Last evening I walked over beyond Fifth Avenue and called at the residence of Edward H. Johnson, vice-president of Edison’s electric company. There, at the rear of the beautiful parlors, was a large Christmas tree, presenting a most picturesque and uncanny aspect. It was brilliantly lighted with many colored globes about as large as an English walnut and was turning some six times a minute on a little pine box. There were eighty lights in all encased in these dainty glass eggs, and about equally divided between white, red and blue. As the tree turned, the colors alternated, all the lamps going out and being relit at every revolution. The result was a continuous twinkling of dancing colors, red, white and blue, all evening.—William Augustus Croffut, Detroit Post and Tribune, December 1882

Just three years after Thomas Edison and his team had successfully invented a method for manufacturing electric lights, a Vice President for his company, Edward Johnson, ordered a string of lights for the Christmas tree in his home.

The New York City newspapers of the time, accustomed to the Edison Company’s frequent press release promises that were not always followed by successes, did not send any reporters to visit Mr. Johnson’s holiday display. A reporter for the Detroit Post and Tribune, William Croffut, did pay a visit. (Croffut was important to Edison: he is the writer who is credited with calling Edison the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” which is where Edison’s lab was located.)

The tree, festooned with eighty bulbs and rotating on a platform powered by an electric motor, is seen above, in a photo from December 25 of that year.
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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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