Around the holiday season, kids get excited thinking about Santa and the toys and Christmas magic he'll bring to their homes. But when actually faced with ol' Saint Nick, they're usually not quite so giddy.

As we can see in this new Cut video, "Kids Getting Their Picture Taken with Santa," these photo shoots often do not go as planned.

Watch the above video for a mix of laughter, tears, dancing and fear. 

H/T BuzzFeed

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The rearview mirror of any relationship can be blinding, particularly one that looks back on more than four decades of shared history. In "45 Years," writer/director Andrew Haigh wonders what might happen if everything a couple has known suddenly crumbles. The movie begins with Jeff (Tom Courtenay) learning that the remains of the woman he once sought to marry have been discovered some 50 years after her death. His reflectiveness sends his wife, Kate (Charlotte Rampling), for a tailspin, and she begins to wonder whether the entire marriage has been tainted by the specter of her husband's lost love. All of this occurs as they are readying a party to celebrate their 45th anniversary. 

A soft-spoken story that doesn't make grand statements about its characters, "45 Years" is a nice companion piece to Haigh's previous film, 2011's "Weekend," which followed a young gay couple as unexpected romance blossomed after a one-night stand. The Huffington Post sat down with Haigh a few weeks ago to discuss how the two projects relate, why ambiguity is essential to "45 Years" and how he feels about the fate of his HBO series, "Looking."

In many ways, this movie is the polar opposite of "Weekend." Did you write "45 Years" because you wanted to explore the inverse of what you did in "Weekend"?

It’s interesting because I do see them as very much connected as films. They are like polar opposites, but also they’re like bookends. They’re totally different, but also dealing with similar things. One is about two people trying to understand what they want by looking forward at the possibility of a relationship, and then the other one is two people trying to understand who they are and what they want by looking back at a very long-term relationship. And I always liked the idea that, in my head, if Glen and Russell from "Weekend" got together and got married, 45 years later they might be like Kate and Jeff. So there’s this strange similarity and they are both essentially two-hander relationship movies, Russell very much being the protagonist of that and Kate very much being the protagonist of this. It's two characters trying to understand their way to and within a relationship and trying to make those relationships work. 

We get very little of Kate and Jeff's backstory in "45 Years," but I understand there was more in your original script. How do you decide what to cut? The reason they don't have children, for example?

Always the biggest challenge, I suppose, is knowing what to reveal and explain and what not to reveal and explain. And in this script, I would definitely say there were scenes we didn’t put in the film that were more about backstory. You can feel it when you’re shooting, to be honest. You’re like, "I’m not going to need this scene." And they still often are very important scenes to shoot because it means as an actor they can understand the emotional trajectory of the film.

For me, I wanted the issues of children to be obviously a fundamental part of the story without overwhelming the story, and also I just love that the audience can leave a film not entirely knowing everything, even half of everything. I love that because I’m sure it’s the only way a film can keep ticking around in your head. And you find very quickly that people put themselves into the movie. I’ve come out of the cinema and screenings and seen members of my family arguing with each other about things, and I’m like, “You’re going to go home and you’re going to lie in bed tonight and you’re still going to be thinking about this.”

I walked out behind a couple discussing whether Kate and Jeff even liked each other to begin with.

Right. "Should they ever have been together?"

Exactly.

I remember my key thing was, and it was the same with "Weekend," in films and in our idealized version of what a relationship is, it’s some kind of weird perfection. It’s deep, passionate love and you care about them amazingly, but I don’t think anybody would think that in real life. We like to think that, but it’s not. It’s very, very messy. The deep core of us all is fucking mess. A total mess. And we do irrational things and we think irrationally and we feel irrationally. Things that shouldn’t destroy us do destroy us, and I love that. I love that messiness.

How much sympathy do you feel for Kate? The story is mostly told from her perspective, but she also becomes irrational about the situation at times. Or at at least that was my take. 

I like the idea of you changing your sympathies. I think it’s very much about what you would do personally. Are you the type of person who would be able to get over what’s happening? We’ve all been there. We’ve all been like, "Why am I so upset about this?" I don’t mind people feeling sympathy or lack of sympathy at certain points of the film. Hopefully, for me, by the time you get to the end of the film, you feel sympathy for Kate -- that’s the key. I feel enormous sympathy for her, even if it is irrational.

What's your attraction to relationship stories? The ones you tell always have a certain soul-searching to them. You explore similar themes with "Looking." Is that a conscientious interest? 

Absolutely. You kind of said it because I think our biggest driving force in life is for us to understand ourselves and find someone else that understands us and then try to find our place in the world. And so I think I’d never really understood how in mainstream cinema relationships are usually the stuff of romantic comedy that ends in affection.

It's like the reward at the end of a struggle.

They’re struggling, they find each other and they’re fine. But life is just not like that and so I’m really interested in that deep desire that we all have to forge relationships, whether they’re with friends or with family or with lovers or whatever it is. We are like little lost souls, desperately trying to find someone. But it could be that you find a political organization that makes you feel less alone, or it could be that you find a person. But that’s what we’re trying to do. I’m drawn to those. That is just so part of human nature to not be alone. It’s kind of as simple as that.

With that interest comes frank depictions of sex, whether it's the one-night stand as the catalyst of "Weekend" or the open-relationship talk in Season 2 of "Looking" or the great scene in "45 Years" where Kate and Jeff attempt sex for the first time in so long. That scene is an anomaly in Hollywood because we rarely see geriatric sex in all its complications. 

Sex is just very interesting to me in the different forms it can take and what it means to people. Sex when you first meet someone is very, very different than sex in a long-term relationship. I think in a long-term relationship it’s less about sex and more about reaffirming your connection. And then sex on a one-night stand is like, “Look at who I am, this is what I can do."

I never wanted to do a sex scene for the sake of doing a sex scene. It has to have a story point. Whether in “Looking,” it’s like Patrick and Richie on the day-trip episode -- that sex forges something deep between them. When Eddie and Agustín have sex and he ejaculates in his eye, there’s a story point for that. And in “45 Years,” it’s very much where they’ve had this moment of recollection and they’d been dancing downstairs and they can feel the passion of their youth again. It’s a moment of the two of them desperately trying to reconnect in that moment. And I genuinely think that if they’d been able to reconnect in that moment, the film would be very, very different. If that sex had been successful, he might just go, “You know what? I’m so sorry.” And she might have said, “Do you know what? I am too.” And they could have talked it all through. That sex scene makes me sad because it just couldn’t work and that’s just for reasons of anxiety. They haven’t had sex in a long time, and when you’ve not had sex with your partner for a long time, it’s anxious when you do it again. And the fact that they are older and physically he cannot perform in the way that he used to perform. The actors knew the importance of the scene -- they had no issues with it. I like to film sex without being explicit, in a way that feels close and intimate because that is what sex feels like to me. It’s about connection.

You were an assistant editor on "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down," movies that are pretty antithetical to your current sensibilities. Can you see a way that they might have influenced your work now?

Not really. You do those films because you want to earn some money. That’s the truth of it. But there were certain films I worked on as an assistant, like “Mister Lonely,” the Harmony Korine film, where you just see the director work and you see the choices they make. That certainly has influenced my way of thinking about films. You sit in an editing room and you look at how much footage has been shot, how many different takes and angles and coverage, and I don’t do that. If I can do a scene in one shot, it’s in one shot. Most of my shots are pretty long. I think with "Looking," what we have in the first minute is a whole episode of a traditional TV show. I like to let things breathe, I like to let things have a certain tone.

That's a lot of what's great about "Looking," but it also probably led to its demise. Ratings aren't always pretty for slow-burning shows like that.

