Who were the first people to celebrate Christmas Day in space?
Reader, as a self-respecting goth-adjacent person, my favourite time of the year should be Halloween. Sure, it has its charms, but my favourite time of the year is also the most wonderful time of the year, Christmas!
I adore everything about the Yuletide season, from the spirit of charity and community downwards, up to and including the weather. Give me snow, scarves and big coats or give me death. I draw the line at a lot of the music, but even then, a track as overplayed as ‘Last Christmas’ still gives me such a warm, fuzzy feeling that I’ve never willingly played a game of Whamageddon in my life. That might just be the George Michael of it all, though. However, the love of Christmas doesn’t mean I don’t understand why people hate it.
Not even for the usual reasons of over-commercialisation and the like. I understand that for a hell of a lot of people, Christmas is the loneliest time of the year. All the good tidings brought for you and your kin don’t just ring hollow for people who don’t have any kin, or who simply don’t have that relationship with their kin; they actively feel like a pretty venomous insult at its worst. There’s also the countless people for whom the holiday season isn’t a time to kick back, celebrate with their family and yam a truckload of pigs in blankets, it’s a time to work.
For most people, this will be because they don’t celebrate Christmas, and more power to them. However, there are always more people than you’d think missing out on times with their loved ones because they quite literally can’t afford not to. Thus, the whole “you’ve got to be with your family at Christmas” thing can leave a bitter taste in the mouth. One can only imagine the kind of job that would make working at Christmas worth it.
However, there’s one candidate for it that might, ironically enough, be the loneliest job of them all.
Who spent Christmas in space?
The first crewed mission to the moon actually happened one year before Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins landed on it. Apollo 8 took off mere months before Apollo 11, but rather than land on the moon, Apollo 8 and its crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders orbited the moon ten times before setting off back home. They became the first humans to ever see the dark side of the moon, and Anders took the photo Earthrise, one of the most spectacular achievements in the history of photography.
All this, combined with the fact that they, y’know, went to space and all that, probably made the fact that the Apollo 8 mission departed Earth on December 21st and returned on December 27th kind of worth it. All three men became not only the first humans to depart from the Earth’s atmosphere, not only the first humans to orbit the moon, but the first humans to spend Christmas in outer space. At the very least, they made the most of it.
The crew broadcast live to Earth’s televisions a number of times during the trip, with special care paid to the broadcasts going out on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The broadcast on December 24th saw the trio read from Genesis before wishing the world a Merry Christmas. Christmas Day saw the crew give the world a tour of their spacecraft as they began their journey back home, before discovering a few Christmas gifts of their own had been left up there by Ground Control.
Along with a few gifts from their wives, they’d also had a miniature Christmas dinner sent up to be eaten on the day. Not exactly a home-cooked turkey, but I can imagine anything would have been greatly appreciated after a week of Astronaut chow. The crew arrived home two days afterwards, safe in the knowledge that they’d found the one situation that you could work on Christmas day and still have it be (sort of) worth it.