Seven Oaks Magazine.

Finally all sitting together in the festively-decorated living room, appetites sated after food and wine, my family grew restless as the usual once-a-year conversations faded into an uncomfortable lull. Suddenly, a beacon from beyond appeared, uniting my family at once as we began screeching an excited, shared refrain: “The hand! The hand!”

Our prompt was a bejewelled crone’s hand that, reaching out from the side of our television set, placed a fresh log on the SHAW cable community channel’s broadcast of The Burning Log. The new piece of wood signalled the start of another loop of the tape that brought the convenience and charm of a brightness-adjustable, child-safe, scentless fire to countless Lower Mainland families and pyromaniacs alike. The only actual wood-burning yule fire to be found on local stations this year, SHAW 4’s The Burning Log displayed a tastefully restrained bouquet of flames with the merest hint of smoke from Christmas morning right through to noon on Boxing Day. My family stared, transfixed, as the wood blackened and melted away, the logs slowly collapsing onto one another.

Sadly, the two other stations that were, locally, broadcasting ‘burning’ yule logs on Christmas Day seemed to have B.C. Gas as a sponsor: from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. both CityTV and Vancouver Island-based The New VI were broadcasting images of brassy gas fires accompanied not by a soundtrack of gentle crackling, no, but by the blaring of brassy carols. Though at least the New VI’s The Yule Log setup was aesthetically pleasing — they had framed the faux-feu with an attractively ornate purpley-rose fire enclosure — CityTV’s Log: The Christmas Special was a dreadfully plain and uninspiring close-up of a gas fire. It warmed neither the skin nor the heart, and I swear I could hear the television’s electrons whining in protest.

Not that I should balk at the authenticity of the Lower Mainland’s selection of televised yule logs. The tradition of televising burning ‘yule log’ belongs to New York City instead. The televised yule log is tradition dating back to 1966 when the general manager of that city’s WPIX television station, the late Fred Thrower, vowed to bring some commercial-free Christmas cheer to all the “cave dwellers” of New York: to all those New Yorkers who lived in dark, cramped, fireplace-less apartments.

A website (http://www.theyulelog.net ) dedicated to the origins of this holiday tradition explains that the original TV yule log was a 17 second film loop, seen for the first time by most on black and white sets. The original fire footage was filmed at Gracie Mansion, the residence of New York City’s mayors, where the film crew ruined a $4,000 rug when they removed the fire grate to get a better picture. Having thus burnt their bridges at Gracie Mansion, WPIX -- armed with better quality film and new colour technology had to re-shoot the fire instead in front of a similar-looking fireplace in California – in midsummer, no less.

Not surprisingly, the Grinch eventually visited WPIX in 1989 as executives cancelled the unprofitable spot, but grassroots devotees brought the yule log tape to the Internet in 2000. In 2001, “a year when everyone is clamouring for ‘comfort food’ television,” as WPIX then-general manager Betty Berlamino explained to the New York Times, the tape made it back on air and logged 611,000 viewers during its two-hour showing.

The televised yule log has continued to spread to more and more networks in various incarnations, providing a spark of comfort for the lonely, a pleasant ambiance for families, and an equally fake companion to all the fake plastic trees. But this year I began wondering: Why don’t the stations show a snowfall scene instead to give a little taste of a white Christmas to some of us West Coasters? Or why don’t they broadcast a pleasant trickling winter creek, or a soothingly meditative dripping icicle? Why do stations insist on showing hours upon hours of burning logs? And for a while, I was stumped.

As it turns out, burning ‘yule’ wood became ceremonial in old pagan midwinter traditions, and has nothing really to do with Christmas. The word “yule” descends from old Norse, and refers specifically to the winter season where logs were cut, dedicated, brought into homes and caves, and burned with great ceremony to welcome the approach of longer days.

And as it is the tradition for traditions to change, we now burn our own virtual yule logs in modern urban caves. Lucky for Canadians that the televised yule fire is at least more in line with Kyoto than the real smoke-ridden or gas-fueled thing. It still seems a little wrong somehow, but for someone who was suffering Christmas-consumerism burnout, the TV yule log – in its own perverted; technologically-enhanced way – helped me to branch out and appreciate the seasonal forest – despite the Christmas trees.