Definitely. "Looking" was always a niche show for a niche within a niche. It’s a gay-themed show, so you’re not going to get millions of straight people watching it -- that’s the inevitability of it. That’s sad nowadays. Not all of the gay community is going to want to watch a show like that. Even in basic terms of aesthetics and how it feels, it is not going to be the right pace or the right tone that they’re looking for. I always knew that it was a certain type of show. I’m not going to turn it into something I don’t want it to be.

I never understood people who tuned out because they didn't see themselves in the show, as if there is some monolithic idea of the gay experience, or even the human experience. Or even as if that's the top priority when it comes to good fiction. Does that line of criticism bother you?

You do have to let it go because you can’t change what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean it’s easy when the response comes out. We shouldn’t be a bunch of sensitive filmmakers, but we are. We’ve all made what we thought is essentially a show about nice people trying to get happiness in their lives. Most of us who work on the show are gay -- most of the writers, most of the heads of department, most of the actors are all gay people working together, and we all love doing the show. Some of the criticism feels less about the show and more about the show people want it to be, and that can be frustrating. But in the end, it’s an argument that I can never win. I had a screening of “45 Years” the other day and a 16-year-old kid came up to me after the screening and started crying, saying how much the show had meant to him. I get that all the time. And you’ve got people in San Francisco like Armistead Maupin, who I adore, who loves the show. You’re like, “Do you know what? That’s really, for me, what matters.” It’s affecting some people and that’s what matters. What else can you do?

Did any of that criticism affect your approach going from Season 1 to Season 2. And from Season 2 to the movie?

Not necessarily. I think maybe it affected the approach slightly going into Season 2. For the movie, not whatsoever. For the movie, I felt like, “This is what we want to do.” I felt like, “We don’t listen to those things.”

Is the movie finished?

We wrapped last week.

Did HBO want to conclude with a movie, or did you have to cajole them into giving the show a proper ending?

I think the strange thing is, in their eyes, it was not about canceling the show -- it was about bringing the show to the end. And in the media it becomes “The show was canceled!” In reality, the phone call is, “We can’t go forward with another season. We want you to make a film.”

That’s great because plenty of premium-cable shows just end. HBO didn’t give “Enlightened” a movie, and there was certainly another story to tell there.

Yeah, lots just end. HBO was very, very proud of the show and loved working on the show, so they wanted as much as we did to see it come to some kind of conclusion. We weren’t concluded in Season 2. Patrick had a bad season on purpose. We want him to find some kind of ending.

"45 Years" opens Dec. 23. This interview has been edited and condensed.

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"I think this culture is very much like a dead language, without anything in common with the language spoken on the street. " French artist Jean Dubuffet proclaimed, referencing Western culture in particular. "This culture drifts further and further from daily life... It no longer has real and living roots." 

More than for any singular artwork, Dubuffet is remembered as the founder of Art Brut, literally translated to raw art, now often referred to as outsider art. The term applies to works made outside of an academic or artistic institution, often in isolation or as the result of a loosely unconventional upbringing. Art brut, at least in theory, is the unmediated result of authentic creativity, that spark that compels you to doodle on a napkin only to throw it away moments later. 

Dubuffet was born on an urban French commune to bourgeois wine merchants in 1901. At 17 years old, he moved to Paris to study painting, and before long, dispirited by academics, left to study independently. He painted on and off, finally exhibiting work in his first solo show at the age of 43. He painted people, on the subway and in the home, their rainbow-colored bodies the shapes of stacked, misshapen fruits. 

You can see a sense of art brut in his early works, before his style even had a name. The crudeness of a line, without hesitation or plan of attack. The noses shaped like upper case Ls and legs shaped like chicken drumsticks. Dubuffet wasn't aiming for a realistic representation of the spaces around him, nor was he interested in the bourgeoning intellectual movements abstracting the world through specific, lofty lenses. He was after something faster, dirtier, harder to describe or pin down, the very thing that Western culture had tried so hard to grasp it lost hold of completely.

During a trip to Chicago in 1951, Dubuffet delivered a lecture claiming that "primitive" artists -- namely children, people hospitalized for mental illnesses, prisoners, and other societal outcasts -- are the sources of true art. Art that is violent, passionate, instinctual and real. This same year, he decided to introduce his diverse art brut collection to the United States.

Dubuffet had been compiling a collection since 1945, and had accumulated nearly 1,200 works by 120 artists, some of whom were children or anonymous artists. He hoped an exhibition of some kind would stimulate the art brut movement abroad, while clearing out some space of his own. The works lived temporarily in the mansion of Dubuffet's friend, collector and artist Alfonso Ossorio, in East Hampton, Long Island, until 1962, when Dubuffet decided he wanted them back.

During its brief New York stay, Dubuffet's art brut collection lived in the same white-walled spaces as mainstream artists who'd occupied them previously. Only instead of being spaciously displayed, the works, a hodgepodge of sizes, artists and media, were tightly jammed into a room, with works leaning on walls or set down on tables. A punch-drunk colored pencil drawing by Swiss artist Aloïse Corbaz lived near a painted piece of flint made by Austrian prince Alfred Antonin Juritzky-Warberg, known as Juva.

Revisiting this nearly forgotten blip in the history of outsider art, the American Folk Art Museum is exhibiting 160 pieces by 35 artists from Dubuffet's collection, in a series titled "Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet." The lively exhibition offers a glimpse into America's early brush with a controversial genre, through the lens of an equally controversial man. 

Included in the show are the hypnotic paintings of French artist Augustin Lesage, who worked as a miner until, at the age of 35, he heard a voice in the mines telling him to paint. He started with drawings, dictated by the voices of the dead, including his sister who passed away at three years old. His first painted work stretched to 97 square feet over the course of a year. Throughout his life he created around 800 paintings, depicting imaginary architectural forms that balloon out into a kaleidoscopic oblivion. Resembling a church rotunda, teeming with various colored vines, feathers, and clouds that mutate and multiply until no space is left empty. 

Then there are the eerie drawings of Heinrich-Anton Müller, who in 1903, at the age of 34, invented a functional machine to "cut vines with the aim of grafting them." He registered the idea for a patent, but it was purportedly stolen before he had the chance. The ordeal left Müller in a psychiatric hospital, where he started drawing imaginary beasts on the facility walls. His sinewy drawing above, made from colored pencil, features a bug-eyed boy alongside a coiling snake, their compositions frazzled as if by electrical shock. Insects flock to his head and feet, while the outlines of his body appear singed like paper too close to a flame. 

The multifarious works in the collection converge on a single, if troublesome, element. They are made outside the dominion of mainstream culture, away from academic principles, intellectual play, market influence and artistic trends. They are frequently the result of what Dubuffet called "mental spurts," the kind of unmediated creative urge that all artists dream of, as primal as a shriek of pain. 

Of course, some artists' "mental spurts" are more dramatic than others. As Peter Schjeldahl points out in The New Yorker, "naïveté is never absolute." Therefore Juva, the aforementioned Austrian prince, was well-educated and never institutionalized. Similarly Russian artist Eugene Gabritschevsky, the son of a well-known bacteriologist, grew up in a privileged family that encouraged him to travel, make art and observe nature. He went to Columbia and later joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris before he was debilitated by mental illness and sent to a psychiatric hospital. 

Still, together, these works serve as examples of an unseen history of painted-over graffiti, scribbles locked in diaries, prison tattoos, childhood art projects and other overlooked art. For Dubuffet, who believed that sand was as precious as gold, there was nothing elevating the works in the Louvre above a child's chalk drawing of an imaginary friend. 

"If there is a tree in the country," Dubuffet said in his "Anticultural Position" speech, "I don't bring it into my laboratory to look at it under a microscope. I think the wind which flows through its leaves is necessary for the knowledge of the tree and cannot be separated from it, as well as the birds which are in the branches, and even the songs of these birds." 

