For decades, Associated Press bureaus spit out bulletins and other breaking stories on click-clacking teletypewriters to news media worldwide.

And in the wee hours of Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, when most of the world was asleep, they also sent teletyped holiday greetings to AP members. From bureaus in New York and Kansas City, from London and Tokyo.

Computers edged teletype machines from the news business around the early 1980s. What remains – for those sentimental enough to have kept them – are delicate, detailed teletyped Christmas art, yellowed relics of technological obsolescence. Some transmissions were so special that newspapers ran the images on their front pages.

“There were some beauties I saw over the years,” recalled Ralph Pelletiere of College Point, N.Y. He’s 73 and retired from AP, where he rose from office boy to assistant communications manager.

Some of those beauties were his. He would start working on them a few months ahead, painstakingly working on graph paper to figure out the pattern of keyboard letters and spaces for proper shading.

Many were done in capital I’s and M’s, X’s, W’s, T’s and L’s. Some were double-struck for just the right effect.

“The original artwork was quite sophisticated,” said Don Robert House, a former teletype operator and repairman who founded the North American Data Communications Museum, which is now at the San Diego State University Library.

Teletype machines read a special code for every space and letter. Once typed, the result was punched paper tape – hundreds of feet long – fed into a tape reader. Finished teletyped images were about 1 to 2 feet long.

“Mine took over an hour to send,” said Pelletiere, who created and sent about 10 teletyped Christmas greetings.

One teletyped greeting from AP London in the 1960s took the operator five hours to draw an image of Queen Elizabeth and about 10 hours to figure out which type characters to use. Tape-punching took another five hours, and the image took 20 minutes to transmit.

Bill Caddell, a former AP technician and communications chief now retired in Omaha, Neb., remembered how some artists included a bell code that had the machine tap out “Jingle Bells” as their images arrived.

If news broke, transmission was interrupted. With the AP and other wire services, news was first.

But for Christmas, starting in 1944 and until teletype machines were phased out, holiday wishes greeted news gatherers like gifts from Santa in the night.

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