather than later.

http://www.amazon.com/Witch-Lime-Str...

And on a semi-related note, if this topic interests you, there’s a similar movie out there, minus Houdini, that you may have not seen. It’s called Red Lights and it stars Robert De Niro, Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, and Elizabeth Olsen. The film follows a group of spiritual debunkers and it’s got some huge flaws, but it’s pretty underrated.

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Lights-DVD...

[The Hollywood Reporter]

Image credit: Wikimedia

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

‘Tis the season for rendering architectural icons out of cookies and plotting to murder your family in a remote mountain hotel. Now the two best things about Christmastime are together at last.

Over at r/movies, eudicotyledon says his family made this incredibly disturbing yet very wonderful gingerbread version of the Overlook Hotel from the film The Shining (which Stephen King actually based on the real-life Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, although the film’s exteriors were filmed here). Some of the details, as well as the edible materials they used, are just stunning!

The house is about four feet long, according to eudicotyledon.

Twin gingerbread girls in the spooky hallway. The wallpaper is made from edible paper!

Room 237, more edible paper details.

Elevator spewing blood, or melted red Jolly Ranchers.

The three-story ballroom (that’s quinoa on the roof).

Scary ballroom scene with blacklight!

The labyrinth is probably my favorite part. Those are green Rice Krispie treats.

Check out all the rest of the images here, it’s truly amazing.

[Reddit via AdamSavage]

Are you an urban fantasy protagonist or a horror protagonist? The answer may depend on just how you’d react if an eldritch, uncanny supernatural being burst out and decided to attack you.

Yesterday, after we posted about the secret of making people fall in love with your super-competent main character, we were discussing it on Facebook. And io9 commenter Greg Cox (author of the recent Star Trek novel Child of Two Worlds and an upcoming tie-in novel for The Librarians) had something super insightful to say.

http://www.amazon.com/Child-Two-Worl...

Cox wrote:

It sometimes seems to me that the main difference between urban fantasy and horror is simply a matter of competency. Urban fantasy characters generally take vampires and zombies in stride and react as competently as the reader would like to think they would do in similar straits.

Horror characters, on the hand, tend to freak out, panic, doubt their sanity, make unwise decisions,, or even descend into gibbering madness—which is probably the more realistic approach!

I know people who simply don’t get or can’t tolerate horror because they expect the protagonists to be as matter-of-fact as, say, Buffy when dealing with weird paranormal threats.

THEY: “Well, why don’t they just go out and buy some silver bullets instead of freaking out over their werewolf issue?”

ME: “Because horror is not about problem-solving. It’s about fear and guilt and madness and darkness, not competence. And, honestly, most normal people would not behave rationally when confronted with an actual ghost or succubi.”

Yes, this is a debate I’ve had many times.

What do you think? Can a horror protagonist ever actually be competent in dealing with terrifying monsters, or does that automatically push the story into “urban fantasy” directions?

Top image: The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.

Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com and follow her on Twitter @CharlieJane

Think you’re the biggest Star Wars fan in our neck of the galaxy? Here’s your chance to prove it once and for all, because only the most loyal of Star Wars devotees will be willing to spend just shy of $25,000 for a lightsaber fountain pen and a nifty floating display stand.

What could possibly justify that obscene price tag? For starters, just eight of these pens are being produced in either a Darth Vader or Yoda saber design. Made from bronze with “black lacquer with palladium and rhodium finishes” the pens also each feature red or green topaz crystals on the ends of their caps to represent the lightsabers’ red or green blades.

But penmaker S.T. Dupont Paris has obviously realized that this isn’t the first lightsaber-shaped pen that Star Wars fans can get their hands on. So to sweeten the pot the company has also created an accompanying floating display stand that relies on the earthly sorcery known as magnets, instead of the Force.

There’s no question this would make for a sweet addition to any Star Wars collection, and a pretty slick conversation starter for your desk at work. But that price tag might mean your kids will have to settle for a local college instead of an out-of-state university, but we’re sure they’ll understand. [Wheelers via Coolest Gadgets]

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens is finally in theaters and toppling box office records day to day, but that’s not going to stop Disney from squeezing even more money from fans on the merchandising side. Besides, BB-8 seems tailor-made to be turned into an ice sphere.

This silicon ice sphere mold from Kotobukiya can be used to make a perfect frozen replica of BB-8 that’s sure to impress your Star Wars-loving guests at your next party. But you can pour everything from melted chocolate to cake batter in there if you really wanted. You’ll just have to wait until March because the mold is only available for pre-order right now for $14. [BigBadToyStore via That’s Nerdalicious]

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Earlier this year, a maintenance worker found a golden scepter in a Jerusalem cemetery. Antiquity experts were stumped, prompting a six-month long investigation into its origin. A Facebook user has now correctly identified the object — and well, let’s just say it’s not what they thought it was.

“To tell you the truth, I’ve never seen anything like this before,” noted Amir Ganor, head of Israel’s Antiquities Authority robbery prevention unit, in a Telegraph article, adding that the burial ground the object was discovered in was an “important archaeology site where remains were found dating to the Roman, Byzantine and Crusader periods.”

(Credit: Israel Antiquities Authority)

Antiquities experts at the IAA figured that the 17 pound (8 kg), 24-carat gold scepter may have been used in biblical Jewish temples, but they weren’t entirely sure. Stumped, they decided to post photos on Facebook asking the public for help.

Turns out it’s not an ancient relic at all, but rather a New Age energy “healing device” called a Weber Isis Beamer. The object, which ranges in price from USD$75 to USD$1,220 depending on the model, is supposed to create a “harmonized” protective field against “electromagnetic and geopathic radiation.”

The Isis Beamer on display at the Weber website. The text translates to: “The Weber Isis Beamer 1:5 can be used in very large buildings, industrial buildings, office buildings and supermarkets. It will harmonize against the strongest electromagnetic and geopathic radiation exposure. 24m radius. More intensive harmonization due to the gilding.” The word “vergoldet” means “gilded” in English. (Credit: Weber)

The mystery was solved by Facebook user Micha Barak, who lives in Italy. Here’s what the IAA had to say about the incident in The Telegraph:

The object, which is produced by a German company, is called ‘Isis Beamer’ after the Egyptian goddess Isis. In Egyptian mythology she was the goddess of medicine, magic and nature. We hope that those responsible for hiding the object in the cemetery will contact us and inform us why it was buried in an ancient structure and to whom of the dead they wished to give positive energy.

Yikes, well that’s embarrassing. To show its gratitude, the IAA has asked Barak to visit them the next time he’s in Israel.

Note: An earlier version of this article attributed the IAA quote to Mr. Barak. We regret the error.

[ The Telegraph ]

Email the author at george@gizmodo.com and follow him at @dvorsky. Top image by Israel Antiquities Authority

Photographer Frode Ramone snapped this stunning shot of the Northern lights illuminating the frosty skies above Svalbard, a group of islands that’s about halfway between Norway and the North Pole. A former whaling hub, the Arctic archipelago is now known for being home to more polar bears than humans.