And yet, the collection of art brut was to Dubuffet like finches to Darwin: examined, codified, removed from the files of psychiatric hospitals and the basements of anonymous homes to be analyzed and appreciated. He chronicled the works in an ethnographic fashion, keeping documents related to art brut in forty files in two cabinets. Because he didn't want to exhibit the art in the typical fine art fashion, Dubuffet isolated the works, making them available only to a limited few by appointment. In an effort to protect the art from the violence of the cultural elite, he moved them even further away from the common man. 

Also complicating Dubuffet's vision is the fact that his aesthetic inclinations weren't as revolutionary as he often made them out to be. Dubuffet published the following note, written by his friend Georges Limbour: "It is true that my feelings about culture (and its relationship to art) and, more generally, about so-called civilization, are going completely against the current and commonly accepted ideas. I could not care less about culture."

However, many culturally influential artists of the time were speaking in a language not all too different from Dubuffet's. Paul Klee's expressive and spindly drawings, Joan Miro's predilection for childhood, Dada's use of anti-establishment absurdity, Surrealism's interest in the erotic subconscious. 

And finally, as is abundantly clear from his elegantly composed texts on the subject, Dubuffet is no naive visionary. As New York Times' John Canaday wrote in 1962: "The artist who is capable of recognizing the aesthetic character of true 'art brut' is the very man least capable of reducing his cultivated perceptions to the level of pure impulse."

In his 1962 piece "Playing the Primitive," Hilton Kramer put it not so kindly, calling Dubuffet "a remarkable example of an artist riding on the wave of a feeling that his own work exploits and enlarges upon but does not itself create or in any way alter." Kramer summarizes the whole art brut obsession as Dubuffet's third and most desperate attempt to make it as an artist.

The controversy surrounding this microcosm of art brut is appropriate, given the equally thorny nature of the genre now mostly referred to as outsider art. What officially qualifies a work as such? Should it be elevated to the status of fine art or integrated into the capillaries of everyday life? Where is the line between appreciation and fetishization, celebration and exploitation?

In Dubuffet's early collection, these pressing questions were already looming, most of which still remain today. Aside from presenting a dazzling display of outsider artworks, from both well known and obscure artists, "Art Brut in America" delves into the ambiguity of a field that's only grown in complexity over time. 

"Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet" runs until January 10, 2016 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

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Although Kwanzaa is a celebration to honor African heritage within African American culture, many black people don't know what it means.

In a new BuzzFeed video, two hosts, Tristan and Kwanza (no, really, her name is Kwanza), ask their black coworkers what Kwanzaa is. Few really know as the hosts get a variation of guesses or "I don't know" from them.

"Black Christmas?" one guy offers as a response. Two people admit that though they celebrated it before, they still weren't sure what was going on.

So what is Kwanzaa?

"If you're looking for a dope holiday to celebrate after Christmas, Kwanzaa is pretty lit," the hosts say of the holiday celebrated from December 26 through January 1.

Each day, those who celebrate are greeting with the question "Habari gani," which translates to "what's the news" in Swahili. The greeting is following by someone responding with the principle of the day. 

The order of principles are as follows: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose, Kuumba (creativity) and Imani (faith).

Each principle corresponds with a candle in a kinara with three red candles, representing struggle, three green candles, representing the future and one black candle in the center, representing the people. During the celebration, the unity cup is passed to all of the family members, with the last sip being saved for the ancestors that passed away.  

Though these are the basics of celebrating this holiday, there are additional steps for preparation and activities that can make Kwanzaa ceremony special.

Asé.

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Many of this year's most notable news stories converged in Greece, as the country fell into political and financial crisis during a bitter fight over austerity and debt, while the shores of the country's islands became landing points for hundreds of thousands of refugees. 

Photos capturing people clashing with police outside of shuttered financial institutions or scrambling to beaches from rubber boats were seen around the world and drove home the tragedy of these events.

Some of the most memorable images of these crises were captured by veteran Reuters photojournalist Yannis Behrakis. This week, the Guardian named him photographer of the year for his coverage.

The WorldPost spoke with Behrakis about his work, his most memorable shots and what he hopes people take away from his images.

You’ve covered refugees for decades. Does it change your approach that the current crisis is taking place in your home country?

It was difficult, obviously, because it was happening in the middle of a huge political and financial crisis. Greece was not prepared for another big issue. But, it was also a test. I was curious and anxious to see how the Greeks would react to such a big catastrophe.

At the end of the day, I'm proud of how the Greeks handled it. I’m talking about the Greek citizens -- the fisherman, doctor or whoever was on the islands or near the border. They made refugees feel comfortable and welcomed.

A lot of Greek volunteers and people from around Europe have come to help one way or the other. A lot of people donated money. It was humanity that flourished in the catastrophe. 

It was humanity that flourished in the catastrophe.

In addition to the refugee crisis, you also covered Greece's political crisis and forest fires. What were some of the most challenging aspects of covering these stories?

The most difficult part is always your personal emotional involvement. This [financial] crisis has had an immediate impact on my family, friends and the people I know. A lot of my colleagues lost jobs, and we have the highest unemployment rate in the European Union.

In the past I used to be based in Greece and then travel to cover big stories such as war or refugee crises around the world. I'd come back to Greece and considered it a paradise. Then all of a sudden Greece became the center of global media attention, and it becomes hard to remain unbiased and cover the story. 

When you’re searching for images and for subjects in your coverage, what are some of the things that you look for?

I’m in the news business, covering hard news and breaking stories. I usually don’t have much time to look for the right light, the right face. It’s usually just a bit of instinct and inspiration, looking at the environment around me. The most important thing that I want to do is send a message.

Working for Reuters, you work for the planet. We have a billion people looking at our stories and pictures, so it’s heavy on my shoulders to be in the middle of a big story and know that all these people around the world are expecting to see the right capturing of the image.

It’s an amazing job we do by telling people what’s going on.

I want to make everyone responsible for what’s happening. What I always say is that I don’t want anyone to say "I didn’t know." I want everyone to know there is a small island in Greece that everyone is coming to as a last hope, and that this is happening. Everyone should know about it.

It’s an amazing job we do by telling people what’s going on. 

Is there a single image or day from your coverage this year that stands out to you?

It was a very rich year story-wise, and there were a lot of moments. If I were to pick a single moment or picture I would say it was from the refugee story. One image I have in my heart is the picture of a Syrian man carrying his daughter through the rain on his way to the border with Macedonia. He is wet, and he has a plastic cape which in my imagination made him look like Superman when I saw him. He kisses his daughter and it was like he was kissing the human race. It was a pure moment of love and care, and such a pure moment for humanity. This is something that’s in my heart and mind. That's the one, if I were to choose one.

Is there a part of your job that you think people don’t understand or miss?  

There is. Some people ask me, or in some cases it feels like they accuse me, saying "you see these people coming in boats and you take pictures, you should help them."

I explain there are so many people around who help them. I’m here to take a picture because this is how I help them, you look at the picture and you say "maybe I should go there and help" or "maybe I should give money to a charity."

My mission is to let people know what is happening, and I think it’s a very important mission.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

More from The WorldPost's Weekly Interview Series:

- Have We Got ISIS All Wrong?
- What Is The State Of Political Islam Today?
- Was The Libyan Intervention A Mistake?
- What Palestinian Membership In The ICC Really Means
- Naming The Dead: One Group's Struggle To Record Deaths From U.S. Drone Strikes In Pakistan

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The story of Christmas began when three wise men saw something strange in the sky and decided to investigate.

Anyone who's seen a UFO can easily relate to what those wise men might have been thinking, and that's what makes the images in these paintings so compelling.

