Today marks the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. Winter will arrive at 5:44 a.m. EST (the time zone in which I am shivering).

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The New York World newspaper published a “Word-Cross Puzzle” created by Arthur Wynne on this date in 1913. It is credited as the first crossword puzzle. (The puzzle is seen at the top of this post.)
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It’s a Wonderful Life, a film directed by Frank Capra and starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, opened in theaters on this date in 1946. Most reviewers labeled it as overly sentimental (although Time magazine loved it) and it fared poorly at the box office.

It was an expensive film to make, as Capra ordered a small-town set that was the size of a small town: three full-size city blocks, with 75 storefronts, some of which opened to stores which had shelves which were fully stocked with real products, and indoor snow machines for the snowy outdoors scenes.

The studio that produced it, RKO, filed it as a budget loss. The film went down in history as a flop.

By the early 1970s, the film had been a holiday staple on local television stations across the U.S. during the holidays for years; this was because It’s a Wonderful Life was such a flop that the rights to broadcast it were inexpensive for those local stations that could not afford pricier holiday fare.
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Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.—the opening paragraph of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, a novel by Charles Dickens, was published on this date in 1843 by Chapman & Hall. It has never gone out of print. (A photograph of a reprint of the first edition is seen at top.)
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