(Roughly) Daily

With this post (and all best wishes for the season), your correspondent begins his annual Holiday hiatus. Regular service should resume on or around the New Year… In the hope that it’s helpful to those still searching for last-minute gifts, this, from the marvelous Tom Gauld…

And as a bonus, this appreciation of Jean Shepherd, the man whose work inspired (and fueled) that yuletide staple, A Christmas Story— and so much more: “The Old Man at Christmas“…

… Most of Shepherd’s career, particularly his first three decades on the radio, relied on riffing and improvisation, which makes for a vast but fairly evanescent archive. People often rewatch classic movies, and sometimes rewatch beloved old TV shows, but they very rarely replay old radio shows. The real marker of twentieth-century success always lay in syndication, and it’s there, a little late in the game, and in a medium that had otherwise eluded him, that Shepherd secured his legacy. In the petty grievances and joys of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, in NPR-style storytelling, in everything that straddles the line between countercultural and popular representative of the monoculture, from Calvin and Hobbes to Steely Dan, echoes of his work can be found, so abundant and diffuse they can be easy to miss—but they’re everywhere you care to look…

Daniel M. Lavery in The New York Review of Books

* Neil Gaiman

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As we read, we might recall that it was on this date in 1882 that an associate of Thomas Edison, Edward Hibberd Johnson (President of the Edison Electric Light Company, a predecessor of Con Edison) lit and displayed the first known electrically illuminated Christmas tree at his home in New York City.

He had Christmas tree bulbs especially made for him–80 red, white, and blue electric light bulbs the size of walnuts, hand-wired around the tree. From that point on, electrically-illuminated Christmas trees, indoors and outdoors, grew in popularity in the United States and elsewhere. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland sponsored the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House. And in 1901, the Edison General Electric Company advertised the first commercially-produced Christmas tree lamps (manufactured in strings of nine sockets).