Many unusual aerial objects depicted in paintings between the 14th to the early 18th century look, at first glance, like modern-day UFO sightings.

It's easy to wonder why artists of those long-ago centuries seemed obsessed with including these curious objects in scenes surrounding the stories of the birth and death of Jesus Christ.

The first example here is a wall mural, or fresco, from 1350, "The Crucifixion," artist unknown, in the Visoki Decani Monestary in Kosovo, Yugoslavia. Two odd-looking objects with "pilots" can be seen in the sky on both sides of Jesus.

"As odd as the details in the upper left and right sections of the Kosovo fresco may seem to modern eyes, they, in fact, refer to something readily familiar: the sun and the moon," according to Dennis Geronimus, associate professor of Italian Renaissance art and chair of the Department of Art History at New York University.

"The strangeness, to our sensibilities, no doubt lies in the fact that the two celestial bodies are personified by two crouching figures that are shown as inhabiting them: producing a kind of 'man in the moon' effect," Geronimus told HuffPost in an email.

He added that the apparent simultaneous presence of both the sun and moon, "alludes to mentions in several of the Gospels of the sky growing dark in daytime during Christ's crucifixion."

Our next painting, from 1486, is "The Annunciation with Saint Emidius," by Carlo Crivelli, that resides at the National Gallery in London. It shows a circular object shooting a thin beam of light down to the Virgin Mary.

"The golden beam descending from a cloud bank through an opening in Mary's bedroom wall, and reaching its destination at the Virgin's head, carries along its path the Holy Spirit," said Geronimus. "Characteristically, here it assumes the form of a white dove and symbolizes the incarnation.  

"The Virgin Mary is shown as being infused -- or, to put it literally, impregnated -- with the Holy Spirit, a miraculous event that will lead to the birth of Christ."

The following image is a close-up of that circular cloud bank.

Computer scientist Jacques Vallee agrees with Geronimus' take on these works of art. But he wonders why this form of symbolism seems to crop up in so many works of art from these years.

"It's certainly true that these paintings do not represent actual sightings by the artist or contemporary events of the scene," Vallee told HuffPost. Vallee and his co-author, Chris Aubeck, are about to publish an extensive update to their 2010 book, "Wonders in the Sky," which looks at reports of strange aerial objects reported by many people -- including scientists -- in pre-20th century accounts, beginning in 1879 and moving backward in time to biblical sightings.

"The value of it, scientifically, is that now we can anchor the beginning of the UFO phenomenon into real, documented history," Vallee said.

"You cannot simply say that, because somebody saw something round in the sky in medieval times, it's the same phenomenon that people see today. We are not making that statement. We're simply describing what people saw and the phenomena associated with it as a contribution to the overall study of the history of the phenomenon."

Vallee (see image below) was a principal speaker in 1978 at the only major United Nations UFO presentation in history, where he urged serious, international, unbiased research, focusing on those UFO reports considered truly unidentified.

"I think the skeptics are right in saying that many of the reports have to do with things that, today, we recognize as comets and meteors and other natural phenomena. And that's fair. We go through that and eliminate those and we keep the ones that are unidentified," Vallee said.

In the late 1960s, Vallee's early UFO research was so respected by the United States Air Force that his books were recommended reading to cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado.

He points out how many people misinterpret unexplained objects seen in old paintings. 

"We don't go into ideology. We're not saying it's proof of alien anything. We're saying there is a phenomenon and it has some of the characteristics of the modern phenomenon, and we let it go at that. You still have to account for differential descriptions because of the changes in the cultures and the changes in the media, through which the data has arrived to us." 

Our next painting to consider, from the 15th century, "Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John," is attributed to more than one artist and is located at the Palazzo Vecchio Museum in Florence, Italy. Mary, mother of Jesus, is seen looking down while, in the background, something unusual is taking place.

What appears as a domed UFO is hovering in the sky while a man and his dog are standing on a ledge staring up at it. These details are revealed in the following composite image.

"The dark blue, almond-shaped form, emitting golden rays, constitutes a symbol that was very common in the Renaissance, when this [circular panel, for private devotion] was painted," said Geronimus. 

"It alludes to the announcement of Christ's birth in Bethlehem to the shepherds, as told in the Gospel of St. Luke (2:8-14). The awed shepherd and his trusted dog are easy to spot here. Rather than depicting an angel as the divine messenger, however, this Florentine master represents the sign more naturalistically -- and obliquely: as a celestial phenomenon."

Our final Christmas painting, from 1710, "Baptism of Jesus," created by Arendt de Gelder, is at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK.

It depicts a large, circular object shooting beams of light down toward Jesus.

"The four rays that pass down from the sky to illuminate the kneeling figure of Christ, as he is baptized by St. John, refer to the divine power of the Holy Spirit, as embodied again by the white dove hovering at the center of the radiant cloud from which the rays emanate," said Geronimus.

Here's a close-up of that circular cloud with the light beams.

"What is unusual, really, about this composition is not so much the literal quality of the Holy Spirit's celestial origins, but the fact that the baptism is here imagined as seemingly a nocturnal event.

"Suffice it to say," Geronimus concludes, "none of these painted details amount to early modern UFO sightings, which isn't to say that the Kosovo muralist's or Carlo Crivelli's contemporary audiences did not believe in otherworldly beings or supernatural events." 

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Christmas is a time to be merry and bright! This is especially true in Latin America.

Every year around the holidays, cities and towns across Latin America are decked with beautiful lights, over the top firework displays, illuminated parade floats and colorful decorations. Though each place adds their own unique flare to their holiday display, one thing holds true across the board: they're all absolutely gorgeous.

In honor of the holiday season, we’ve rounded 16 photos of holiday lights and decorations from Latin American Christmases past and present.

Enjoy!

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The ladies of Twitter never fail to brighten our days with their brilliant -- but succinct -- wisdom. Each week, HuffPost Women rounds up hilarious 140-character musings. For this week's great tweets from women, scroll through the list below. Then visit our Funniest Tweets From Women page for our past collections.     

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Don't be fooled by his tough exterior -- Brantley Gilbert is channeling Santa Claus himself this year by teaming up with the educational publisher Bendon, Inc. to bring gifts to children in need. 

The country rock singer partnered with the popular children's book and toy company to help donate $10.5 million worth of merchandise to Toys for Tots, a marine organization that provides toys and other educational materials to underprivileged kids across the country.

Bendon CEO Ben Ferguson told The Huffington Post that Gilbert was "instrumental" in organizing the donation. 

"The items that we chose are brand new items featuring some of the best licenses in the world," Ferguson said. Bendon's books and toys boast a host of characters that kids love like Hello Kitty, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Dora the Explorer and more.

Gilbert's participation in the deal comes from a personal place.

“Growing up in rural Georgia, I know that sometimes Christmas isn’t a time of joy for some kids and our contribution might be all they receive this year so I really wanted our donation to matter,” Gilbert said in a statement. 

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Once the news got out that Killer Mike, Big Boi, T.I. and other rap notables were joining a legal brief to the Supreme Court, entertainment outlets jumped on the story as if it were an amusing culture clash.

Which it probably is. When the court last heard a rap-related case in December 2014, the press was all over Chief Justice John Roberts' recitation of Eminem lyrics at oral arguments. One law professor even did a mash-up of the chief and Marshall Mathers, aptly titled "Roberts and Clyde." Fun stuff.

But both cases also raise serious issues of constitutional rights -- whether you're a rap lover or someone who cares about online freedom.

In last year's dispute, a broad coalition of civil rights groups and free-speech advocates urged the court to recognize the First Amendment implications of essentially criminalizing the making of rap music and what an adverse ruling could mean for what anyone can say on the Internet.

