Fifty-seven years ago today, three humans did something no one had done before: they orbited the Moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders circled it ten times over twenty hours, and during that time, Anders looked back at home and said something that still matters.
"Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color quick, would you…"
What he captured—the Earthrise photograph—became what nature photographer Galen Rowell would later call "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken." In the second frame, with the Moon's barren terrain in the foreground, three-quarters of Earth floats in the void: blue, green, fragile, alone.
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Start Your News DetoxThe broadcast that Christmas Eve was the most watched television program in history at that time. Millions of people saw their planet from 250,000 miles away for the first time. It changed something. Anders himself became an atheist from the experience—seeing Earth that way, suspended in darkness, made the old certainties feel smaller.
When soldiers stopped fighting to sing
On the same date in 1914, something else happened that reminds us humans are capable of pausing the machinery of war. German troops in Belgium began decorating their trenches and singing Christmas carols. British soldiers on the other side heard the music and joined in. Within hours, men who were supposed to be killing each other were walking across no man's land, exchanging whiskey and cigars, greeting each other by name.
The Christmas Truce lasted only a few days. By December 27th, the fighting resumed. But for a moment, soldiers remembered they were human first.
A song written in hours that outlasted empires
Two hundred and seven years ago today, a parish priest named Joseph Mohr walked nearly two miles through the Austrian countryside to visit his friend Franz Xaver Gruber. Mohr had written some lyrics two years earlier and wanted them set to music for Midnight Mass.
Gruber, a schoolteacher and choirmaster, composed the melody in a few hours. That evening, "Silent Night" was sung in a simple arrangement for guitar and choir in a small church. It spread from there—folk singers from the Ziller Valley carried it across Europe, performing for emperors and czars. Within years, the song had traveled further than either man could have imagined.
For decades, Mohr's name was lost entirely. The original manuscript disappeared, and people assumed the melody came from Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven. A handwritten manuscript in Mohr's own hand wasn't discovered until 1995, finally proving what he had created. Bing Crosby's version became the third best-selling single of all time.
But Mohr's real legacy wasn't the fame. During his life, he created a fund so children from poor families could go to school. He set up a system to care for the elderly. He wrote a song that people still sing when they want to feel peace.
What these moments have in common
Earth from space. Soldiers singing instead of shooting. A simple melody that crossed continents. These aren't separate stories—they're evidence of something: humans reaching beyond what we thought possible, choosing connection over conflict, creating beauty that outlasts the moment it was made.
On December 24th, we remember that we're capable of all of it.
