FROM THE ARCHIVES: HALLELUJAH! IT BURNS AGAIN!:

Yule log telecast lights fire of New York viewers (AP, December 28, 2002)

A TV broadcast of logs burning in a fireplace to a Christmas carol soundtrack burned up the ratings this year. The uninterrupted two-hour Christmas morning broadcast of the ''Yule Log Christmas Special,'' a holiday tradition for hearthless New Yorkers, returned to the air in 2001 after a 12-year hiatus. Wednesday's showing, from 9 to 11 a.m., boasted 284,012 viewing households, a 26 percent boost in viewership compared with last year, WPIX-Channel 11 said. It smoked the 1 p.m. airing of the 1951 classic film version of Charles Dickens' ''A Christmas Carol,'' starring Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, by 29,000 households. The rather bizarre Christmas tradition also burned up the airwaves every year from 1966 to 1989.

For a third of a century, the Brothers have been at war over the Yule Log, with the philistine claiming it's a 10 second tape loop repeated over and over and I stubbornly maintaining it was originally a live broadcast. I deeply resent the term "bizarre" in this un-American, borderline-fascistic story. [originally posted: 2002-12-28] Posted by Orrin Judd at December 24, 2006 12:48 AM