Killer Mike himself, writing in USA Today last year, expressed concern for how the justices might rule in Elonis v. United States, which involved a man found guilty of making threats to his wife in the form of rap lyrics posted to Facebook. Killer Mike and his co-author, University of Richmond professor Erik Nielson, worried that the court could miss a bigger picture: how the law often treats rap less as an art form and more as evidence of criminality in men of color. As if some rhymes over a beat were proof of violent intent.

Roberts, writing for the 8-1 majority in Elonis, dodged all those concerns when the court ruled in June. He didn't even mention the First Amendment. The court's very narrow ruling threw dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas for a loop. Thomas chastised the majority for failing to set a workable standard for the state of mind that prosecutors must prove when going after threats made on social media, musical or not.

"This failure to decide throws everyone from appellate judges to everyday Facebook users into a state of uncertainty," Thomas wrote.

So Killer Mike is at it again. He and Nielson -- plus a cadre of other rap scholars and artists -- are pressing the Supreme Court to act in a new case that's at once very similar to Elonis and very different.

It's similar in that the new case, Bell v. Itawamba County School Board, deals with government punishment of speech made online. It's different in that this is not a criminal case, but a civil dispute involving a high school that punished a student for a rap he posted on YouTube.

Back in 2010, Taylor Bell, the black student at the center of the case, was equal parts aspiring emcee, whistleblower and caring classmate. Several girls at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, told him that two male coaches were sexually harassing them, making suggestive comments about their appearance and touching them inappropriately.

Bell decided to rap about the allegations and post the audio to Facebook and YouTube, all from the comfort of his home. In keeping with the genre, his verses were riddled with explosive rhetoric: 

This nigga telling students that they sexy, betta watch your back / I'm a serve this nigga, like I serve the junkies with some crack / Quit the damn basketball team / the coach a pervert / can't stand the truth so to you these lyrics going to hurt

Those are some of the softer lyrics. Elsewhere, there's a claim that Bell -- or rather, T-Bizzle, his stage name -- would "hit you with my rueger [sic]" or "get a pistol down your mouth." This was enough to raise alarm among school administrators and get Bell into trouble for allegedly threatening the coaches.

But neither of those gentlemen appeared at his disciplinary hearing, and no evidence that they -- or the school -- faced an actual threat was presented at the hearing. Still, Bell was suspended and placed in an alternative school to finish out the remainder of the school year.

A month later he sued the school district in federal court, claiming a violation of his First Amendment rights as they relate to off-campus speech. The law is hopelessly divided in that area, and so Bell's case wound its way through the courts until it landed before a 16-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit -- considered one of the most conservative courts in the country.

Their August ruling was all over the place. In the course of 101 pages, a majority of the judges agreed that Bell's protest rap was "incredibly profane and vulgar" and that the school didn't violate the First Amendment in suspending him.

But the judges split sharply in their reasoning, with one of them noting that "the Supreme Court has not expressly ruled" on how speech protections apply to off-campus speech by students.

Instead, all the public and the lower courts have to rely on is a 1969 case holding that schools may punish on-campus speech, so long as the speech could bring about "substantial interference" with school activities. Courts have since applied that standard inconsistently to off-campus activity.

Bell now asks the high court: To what extent does the Constitution allow schools to punish students for things they say when they're not there?

That's squarely a First Amendment question. And given the uncertainty in the lower courts, the Supreme Court should agree to hear the case. But there's also the concern Killer Mike and the rap scholars raised in their brief filed Monday: rap's place as an art form and a vehicle for social protest by African-Americans.

"If our judicial system allows these stereotypes [of rap's creators and listeners] to go unchallenged, justice will continue to be elusive for those Americans most in need of a voice -- a voice that rap music has given them," the brief argues.

Whether the justices are ready to grapple with that reality is unclear. But their voices, however unhip, could resonate loudly in cases where music may wrongly be associated with a person's character, a crime or even entire communities.

Or as Killer Mike told The New York Times when he reflected on what Bell did: "I see a kid who saw wrong happening and was outraged about it. He wrote a poem about it over a beat."

We should find out in the next few months whether that's enough for the Supreme Court to weigh in.

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As the enthusiastic yet self-aware narrator of “Jane the Virgin” let us know last week, Jane Gloriana Villanueva was not always the level-headed heroine we’ve grown to admire.

Since the show’s pilot premiered last year, Jane’s personality has been marked by a desire for control: control of her calendar, control of her increasingly tumultuous family life, control of her career prospects, which, up until she met the disruptive Rafael, didn’t stray from the practical.

You can’t really blame Jane for being Type A. Her mom Xiomara is super-doting, but repeatedly reiterates her regrets about having Jane at such a young, capricious age. This leaves Jane with a life centered on not repeating her mother’s mistakes -- but the uncontrollable events of her life seem to be working against her.

If you haven’t seen the show, here’s some complicated exposition. Bear with me for a sentence or two; it is a riff on the notoriously maudlin genre of telenovelas.

So. Jane is slated to finish school and begin working as a teacher just in time for her engagement to longtime beau Michael when -- surprise! -- she gets artificially inseminated by a loopy doctor who happens to be the sister of a dude she made out with once. Said dude, Rafael, happens to be the baby’s father, and the mom is an understandably sinister woman with whom he’s going through a divorce. Phew. 

Jane manages to take all of this, and much more, in stride, because she’s a straight-A student accustomed to being flexible and working hard. She does these things because in many ways she’s her family’s emotional bedrock; Xiomara is less mature than Jane, and Jane’s grandmother’s first language isn’t English, so she occasionally needs support outside of the house.

Jane, then, epitomizes a sort of anti-slacker girl, working against a recently established on-screen trope. Unlike Hannah on “Girls,” who waffles between dudes and life paths, or Annie from “Bridesmaids,” who’s unsettled by her best friend’s plan to settle down, Jane has her act together out of necessity.

To be clear: the slacker girl, who’s a more realistic manifestation of the idealized manic pixie dream girl, serves an important, feminist purpose. Presenting the idea that women can’t do it all, she’s morally confused or drifting either by choice or as a response to the difficult decision presented to a contemporary woman. She can choose a life of domesticity, or a seemingly freer, more independent path. That these two desires are conversationally couched as conflicting can be crippling; not choosing can feel like the most honest choice.

But, being presented with such a choice at all, rather than being expected to take on both family and work, is a uniquely privileged position. And, as the Christmas-themed episode of “Jane the Virgin” illustrated, Jane wasn’t born emotionally stable; she began acting responsibly per her grandmother’s suggestion. (Her grandmother, as a reminder, isn’t a legal citizen through much of the show, and practices responsibility mostly out of fear of deportation.)

The episode begins with a flashback of young Jane screaming and huffing at her mother, who opened an advent calendar out of order. Jane’s grandmother then shares her own anger management techniques, suggesting she think of items or memories that make her feel calm; one for each letter of the Spanish word “calma.”

Once she’s employed the technique, thinking of “abuela” for “A,” and her son Mateo for “M,” Jane’s able to regain her focus, and get back to work. Level-headedness is an exercise she works at, not a natural disposition.

But make no mistake: Jane is no supermom ideal. Most of the show’s plot involves her inability to juggle her myriad responsibilities, and the hard choices she has to make when trying to do so. This conflict is convenient for the show’s quick pace. Jane is constantly running from work or school to Rafael’s house (the two share custody of their son) to her own home to spend time with her family. The show’s writers manage to make work-life balance a fascinating, gripping plot point, mimicking the actual travails of contemporary womanhood.

As a viewer, the experience of watching Jane struggle to stay afloat is akin to a breakneck action plot. We can’t help but root for her, because if she can’t do it, there’s little hope for the lazier rest of us, who are more inclined to spend our evenings watching telenovelas than changing diapers.

