Dec 24, 2017 3 min read

Christmas Eve is one of those days when the world seems to stop.

Holiday preparations are largely completed. Travelers have reached their destinations, or will at least by tonight. Businesses will mostly close by 6 p.m. and those marking the Christian holiday will stop by a church and sing a chorus of “Silent Night.”

The world, however, does keep turning on Dec. 24. A Christmas Eve still fondly recalled by those old enough to remember it happened in 1968, when Apollo 8 astronauts Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell became the first humans to orbit the moon, seven months before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on it. They also became the first people to see our own planet from afar. With a massive worldwide television audience estimated at 1 billion viewers, the astronauts read aloud the opening passages from the Book of Genesis, and wished a Merry Christmas to “all you on this good Earth.”

Considering that the astronauts’ trip around the moon came at the end of a year that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Tet Offensive, riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the violent suppression of Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” reform movement and uprisings in France, it offered a moment of unity and peace for a turbulent and divided world.

Though our divisions are not quite as stark as they were almost half a century ago – we are not fighting a war of uncertain value that’s claiming more than 1,000 American lives every month, as we were in 1968 – we are still clearly divided on a number of fronts, as events this year in Charlottesville, Va., and in football stadiums around the country demonstrated. The world – and, specifically, the United States – could certainly use a similar moment of harmony and accord right now.

History has been made on other Christmas Eves. Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Aida” bowed on Dec. 24, 1871, and three years later, Thomas Edison filed a patent for the phonograph, an invention that would eventually bring “Aida” and other great works to every corner of the planet and change the world in innumerable ways.

It was on Christmas Eve in 1943, with the world locked in war, that President Franklin Roosevelt announced that Dwight Eisenhower would be the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. Eisenhower, of course, became president himself nine years later, and the United States benefited from the seriousness of purpose and steady leadership he brought to the Oval Office.

Less portentous events have also occurred on Christmas Eve. Back in 1901, for instance, private companies started using the word “postcard” to describe what had previously been known as “souvenir cards.” “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley is said to have tried LSD for the first time on Dec. 24, 1955, and, the following year, an “I Love Lucy” Christmas special aired for the first time on CBS-TV. On Dec. 24, 1964, work started on “The Cage,” the pilot episode for “Star Trek,” and Disney released “The Aristocats” in 1970.

Perhaps a lesson we can draw from the past is that the problems and divisions that animate us so thoroughly today will eventually pass.

Merry Christmas.