I grew up in Denville, New Jersey, a small town about forty miles west of New York City. On Christmas Eve, WPIX, television channel 11 in New York City aired a program they simply called “The Yule Log”. This program was a three hour film loop showing a crackling fire in a fireplace. The soundtrack consisted of a number of “easy-listening” Christmas tunes played in rotation. I found this program on TV one Christmas in the late 1970s or early 1980s, enjoyed watching it, and looked for it again the next year.
My interest in seeing The Yule Log on TV became such a cliche in my family that I eventually received a VHS tape of a similar yule log program as a gag Christmas gift. I think I got this gift during one Christmas in the early 1990s, around the time that Wikipedia says that WPIX stopped airing the program.
A lot of other people in the New York Metropolitan Area and elsewhere apparently considered the program their Christmas tradition as well. An illustration of the strength of the fan base for the program is TheYuleLog.com.
WPIX reinstated the program for Christmas 2001 and it’s been on the air each year ever since.
The other day I was listening to one of the TWiT podcasts (either TWiT 123 or MacBreak Weekly 68). The podcast mentioned iYule.TV, a video production formatted for the iPhone and a number of other video-capable media players. For $5 to $10 dollars, you can purchase a copy of a 30-minute video of a yule log complete with an original musical score by Geoff Smith. Portions of the proceeds from the sales of the iYule.TV video will go to charity.
My reaction to hearing about iYule.TV (and before I heard that some of the producers’ proceeds will be donated to charity) was, “Why didn’t I think of this?” I felt like this was a guaranteed money-maker, just from the novelty of being able to view it on the iPhone or the iPod Touch.
In the course of researching this article, I learned that WPIX has produced a version of their presentation of The Yule Log formatted for the Video iPod. They call it The Portable Yule Log.
I’m going to download The Portable Yule Log from WPIX and see if it measures up to my memories. More on this later.
Update: The Portable Yule Log video clip is only two minutes long and it contains no Christmas music, so it’s not a personal copy of the original WPIX broadcast. If I have time, I will subscribe to iYule and see what that’s like.