You can be highbrow. You can be lowbrow. But can you ever just be brow? Welcome to Middlebrow, a weekly examination of pop culture. Sign up to receive it in your inbox weekly.

Follow Maddie Crum on Twitter: @maddiecrum

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The holidays can be rough. But no matter how politically ignorant your Aunt Susie is or how drunk and obnoxious your Uncle Mort is, at least you are not any of these unfortunate souls whose sad Christmases are forever immortalized in the archives of art history. 

Everyone who is not the girl in the red velvet. She's clearly getting most of the ham. 

Whoever is about to get this freaky doll with the small feet. Does she even have any hands? Who made this doll? 

This brooding soul. "Just one tiny book and one tiny cigarette for me, please."

The lone fellow in the pack who never wanted to hunt. He always felt a certain affinity for animals, though his father never understood his way of life. In fact, the thought of eating them makes him sick to his stomach. 

These passive aggressive grannies missing out on all the holiday cheer. I sense tension, no? 

This poor Mary who happened to go into labor at night. A dark barn does not constitute ideal birthing conditions.

This lil' guy. Pssst, dude, it looks like the sun is setting. Let's wrap it up. 

All the ladies in the house who have to ice skate in a poofy dress. That is some patriarchal bullsh*t. 

These sheep. They don't even know it's Christmas. 

This skinny ass Christmas tree. 

The man designated the official punch bowl stirrer. The punch is fine, guys. 

This bored dude with a mustache. Thirsty for a wand and a dynasty of his own... 

The smaller haystack. Sucks, man. 

Oh my god, all of these children. I don't know who to trust. 

The guy about to be trampled on by a million drunk people. No matter how much your Christmas sucks, at least you won't be at the bottom of a drunken dance-party-turned-brawl surrounded by precarious broken glass and spilled mead. 

Every so often, HuffPost Arts & Culture attempts to bring to light a few forgotten gems with our slightly humorous look back at art history. For past examples see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. 

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We're all familiar with the myth of the tortured artist.

Historically, this vision might take the form of a white dude dripping in booze, locked up in his studio, with only a paintbrush and a photo of his long lost lover to keep him company. The archetypal suffering artist, of course, is Vincent van Gogh, who battled mental illness from a young age and officially secured his spot as suffering artist par excellence when he, as the legend goes, chopped off his ear with a razor blade. 

Recently, Kathryn Graddy, professor of economics at Brandeis University, completed a study suggesting that the myth of the tortured artist was little more than that: a myth.

In a study titled "Death, Bereavement, and Creativity," Graddy analyzed sales data and museum acquisition histories for 12,000 works from 48 artists, made between 1900 and 1920. 

Specifically, she looked at how artworks made shortly after the death of a loved one fared in comparison to artworks made by the same artist in supposedly happier times. All of her subjects, as stated in the study, "experience loss through death of a close relative or friend at some point in their lives, geniuses and superstars included. This paper seeks to measure the effect of this loss on creative output."

Graddy found that artworks made during times of duress fared worse than works made in more stable periods -- meaning, they sold for significantly less at auction and were less likely to be included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.

For example, Graddy cites the fact that Pablo Picasso's iconic Blue Period is often thought to have been a direct result of his friend Carlos Casagemas' suicide. But this fruitful period in Picasso's career still pales in comparison to his "Les Femmes d’Alger," painted over 50 years later, which sold for $100 million. (The Blue Period's "La Gommeuse" only mustered $67.5 million.) 

The pattern stuck with the other 47 artists, including Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and Picasso to Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Rothko and Joan Miro: work made within one year of the death of a loved one sold for significantly less at auction. On average, 50 percent less.

OK. So the work on average is less expensive and less likely to get into The Met. But who says a work's monetary value dictates its creativity? 

"This is not a sad result, this is a happy result," Graddy told The Independent. "It would be awful if you had to suffer bereavement or a death just to be creative and productive. I’m not sure that when people think about it more deeply that they will be surprised."

If Graddy's study were solely setting out to evaluate the relationship between artists and the monetary success of their work directly following the death of a friend or family member, fine. But to extrapolate from that very specific template and infer that artists create "worse art" during supposedly concrete times of suffering seems wrong. Perhaps an artist feels paralyzed during their first year of grieving, but who is to say that sadness would subsist the following year? Or Ever? 

Furthermore, Graddy's overwhelmingly white male sample -- Agnes Martin and Alice Neel are the only women represented -- ignores countless other possible sources of suffering, including but not limited to poverty, physical disability, addiction, mental illness, marginalization and political oppression..

What about artists like Yayoi Kusama, who began painting as a child as a way to manage her visual hallucinations? "Painting saved my life," she wrote in The Telegraph. "When I wanted to commit suicide, my doctor encouraged me to paint more." Or Frida Kahlo, who turned to art after a bus accident left her with a broken spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, as well as 11 fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, a dislocated shoulder, and a punctured uterus that would never bear children. 

What about all the art made from political suffering, like the artists showing support for Ferguson, or protesting gun violence, slavery, sexism, or government oppression? 

What about the entire field of outsider art, in which art becomes the vital lifeblood of individuals facing unimaginable barriers? Artists including Madge Gill, Michel Nedjar, August Walla, Bill Traylor, Aloise Corbaz, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Lonnie Holley, James Castle -- the list goes on and on -- battling extreme mental and physical obstacles often in near total isolation, who turn to art as a space of order and solace. For artists like these, the end goal of self expression is not a sweet spot in The Met or high auction prices. How could it be when most often they don't expect their work to be seen at all?

What Graddy's study gets wrong is that most artists working during times of strife aren't trying to break auction records or break into a major museum. They're just trying to get through the day. Assuming grieving only lasts a year -- which it doesn't -- there are still numerous other opportunities for adversity to manifest itself in an artist's life.

Bottom line: Suffering isn't there to bolster creativity, creativity is there to assuage suffering. It's not about the quality of art, but the quality of life. 

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Christmas lights suck up a tiny fraction of all the electricity Americans use annually, but it's more than some developing nations consume in an entire year, researchers have found.

El Salvador, Cambodia and Tanzania are some of the countries that use less power than the seasonal lights Americans string up, according to the Center for Global Development.   

In an interview with NPR, researcher Todd Moss said that it's a useful comparison because many developing countries face pressure to use more renewable sources of energy. 

Though switching to cleaner sources of power is important, Moss said, the graph he developed with Priscilla Agyapong shows poorer countries like Nepal and Ethiopia are just a drop in the bucket compared to the U.S.

"It's pretty rich for me to sit in Washington, D.C., and tell Ghana they can't build one natural gas power plant," Moss told NPR.

Americans' holiday decorations use 6.6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, which is enough to run 14 million refrigerators, according to the researchers. But that only accounts  for 0.2 percent of total electrical usage.

Moss and Agyapong used data from the US Department of Energy and the World Bank. 

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You’re sharing a bedroom with your kid sister. Your uncle won’t stop turning the volume up on his favorite holiday CD (“Christmas With the Chipmunks”). You RSVPed “yes” to apparently endless seasonal parties despite never having had any desire to attend.

The holidays are stressful.

While many of us have time off from the workplace grind around Christmas and the New Year, that doesn’t mean we’re able to while that time away with a stack of experimental or educational books. With all the distractions and crushing anxiety, all you’re really going to want is the winter equivalent of a beach read.

Snuggle under some woolly blankets -- to guard against the chills that’ll be running up and down your spine -- and get to work on one of these 2015 thrillers. You’ll barely notice that your dad keeps trying to goad you into a debate about Donald Trump, or that your mom keeps hinting that she’s feeling pretty ready for grandkids, once you’ve been sucked into these action-packed, suspenseful stories.

