Welcome to the 2025 Heistmas Advent Calendar, a daily drop of pop culture Christmas icons, oddities, and joy. Check back every day from now through December 25 for each daily entry!
On Christmas Eve, 1951, NBC aired Amahl and the Night Visitors, a Christmas-themed opera, on stations across the United States. This broadcast was important for a number of reasons. Among them: It was part of an early television legacy of airing live opera; it was the world premiere of an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, an important figure in 20th century classical music; the show itself was the first American opera ever composed expressly for television; and the music and libretto were written by a gay man (Menotti’s partner was Samuel Barber, one of the most highly regarded composers of the century.). It was also the inaugural broadcast of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, so may be considered a distant, distant, distant, distant ancestor of today’s all-consuming Hallmark holiday movies.