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Discover the First Depiction of Santa Claus (and Its Origins in Civil War Propaganda), Discover 20 Historical Christmas Recipes: Fruitcake, Gingerbread, Figgy Pudding & More ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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Upon hearing the name of Salvador Dalí, even a total layman in the art world is bound to get visions of melting clocks. Surprisingly, for an artist who showed so much self-marketing savvy, Dalí never brought an actual timepiece in that distinctively, even canonically surreal shape to market. But that hardly stopped Cartier…
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It will no doubt come as a relief to many readers that Santa Claus appears to have been a Union supporter. We know this because he appears distributing gifts to soldiers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of his earliest depictions. That illustration, “Santa Claus in Camp” (above), first appeared in the…
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One can hardly consider the Christmas season for long, at least in the English-speaking world, without the work of Charles Dickens coming to mind. That owes for the most part, of course, to A Christmas Carol, the novella that revived the public culture of a holiday that had been falling into desuetude by the…
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Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That once-contrarian categorization has increasingly been accepted over the past couple of decades, at least since an editor with whom I’ve often worked first declared it in a Slate roundup. As a result, John McTiernan’s sturdy piece of one-building eighties Hollywood action may have displaced It’s a Wonderful Life as…
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When discussing a musician like Fela Kuti, many of our usual terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musical culture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten or so lyrics-forward songs every two or three years, promoting it on tour while also…
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