Surprising Facts About Your Favorite Christmas Movies
We can’t blame you for thinking you know all there is to know about your favorite beloved holiday flicks. After all, annual 24-hour marathons and Netflix access make it almost too easy to unintentionally learn every heartwarming and hilarious line.

But even the most diehard Christmas movie fanatics still have secrets to discover, from just how much actors went it took to bring storybook characters to life, to the cameos you might have missed even on your 10th viewing.

1. Now a beloved classic, It’s a Wonderful Life was a total box office flop when it was released in 1946.

2. Emma Thompson wore a fat suit while filming Love Actually.

3. Some of the Jean Shepherd stories that eventually made it to the A Christmas Story script were first published in Playboy.

4. Jim Carrey worked with a CIA specialist who trained agents to survive torture in order to get through the painful makeup process for Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

5. Then 8-year-old Natalie Wood believed her Miracle on 34th Street costar Edmund Gwenn was actually Santa Claus.

6. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, the flowing look of the Ghost of Christmas Past was achieved by submerging the puppet in a water tank.

7. According to The Nightmare Before Christmas‘ supervising animator Eric Leighton, the film was shot at 24 frames per second, meaning the characters had to be posed 24 different times for each second of the film.

8. An episode of MythBusters proved that a tongue can instantly get stuck to a freezing pole à la A Christmas Story.

9. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a hidden Mickey Mouse logo when The Santa Clause characters Scott and Charlie pass by the moon in a sleigh.

10. Will Ferrell ate so much sugar while filming Elf that he had trouble sleeping.

11. John Candy shot all of his Home Alone scenes in one long 23-hour day on set.

12. Eric Lloyd, who played Charlie in The Santa Clause, broke his front teeth in a fall right before filming and had to wear prosthetics for the shoot.

13. A Christmas Story child star Peter Billingsley was the first of thousands to audition for the role.

14. Gonzo was originally going to portray Christmas Yet to Come in The Muppet Christmas Carol. He eventually took on the role of Charles Dickens because, as director Brian Henson said, he was “the least likely character to be Charles Dickens.”

15. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer‘s stop-motion animation was produced in Japan, while most of the audio was recorded in Canada.

16. The shots of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in Miracle on 34th Street are real: Star Edmund Gwenn actually took to a float as Santa for the 1946 celebration.

17. Jim Carrey was originally slated to star in Elf.

18. The Santa Clause joke involving “1-800-SPANK-ME” caused massive problems for parents when kids discovered it connected them to an actual phone sex hotline. Some viewers who dialed the number reportedly racked up hundreds of dollars in phone bills.

19. Composer Danny Elfman still didn’t have a script when it came time to write the music for The Nightmare Before Christmas, so he based his songs only on conversations with and sketches from director Tim Burton.

20. Grown-up A Christmas Story star Peter Billingsley has an uncredited cameo in Elf.

21. Vincent Price was considered for the part of It’s a Wonderful Life villain Mr. Potter.

22. The Grinch was black-and-white in the originally Dr. Seuss book, but director Chuck Jones had the idea to make him green for the 1966 animated feature.

23. After the release of Home Alone 2, families flocked to N.Y.C.’s Plaza Hotel, where they could recreate Kevin’s adventure in Suite 411, “Kevin’s Suite,” for $1,100 a night.

24. Writer Richard Curtis first conceived Love Actually as two separate films, and had planned entire movies following the storylines of Hugh Grant and Colin Firth’s characters.

25. It’s A Wonderful Life was named the most inspirational film of all time by the American Film Institute.

26. It took The Nightmare Before Christmas team an entire week to finish shooting each minute of the completed film.

27. Macaulay Culkin’s little brother Kieran had a small role as Kevin’s bed-wetting cousin in Home Alone and Home Alone 2.

28. Flash Gordon made an appearance in a deleted fantasy scene from A Christmas Story.

29. Despite being a holiday movie, Miracle on 34th Street hit theaters in May, because 20th Century Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck believed more people went to the movies in the summer.

30. Rudolph creator Robert May considered the names Reginald and Rollo for the reindeer.
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Get the behind-the-scenes scoop on classics like A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life
A cool summer, and a cool year so far for the eastern U.S.; average for U.S. overall
The data are in, and it’s official: it was a cool summer in the eastern U.S.

“Below-average summer temperatures were observed from the Rocky Mountains to much of the central U.S. and East Coast,” reports the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in its August U.S. State of the Climate report.

For the nation as a whole, summer temperatures were near average as hotter than normal conditions in the West offset the cooler than normal conditions in the East. It was the coolest summer since 2009 for the U.S., but still a smidgen (0.3 degrees F) above the 1901-2000 average.

Conditions in August were a duller version of the summer overall. Temperatures along the West Coast were well above normal, and near to below normal east of the Rockies. Averaged across the country, August was very close to normal, 0.1 degrees F above the 1901-2000 average.

Notably, Virginia had its 10th coolest August on record dating back to 1895. North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland represented the coolest pocket of the nation with respect to normal during the month.

The weather pattern so far in 2014 has been nothing if not consistent. In every season, the western U.S. has been warmer than normal and the central and eastern U.S. has been cooler than normal. A persistent dip in jet stream in the East has facilitated the occasional polar vortex intrusion, while the so-called “ridiculously resilient ridge” in the West has blocked storms and made it bake.

Related: U.S. weather in 2014 is more bi-Polar than ever

Taking the hot West and the cool East together through the first 8 months of 2014, the temperature of the nation has balanced out “near average”, NCDC reports. As temperatures have run warmer than normal in the U.S. in recent years, 2014 marked the coldest first 8-months of a year since 1997, NCDC says.

While U.S. temperatures have averaged near the long-term average this year, the globe has been considerably warmer. Through July, the global temperature in 2014 was tied for the third warmest on record dating back to 1880.

Related: The eastern United States: A lonely cold pocket on a feverish planet

(All graphics courtesy National Climatic Data Center)
Please write a summary below.

The data are in, and it's official: it was a cool summer in the eastern U.S.