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.

On a cold winter's night on the Northern Atlantic coast in 1906, snow remained on the ground

from a storm days earlier.

The sea stretched out like a black sheet, its surface broken only by the ghostly lights of

the ships that dotted the horizon.

From here, on a desolate bluff south of Boston, the night was so still it felt like it was holding its breath.

It was Christmas Eve, a perfect night for a miracle, or at least something that felt like one.

The crews of the ships in the area, the U.S. Navy patrolling the coast, the United Fruit Company importing shipments of bananas from Latin

America, they knew something was coming. They'd gotten word of it just days before, of an event,

an experiment. At 9 o'clock, the shipboard operators received the signal. The dots and dashes

sequence of Morse code spelling CQ, CQ, CQ, CQ, meaning a general

call to all stations within range.

But tonight, it was a call to the modern age.

Because after that initial Morse code signal, the wireless receivers produced not more dots

and dashes, but something surprising, something

entirely new.

The receivers produced the sound of music, of a wax cylinder recording of an aria from

...