The best way to celebrate the holidays -- with just a dash of danger.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

This squirm-inducing novel specializes in fostering an atmosphere -- a particularly grotesque one that may leave readers feeling vaguely in need of a shower -- but also draws readers along with a constantly mounting awareness of horrors that lie in store. The self-loathing protagonist, a young woman named Eileen who lives with her abusive alcoholic father and works at a juvenile detention center, thinks she’s found a lifeline in the form of her glamorous new coworker and friend, Rebecca. But Rebecca isn’t all that she seems -- and Eileen may not be either. Read our review.

In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

Bachelorette parties can be stressful enough, but imagine an unexpected invitation to one from an estranged friend you haven’t seen in years. One who happens to be marrying the only man you ever loved. When Nora arrives at the glass-walled cottage in the woods for Claire’s bachelorette weekend, events take an unsettling turn, and soon she’s desperately trying to figure out what the weekend is really about, and who’s pulling the strings.

Her by Harriet Lane

At first, Her is a book about friendship. Two lonely neighbors, both mothers, strike up a tentative friendship. Someone, however, is nursing a secret that could destroy their worlds, and though the sense of unease builds and penetrates their comfortable middle-class existence, the women may not realize the full extent of the danger until it’s too late.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

If you haven’t yet read the book that was repeatedly called “the next Gone Girl” yet, don’t waste any more time: It’s being adapted into a movie slated for the fall of 2016. A heart-pounding mystery novel, The Girl on the Train follows sad sack, alcoholic, divorcée Rachel as she struggles to piece together the events surrounding a murder through the haze of her booze-fueled blackouts. Read our review.

Disclaimer by Renee Knight

Books themselves turn treacherous in this thrilling story of suspense. Catherine, a successful documentarian, finds a self-published book in her home and begins reading it, only to discover that it’s a fictionalized account of a tragic event from her own past. Not only does the book make it clear that someone else knows about the secret she’s tried to forget about, it seems that the mysterious author is bent on revenge.

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

This lovely, poetic novel is the picture of a domestic thriller. Without any serial killers or gruesome plots, the family at its heart seems fated for tragedy. Anna, the wife and mother, has begun to drown her boredom and depression in a string of reckless affairs, and the consequences to her and to her family seem both unforeseeable and somehow inevitable. You won’t be able to put this down until you’ve devoured every word. Read our review.

Dragonfish by Vu Tran

Falling on the more literary end of the suspense range, Dragonfish interweaves a hardboiled noir mystery with a heartbreaking tale of the agonies and losses of migration. Robert, an Oakland cop, was left by his Vietnamese wife, Suzy, two years ago. Then she disappears, leaving behind her new Vietnamese husband, Sonny, who’s determined to find her. When Sonny conscripts Robert to track her down, the cop begins to dig, and soon he’s discovering that the secrets that made up Suzy’s past were far darker and more perilous than he imagined.

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If you don't already #FeelTheBern, these Bernie Sanders goodies will definitely turn up the heat. 

Sanders fans can count down the days to the Iowa caucus with a smokin' hot "Men Who Bern" calendar, cuddle up with a Lil' Bernie doll or flash their pride with "Bernie Sanders Is My Spirit Animal" campaign pins. 

The artists behind this swag clearly love the Vermont senator, but they're not directly associated with his campaign. And while these homemade pieces may not have the clean lines of an officially sanctioned "Chillary Clinton" beer coozy, their homespun rustic flair reflects the grassroots nature of Bernie himself.

Still, all of them aim to help Sanders get his Birkenstocked foot in the White House door. Proceeds go directly to the campaign. 

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"The Nutcracker" might be a family favorite today, but back in the 1890s, the uber-famous ballet was a critical flop.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky premiered his now internationally beloved ballet "The Nutcracker" in 1892. Choreographed by Marius Petipa and his assistant Lev Ivanov, audiences in St. Petersburg, Russia, were not particularly taken with the performance, which was loosely based on the dark E.T.A. Hoffmann story, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King."

Critics enjoyed the composition, but found the ballet and costumery itself to be lackluster. In reviews, writers singled out the Sugar Plum Fairy, harshly describing the dancer Antonietta Dell'Era as "pudgy." All in all, it was not a success. And Tchaikovsky himself never saw the ballet gain in popularity.

Skip forward a century and a quarter, and "The Nutcracker" is by and large the most beloved ballet of the holiday season. It's performed around the world as a staple of Christmas ritual, thanks almost entirely to a 20th century choreographer by the name of George Balanchine. He first staged the ballet in 1954, two decades after its debut in the United States, and his adaptation became a hit in New York City.

"The first of his five full-length ballets, this was the Nutcracker that launched the hundreds of Nutcracker ballets that now dominate America’s Decembers," Laura Jacobs writes in Vanity Fair.

Henceforth, Clara and Herr Drosselmeyer, the Nutcracker Prince and the Sugar Plum Fairy -- they became just as important a part of the winter pantheon as Frosty, the Grinch and Rudolph. In celebration of Nutcracker season, we went through the photographic archives to showcase a collection of vintage ballet snapshots. Behold, a visual history of "The Nutcracker" in 100 photos:

A version of this post originally appeared on this site last year.

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Around the holiday season, kids get excited thinking about Santa and the toys and Christmas magic he'll bring to their homes. But when actually faced with ol' Saint Nick, they're usually not quite so giddy.

As we can see in this new Cut video, "Kids Getting Their Picture Taken with Santa," these photo shoots often do not go as planned.

Watch the above video for a mix of laughter, tears, dancing and fear. 

H/T BuzzFeed

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The rearview mirror of any relationship can be blinding, particularly one that looks back on more than four decades of shared history. In "45 Years," writer/director Andrew Haigh wonders what might happen if everything a couple has known suddenly crumbles. The movie begins with Jeff (Tom Courtenay) learning that the remains of the woman he once sought to marry have been discovered some 50 years after her death. His reflectiveness sends his wife, Kate (Charlotte Rampling), for a tailspin, and she begins to wonder whether the entire marriage has been tainted by the specter of her husband's lost love. All of this occurs as they are readying a party to celebrate their 45th anniversary. 

A soft-spoken story that doesn't make grand statements about its characters, "45 Years" is a nice companion piece to Haigh's previous film, 2011's "Weekend," which followed a young gay couple as unexpected romance blossomed after a one-night stand. The Huffington Post sat down with Haigh a few weeks ago to discuss how the two projects relate, why ambiguity is essential to "45 Years" and how he feels about the fate of his HBO series, "Looking."

In many ways, this movie is the polar opposite of "Weekend." Did you write "45 Years" because you wanted to explore the inverse of what you did in "Weekend"?

It’s interesting because I do see them as very much connected as films. They are like polar opposites, but also they’re like bookends. They’re totally different, but also dealing with similar things. One is about two people trying to understand what they want by looking forward at the possibility of a relationship, and then the other one is two people trying to understand who they are and what they want by looking back at a very long-term relationship. And I always liked the idea that, in my head, if Glen and Russell from "Weekend" got together and got married, 45 years later they might be like Kate and Jeff. So there’s this strange similarity and they are both essentially two-hander relationship movies, Russell very much being the protagonist of that and Kate very much being the protagonist of this. It's two characters trying to understand their way to and within a relationship and trying to make those relationships work. 

We get very little of Kate and Jeff's backstory in "45 Years," but I understand there was more in your original script. How do you decide what to cut? The reason they don't have children, for example?

Always the biggest challenge, I suppose, is knowing what to reveal and explain and what not to reveal and explain. And in this script, I would definitely say there were scenes we didn’t put in the film that were more about backstory. You can feel it when you’re shooting, to be honest. You’re like, "I’m not going to need this scene." And they still often are very important scenes to shoot because it means as an actor they can understand the emotional trajectory of the film.

