How the TV Yule log stole Christmas

My holiday season officially starts on the night before Thanksgiving, snuggling under a thick throw while sharing a fireside catch-up with my best friend. Fortunately, she doesn’t have to get her hands dirty or even leave the couch to light up the ambience. She doesn’t even have a fireplace. All it takes is a few clicks of her remote to crank up one of the many flaming yule logs that TV offers, and voila: a maintenance-free, rustic glow is achieved.

Television has long been referred to as the electronic hearth, but the yule log’s ubiquity in the streaming era shifts that notion into oddly literal territory. My friend goes for Netflix’s original seasonal blockbuster, “Fireplace For Your Home,” which shows nothing but a burning wonder slowly fading to glowing coals and feathery ash. Is that a metaphor for life right now? Depends. How blue is your Christmas this year?

Regardless of how you’d answer that, the TV fireplace now comes in an array of forms, most of which are branded. There are too many, really. It has gotten ridiculous.

Since 2024, Netflix has featured a “Bridgerton”- themed fireplace, set in the middle of a Regency-era sitting room. You can almost picture a few of your favorite British nobles enjoying tea there or quietly poking each other’s pies somewhere outside of the frame.

HBO Max has presented its branded “Harry Potter” blaze and “A Very Merry Ricksmas Yule Log,” featuring Rick and Morty scrolling through interdimensional cable with the TV on mute, since 2022. And Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the World of Westeros’ conflagration, starring a dragon egg. All fire, no blood.

Blame market forces for this proliferation. Hearing Nat King Cole croon about chestnuts roasting on an open fire dozens of times is one of the many reminders that fireplaces are luxuries most of us don’t have. It’s a renters’ world, and few apartments and condos offer working versions to tenants. However, nearly everyone has a TV or tablet, and most have broadband access. Hence, the annual reign of small screen hearths.

As with most holiday-related rituals, digging into the history of the yule log as a TV tradition dispels some of its mystical wonder, revealing its origin in desperate necessity. In November 1966, New York’s WPIX-TV had a 90-minute block of dead air that the studio’s president, Fred Thrower, decided to fill with footage of a roaring fire, calling it a Christmas card.

As a WPIX special commemorating the log explains, the inaugural special debuted on Christmas Eve that year and consisted of 17 seconds of footage looped for three commercial-free hours, which cost the station around $4000 in lost advertising revenue. Footage was reshot to capture six and a half minutes on a loop starting in 1970, and aired as an annual tradition that continued until 1989. (See: that number attached to lost revenue.)

WPIX revived the special in 2016. By then, local stations across the country were producing their own versions, recognizing the seasonal appeal. Not everyone has a fireplace, but nearly everybody loves relaxing by a fire, even a flat-screen version. Footage of rolling flames is as soothing as the real thing, and without the choking emissions and sooty clean-up.

Netflix’s low-fi, high-def version, created by George Ford, has been running since 2010, although two updated hours hit the streamer in 2015. Although it may be tempting to imagine Ford rolling around on a giant pile of easy money like Scrooge McDuck, his mission was harder than the result makes it look, and was ignited by a modest, generous purpose.

“When you talk about Christmas, that special holiday feeling that everyone gets, it’s all about friends, loved ones, lights, the tree and, of course, the fireplace,” Ford told CBC Radio in 2022. “. . .I set off to make the perfect fireplace so everyone can have that fulfilling feeling of a fireplace in their house.”

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In that, he succeeded. Ford’s fir and birch-burners are radiant examples of human-made art triumphing over digital manufacture. He told the CBC that it took hundreds of attempts to capture these slow-burning masterworks, and all these years later, hygge-seekers remain rapt.

Seeing some version of “Fireplace For Your Home” crack the service’s Top 10 between Christmas and New Year’s Day wasn’t unusual in the past. Nowadays, though, these stalwarts have competition in yule logs with production budgets and franchise branding behind them.

There’s “The Witcher”-themed medieval-style brazier fueled by the supernatural force that we know in modern times as a gas line. Introducing a “Squid Game” fireplace seemed like an odd choice in 2024 — or any year, truly —  but this year’s “KPop Demon Hunters” fireplace gives that some real competition for seasonal inappropriateness.

Onlookers are invited to be mesmerized by the fuchsia flames of Gwi-Ma’s realm as the movie’s hooky synth pop bounces in the foreground. Netflix describes this as relaxing, which it very well may be to parents wrung out by their children loudly campaigning to watch. But if you enjoy keeping the reason for the season top of mind, please note that Gwi-Ma is a demon king.

Disney+ has a “Frozen”-themed fireplace, which is on brand. Joining it is a two-hour gaze at the Grand Californian Hotel & Spa’s giant stone wonder, flanked on one side by a Mickey Mouse mug.

Then there are the hysterical, bizarre misdirects of Adult Swim’s 2022 “Yule Log” and its 2024 sequel “Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out,” both on HBO Max. The first opens with standard Yule Log footage before flipping into an entirely different movie within five minutes. The plot description holds some clues that something ain’t right: “Get in the holiday spirit with this cozy, crackling fire,” reads the text accompanying the first, adding, “Rated TV-MA for violence, adult language and brief nudity.” The follow-up continues this kookiness with a madhouse spoof of Hallmark holiday saccharine in which a woodpile becomes a homicidal monster.

Not to go all Charlie Brown here  – and yes, a Peanuts-themed fireplace exists on the Interwebs – but might we introspect about these commercialist and consumerist bells and whistles leading us astray?

Consider the original Yule Logs, massive oak trunks that Vikings burned for the duration of the Midwinter solstice to rebuke the long darkness. Their celebrations gathered community members to share meals and stories.

Whereas the latest contributions to the “Fixer Upper: Fireplace” catalog, streaming on HBO Max, Discovery+ and YouTube, offer host-free virtual visits to the hearths inside two of Chip and Joanna Gaines’ properties, the Family Farm and their Mountain House. Plenty of the home improvement moguls’ boosters will see these as soothing and aspirational, and I’m wagering that each room’s accoutrements are available for purchase at the Magnolia Silos in Waco, Texas.

But there’s also an aspect to these vanity stagings which, like the Grand Californian Hotel & Spa branded fireplace experience, whispers, “Hey, look what you can’t afford in this economy. You don’t need 37 logs. Your children can make do by peering at ours.”

Dreaming is free, of course, and as Julie Andrews is famous for reminding us, the holidays are a time for appreciating a few of your favorite things. But when we think about bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, the gentle flames that would heat them come to mind, not a real estate peepshow staged by stars who aren’t even around to serve you cocoa. Although if Joanna Gaines were making that mug, it would probably be, hate to say it, pretty litty.

Absent that, as with most things holiday-related, there’s nothing wrong with basking in the comfort of a toasty, popping TV classic. If it helps you chill, go ahead and strike that match with your remote.

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