• Christ is born and HE is savior! (Levant, 00-100)
• The day of his birth is a holiday called Christmas (Rome, 300s)
• Nicholas is sainted in his name (Anatolia, 400-500)
• St. Nicholas is “Santa Claus”, bringer of presents! (Dutch-American legend, NYC, USA, early 19th cen.)
• Santa Claus fills stockings riding a sleigh pulled by 8 reindeer (Clement Clarke Moore, USA, 1823)
• Christmas is a day where capitalist magnates are inspired away from profit-maximization by popular sentiment (Charles Dickens, London, UK, 1843)
• Christmas is a holiday where you erect a lit pine tree and trade store-bought presents (mid-late 19th cen., German lands)
• Santa Claus wears a red cap and suit (Coca-Cola and others, USA, 1930s)
• Santa has a 9th reindeer, a pathetic runt named Rudolph (Robert L. May for Montgomery Ward, Chicago, USA, 1939)
• Christmas is a day where people erect evergreen trees and exchange presents but a fuzzy green monster representing capitalism wears a red suit and teams with an ersatz runt reindeer to undermine it, but popular sentiment inspires him away (Theodore Geisel as “Dr. Seuss”, La Jolla California, USA, 1957)
Cultural evolution!
Meanwhile in half a century the other thread born from A Christmas Story and Die Hard and It’s A Wonderful Life and Home Alone becomes a story of a boy alienated from his parents because they don’t trust him with a gun pulling it together to kill invaders but also realize his life is richer putting up with them than it would be without
Unlikely, because in half a century Die Hard, a Christmas Story and Home Alone will still be copyrighted works.
The deeper down that list you go, the more difficult and costly it is to use those concepts and characters in remixes and original works.
I can, today, write and sell any story I want about a red suited Santa and those eight tiny reindeer visiting Scrooge to, I don’t know, save baby new year from an evil warlord who lives in the post-apocalypitic future.
I have to do an extreme amount of negotiation and work to have Santa meet the Grinch, and an insane, titanic amount of charisma to convince the Geisel estate to have him do something as daft as fighting a time-traveling warlord.
The Thirties developments (red suit, runt reindeer) were still in their first 28-year cycle under the 1909 Copyright Act when Dr. Seuss wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas
My favourite example of evolution of cultural legends is the 1991 American movie Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves
Because the writer wrote in the Morgan Freeman character assuming it was always part of the legend, but a copyright review established he was still owned, an original creation of a 1980s BBC series
Bcuz with the Muslim “Asian” immigration from the old Raj and the black “Windrush” back-migration from the Caribbean, the official agents of British mass culture thought this British ur-legend could use a black Muslim figure
(Which yeah that’s not historical but the idea that the true church – “Friar Tuck” – or the true nobility – “Robin of Locksley” were on the side of the people was the same kinda made up national unity legend in the first place)
And so they just changed his name and do you remember his name anyway? Or the name of the BBC original? (Azeem and Nasir, tyvm). Copyright doesn’t stop the legend from twisting.
(For that matter Home Alone was Die Hard For Kids within 2 years)
I mean my counter-argument would be to ask for one example of a fuzzy green Christmas grump that isn’t the Grinch as directly authorized by the Geisel estate.