The Inexorable Progress of Christmas

You may be aware of “Moore’s law,” which holds that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

I would like to point out another seeming fact of development or evolution:  Christmas classics are arriving on the scene at an ever accelerating pace.  Consider the facts:

• The great novella A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, was published in 1843.
• Frank Capra’s immortal film It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, appeared 103 years later,  in 1946.
• Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis as John McClane and Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, came out only 42 years thereafter, in 1988.

It seems undeniable that great Christmas-oriented fare is being produced more and more rapidly.  Each generation between Christmas classics is about half the length of the preceding generation.

So, as we scientists do, I make a prediction based on the data in hand.  The true test of a scientific theory is not whether it can account for the data that’s already known but whether it can predict as yet unknown facts (e.g., the position of Mars on some future date).

The data summarized above suggest that a new Christmas classic must have arrived approximately 20-25 years after Die Hard.

But is this true?  Did it really happen?  Yes, I think it did.

20-25 years after would be 2008 to 2013.  And in 2014 — well within what I deem to be the margin of error — we have the Hallmark Channel’s immortal Christmas Under Wraps, starring “Cameron Bure as a high-powered doctor who is forced to visit a small town in Alaska. It has a subplot involving the real-life Santa Claus. It has lines like, “You can listen to your mind, but you have to follow your heart.” It has a Very Forgettable Man with a chiseled jaw. Sugar cookies figure prominently. There is a Christmas tree decorating party. Priorities are rearranged. Earthly success is pitted against familial happiness, and the right set of values wins out in the end.”  (See “I watched the top 10 Hallmark Christmas movies so you don’t have to: Here’s what I learned.  What I thought would be a fun, somewhat silly experiment turned out slightly differently.”)

I haven’t formulated this discovery as a law just yet.  And I’m certainly not going to call it “Peterson’s Law” any time soon  (Modestly, I will wait for others to do so.)

But I thought that you should know that the march of science continues, notwithstanding both impeachment and Brexit.