Birthdays: Benjamin Disraeli, Josh Gibson- the Home Run King of the Negro Baseball Leagues, Pat Weaver-TV exec who created the Today Show and father of Sigourney Weaver, Frank Zappa, Jane Fonda is 69 , Paul Winchell the voice of Tigger and the Ant Hill Mob, Keifer Sutherland is 40, Samuel L. Jackson is 58, Florence Griffith Joyner, animator Phil Roman, Ray Romano is 49, Jeffrey Katzenberg is 58

1913-THE BIRTHDAY OF THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE-The first Crossword Puzzle appeared in the New York World.

1914- The premiere of the first feature length film comedy- Tilly’s Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and a young Charlie Chaplin.

1925- Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece Battleship Potemkin premiered in Moscow. The film's pioneering use of montage editing, particularly in the Odessa Steps Sequence, inspired a generation of filmmakers.

1933- Twentieth Century Fox signed 5-year-old Shirley Temple to a seven-year contract.

1937-Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" premiered at the Cathay Circle Theater. The first feature-length American cartoon. Many predicted Disney's Folly would fail, and many theaters refused to run it. The theater managers felt they wouldn't be able to charge adult evening ticket admissions for a cartoon. The animators were so desperate for it to be a hit they themselves fanned out across the city and pinned up the posters themselves. When the film was done the audience stood and cheered. Snow White became the box-office champ of 1938,earning 4 times more than any other film that year. The Looney Tunes crew attended the black tie opening. That night Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett were inspired to create the mouse Sniffles.

1937- Ted Healy, former vaudeville partner and founder of the Three Stooges, was killed in a barfight. He and the Stooges had long since ended their partnership and he loudly resented their growing success. One legend has it that actor Wallace Beery and some gangsters did the fatal pounding. Another rumor is one of the gangsters was young Albert Cubby Broccoli, who forty years later would produce the James Bond movies and win an Irving Thalberg Award at the 1982 Oscars. Another hood at the scene a capo for Lucky Lucciano and Healy had been dating his girlfriend Thelma Todd, who also died under mysterious circumstances.

1939- In the year that saw them signing a non-aggression pact, Adolf Hitler in Berlin sent Holiday Greetings to his new buddy Marshall Josef Stalin in Moscow. Merry Christmas you Zionist-Bolshevik UnterMenschen! Thank you and same to you, you Fascist Maggot Tool of International Capitalism!

1940- Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (44) dropped dead of a heart attack at Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham's house. She had just left the house to buy him some candy. His last words were 'Hershey bars will be fine..."

1971- Richard William's animated TV special "A Christmas Carol"


1989- Vice President Dan Quayle sent out 30,000 official Christmas cards with the word beacon misspelled- beakon.