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\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2022 Christ is born and HE is savior! (Levant, 00-100)
\n\u2022 The day of his birth is a holiday called Christmas (Rome, 300s)
\n\u2022 Nicholas is sainted in his name (Anatolia, 400-500)
\n\u2022 St. Nicholas is \u201cSanta Claus\u201d, bringer of presents! (Dutch-American legend, NYC, USA, early 19th cen.)
\n\u2022 Santa Claus fills stockings riding a sleigh pulled by 8 reindeer (Clement Clarke Moore, USA, 1823)
\n\u2022 Christmas is a day where capitalist magnates are inspired away from profit-maximization by popular sentiment (Charles Dickens, London, UK, 1843)
\n\u2022 Christmas is a holiday where you erect a lit pine tree and trade store-bought presents (mid-late 19th cen., German lands)
\n\u2022 Santa Claus wears a red cap and suit (Coca-Cola and others, USA, 1930s)
\n\u2022 Santa has a 9th reindeer, a pathetic runt named Rudolph (Robert L. May for Montgomery Ward, Chicago, USA, 1939)
\n\u2022 Christmas is a day where people erect evergreen trees and exchange presents but a fuzzy green monster representing capitalism wears a red suit and teams with an ersatz runt reindeer to undermine it, but popular sentiment inspires him away (Theodore Geisel as \u201cDr. Seuss\u201d, La Jolla California, USA, 1957)
\nCultural evolution!
\nMeanwhile in half a century the other thread born from A Christmas Story and Die Hard and It\u2019s A Wonderful Life and Home Alone becomes a story of a boy alienated from his parents because they don\u2019t trust him with a gun pulling it together to kill invaders but also realize his life is richer putting up with them than it would be without
\nUnlikely, because in half a century Die Hard, a Christmas Story and Home Alone will still be copyrighted works.
\nThe deeper down that list you go, the more difficult and costly it is to use those concepts and characters in remixes and original works.
\nI can, today, write and sell any story I want about a red suited Santa and those eight tiny reindeer visiting Scrooge to, I don\u2019t know, save baby new year from an evil warlord who lives in the post-apocalypitic future.
\nI have to do an extreme amount of negotiation and work to have Santa meet the Grinch, and an insane, titanic amount of charisma to convince the Geisel estate to have him do something as daft as fighting a time-traveling warlord.
\nThe Thirties developments (red suit, runt reindeer) were still in their first 28-year cycle under the 1909 Copyright Act when Dr. Seuss wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas
\nMy favourite example of evolution of cultural legends is the 1991 American movie Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves
\nBecause the writer wrote in the Morgan Freeman character assuming it was always part of the legend, but a copyright review established he was still owned, an original creation of a 1980s BBC series
\nBcuz with the Muslim \u201cAsian\u201d immigration from the old Raj and the black \u201cWindrush\u201d back-migration from the Caribbean, the official agents of British mass culture thought this British ur-legend could use a black Muslim figure
\n(Which yeah that\u2019s not historical but the idea that the true church \u2013 \u201cFriar Tuck\u201d \u2013 or the true nobility \u2013 \u201cRobin of Locksley\u201d were on the side of the people was the same kinda made up national unity legend in the first place)
\nAnd so they just changed his name and do you remember his name anyway? Or the name of the BBC original? (Azeem and Nasir, tyvm). Copyright doesn\u2019t stop the legend from twisting.
\n(For that matter Home Alone was Die Hard For Kids within 2 years)
\nI mean my counter-argument would be to ask for one example of a fuzzy green Christmas grump that isn\u2019t the Grinch as directly authorized by the Geisel estate.
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