For me, I wanted the issues of children to be obviously a fundamental part of the story without overwhelming the story, and also I just love that the audience can leave a film not entirely knowing everything, even half of everything. I love that because I’m sure it’s the only way a film can keep ticking around in your head. And you find very quickly that people put themselves into the movie. I’ve come out of the cinema and screenings and seen members of my family arguing with each other about things, and I’m like, “You’re going to go home and you’re going to lie in bed tonight and you’re still going to be thinking about this.”

I walked out behind a couple discussing whether Kate and Jeff even liked each other to begin with.

Right. "Should they ever have been together?"

Exactly.

I remember my key thing was, and it was the same with "Weekend," in films and in our idealized version of what a relationship is, it’s some kind of weird perfection. It’s deep, passionate love and you care about them amazingly, but I don’t think anybody would think that in real life. We like to think that, but it’s not. It’s very, very messy. The deep core of us all is fucking mess. A total mess. And we do irrational things and we think irrationally and we feel irrationally. Things that shouldn’t destroy us do destroy us, and I love that. I love that messiness.

How much sympathy do you feel for Kate? The story is mostly told from her perspective, but she also becomes irrational about the situation at times. Or at at least that was my take. 

I like the idea of you changing your sympathies. I think it’s very much about what you would do personally. Are you the type of person who would be able to get over what’s happening? We’ve all been there. We’ve all been like, "Why am I so upset about this?" I don’t mind people feeling sympathy or lack of sympathy at certain points of the film. Hopefully, for me, by the time you get to the end of the film, you feel sympathy for Kate -- that’s the key. I feel enormous sympathy for her, even if it is irrational.

What's your attraction to relationship stories? The ones you tell always have a certain soul-searching to them. You explore similar themes with "Looking." Is that a conscientious interest? 

Absolutely. You kind of said it because I think our biggest driving force in life is for us to understand ourselves and find someone else that understands us and then try to find our place in the world. And so I think I’d never really understood how in mainstream cinema relationships are usually the stuff of romantic comedy that ends in affection.

It's like the reward at the end of a struggle.

They’re struggling, they find each other and they’re fine. But life is just not like that and so I’m really interested in that deep desire that we all have to forge relationships, whether they’re with friends or with family or with lovers or whatever it is. We are like little lost souls, desperately trying to find someone. But it could be that you find a political organization that makes you feel less alone, or it could be that you find a person. But that’s what we’re trying to do. I’m drawn to those. That is just so part of human nature to not be alone. It’s kind of as simple as that.

With that interest comes frank depictions of sex, whether it's the one-night stand as the catalyst of "Weekend" or the open-relationship talk in Season 2 of "Looking" or the great scene in "45 Years" where Kate and Jeff attempt sex for the first time in so long. That scene is an anomaly in Hollywood because we rarely see geriatric sex in all its complications. 

Sex is just very interesting to me in the different forms it can take and what it means to people. Sex when you first meet someone is very, very different than sex in a long-term relationship. I think in a long-term relationship it’s less about sex and more about reaffirming your connection. And then sex on a one-night stand is like, “Look at who I am, this is what I can do."

I never wanted to do a sex scene for the sake of doing a sex scene. It has to have a story point. Whether in “Looking,” it’s like Patrick and Richie on the day-trip episode -- that sex forges something deep between them. When Eddie and Agustín have sex and he ejaculates in his eye, there’s a story point for that. And in “45 Years,” it’s very much where they’ve had this moment of recollection and they’d been dancing downstairs and they can feel the passion of their youth again. It’s a moment of the two of them desperately trying to reconnect in that moment. And I genuinely think that if they’d been able to reconnect in that moment, the film would be very, very different. If that sex had been successful, he might just go, “You know what? I’m so sorry.” And she might have said, “Do you know what? I am too.” And they could have talked it all through. That sex scene makes me sad because it just couldn’t work and that’s just for reasons of anxiety. They haven’t had sex in a long time, and when you’ve not had sex with your partner for a long time, it’s anxious when you do it again. And the fact that they are older and physically he cannot perform in the way that he used to perform. The actors knew the importance of the scene -- they had no issues with it. I like to film sex without being explicit, in a way that feels close and intimate because that is what sex feels like to me. It’s about connection.

You were an assistant editor on "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down," movies that are pretty antithetical to your current sensibilities. Can you see a way that they might have influenced your work now?

Not really. You do those films because you want to earn some money. That’s the truth of it. But there were certain films I worked on as an assistant, like “Mister Lonely,” the Harmony Korine film, where you just see the director work and you see the choices they make. That certainly has influenced my way of thinking about films. You sit in an editing room and you look at how much footage has been shot, how many different takes and angles and coverage, and I don’t do that. If I can do a scene in one shot, it’s in one shot. Most of my shots are pretty long. I think with "Looking," what we have in the first minute is a whole episode of a traditional TV show. I like to let things breathe, I like to let things have a certain tone.

That's a lot of what's great about "Looking," but it also probably led to its demise. Ratings aren't always pretty for slow-burning shows like that.

Definitely. "Looking" was always a niche show for a niche within a niche. It’s a gay-themed show, so you’re not going to get millions of straight people watching it -- that’s the inevitability of it. That’s sad nowadays. Not all of the gay community is going to want to watch a show like that. Even in basic terms of aesthetics and how it feels, it is not going to be the right pace or the right tone that they’re looking for. I always knew that it was a certain type of show. I’m not going to turn it into something I don’t want it to be.

I never understood people who tuned out because they didn't see themselves in the show, as if there is some monolithic idea of the gay experience, or even the human experience. Or even as if that's the top priority when it comes to good fiction. Does that line of criticism bother you?

You do have to let it go because you can’t change what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean it’s easy when the response comes out. We shouldn’t be a bunch of sensitive filmmakers, but we are. We’ve all made what we thought is essentially a show about nice people trying to get happiness in their lives. Most of us who work on the show are gay -- most of the writers, most of the heads of department, most of the actors are all gay people working together, and we all love doing the show. Some of the criticism feels less about the show and more about the show people want it to be, and that can be frustrating. But in the end, it’s an argument that I can never win. I had a screening of “45 Years” the other day and a 16-year-old kid came up to me after the screening and started crying, saying how much the show had meant to him. I get that all the time. And you’ve got people in San Francisco like Armistead Maupin, who I adore, who loves the show. You’re like, “Do you know what? That’s really, for me, what matters.” It’s affecting some people and that’s what matters. What else can you do?

Did any of that criticism affect your approach going from Season 1 to Season 2. And from Season 2 to the movie?

Not necessarily. I think maybe it affected the approach slightly going into Season 2. For the movie, not whatsoever. For the movie, I felt like, “This is what we want to do.” I felt like, “We don’t listen to those things.”

Is the movie finished?

We wrapped last week.

Did HBO want to conclude with a movie, or did you have to cajole them into giving the show a proper ending?

I think the strange thing is, in their eyes, it was not about canceling the show -- it was about bringing the show to the end. And in the media it becomes “The show was canceled!” In reality, the phone call is, “We can’t go forward with another season. We want you to make a film.”

That’s great because plenty of premium-cable shows just end. HBO didn’t give “Enlightened” a movie, and there was certainly another story to tell there.

Yeah, lots just end. HBO was very, very proud of the show and loved working on the show, so they wanted as much as we did to see it come to some kind of conclusion. We weren’t concluded in Season 2. Patrick had a bad season on purpose. We want him to find some kind of ending.

"45 Years" opens Dec. 23. This interview has been edited and condensed.

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