Of Christmas as long, long ago is my new book arriving for the 2025 Christmas season.

Find out what Christmas was like centuries ago.

Sneak preview, it was weird, and spooky, and rowdy.

Kind of gross sometimes.

Find it wherever books are sold in hardcover from Lions Press and audiobook from recorded books. It's Christmas as you've never

seen it before, and it makes a great gift. I'm Brian Earle. This is Christmas Past. The televisions

were on that Christmas Eve. That was nothing new. Television had become part of Christmas decades

earlier. Families gathered around flickering RCA consoles and Boston brownstones, the picture

snowy, but the moment clear. In Kansas farmhouses, the glow of the TV flashing blue frames on the

wall. On the south side of Chicago, three generations

squeezed onto a plaid sofa watching a grainy image crawl across the screen. In suburban ranch homes,

the news came through the static. Earlier that year, they had gathered around those same sets

to watch reports that the Tet Offensive had erupted

in Vietnam. They had watched stunned as a Memphis balcony became a shrine to Martin Luther

King, and again as Robert Kennedy collapsed in a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. They had watched

footage of riots in Chicago and Berkeley, of student uprisings in France and tanks rolling

into Prague. In October, hundreds were gunned down in a plaza in Mexico City.

1968 was a year that felt like it might split history in two, a fault line cracking

through time itself. But now, on Christmas Eve, nearly a third of

humanity tuned in to something different. One billion people watched the transmission come through,

grainy, delayed by distance, but unmistakable. The voices of three men drifting into dens and living rooms. Three men who

had traversed afar farther than anyone had ever gone, and who were delivering a message

...