Season of peace

Whether it's LED tree-toppers on the shelf at Urban Outfitters or a psychedelic, water-wheel-sized installation on the sales floor at Barneys New York, the peace symbol has become the unofficial symbol of this holiday season. Two long-running wars, a frenzied election cycle and the symbol's 50th birthday this year have combined to push the hippie relic into the public eye in a way it hasn't been for decades.

So this year you can have a cool yule with peace symbol ice cube trays, baby bibs and swimsuits. You can find it stitched into $250 cashmere throw pillows, enameled into $400 cuff links and hand-painted onto $2,000 purses. And just last week it was announced that Shawn Johnson, the plucky 16-year-old Olympian who back-flipped into our hearts in Beijing while sporting a dangly pair of peace sign earrings, is launching a line of peace-bedazzled leotards early next month.

Winding from the corner of Haight-Ashbury to the holiday window display at Barneys New York, what a long, strange trip it's been for the emoticon of the '60s counterculture, just three straight lines inside a circle.

According to photographer Ken Kolsbun, who has been chronicling the life and times of the symbol for the last four decades (his book with Michael S. Sweeney, "Peace: The Biography of a Symbol," was published in April), the design was the creation of a British textile designer named Gerald Holtom, who hit on the now-indelible image by melding the semaphore signals for the letters "N" (both arms down stretched at 45 degree angles) and "D" (arms parallel, left arm down, right arm up) to represent the words "nuclear disarmament." It made its public debut at a ban-the-bomb march in London's Trafalgar Square on April 4, 1958.

"Ten days later, Life magazine ran a photo from that march, which was its first appearance in the U.S.," Kolsbun said by phone. It caught on stateside, he said, thanks to the antiwar movement, which he credits with broadening the symbol's meaning beyond nuclear protest. And the symbol has been percolating through American pop culture ever since.

Its popularity seems to be cyclical, Kolsbun notes. "After the Vietnam War there was a lull, but they seemed to crop up in the '80s with the [Nuclear Weapons] Freeze Campaign, and again around the time the second Iraq war broke out. My wife and I were at a big rally in San Francisco and the symbol was all over the place," he said.