Christmas Quiz
Some Christmas traditions are younger than they look, and a few began as advertising.
A Christmas quiz with answers about the customs of the season: cards, crackers, songs, food and gift-bringers from different countries. It is about traditions and their surprising origins, for anyone who enjoys the holiday.
Did you know?
- 'Silent Night' was first performed on Christmas Eve 1818 in the village of Oberndorf, near Salzburg in Austria. The words were by Joseph Mohr and the melody by Franz Gruber, and it was accompanied by a guitar. It has since been translated into several hundred languages.
- Coca-Cola did not invent Santa's red suit, although the story is often repeated. Red-coated Santas appear in illustrations from the nineteenth century. What the company's advertisements, painted by Haddon Sundblom from 1931, did was to fix one warm, plump, human-sized version in the public mind.
- Since 1966 the Swedish town of Gävle has built a giant goat of straw in its main square each December, based on the small straw goats used as decorations across Scandinavia. The figure stands about thirteen metres tall and has become famous far beyond Sweden.
Where Christmas customs come from
Christmas is celebrated on 25 December in much of the world, as a religious festival for many people and as a family and cultural holiday for many others. A large share of the customs now thought of as timeless are fairly recent. Cards, crackers, electric lights and the modern picture of Santa Claus all took shape in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often helped along by printers, shops and magazines.
Gift-bringers around the world
The name Santa Claus comes from Sinterklaas, the Dutch figure who brings presents on the evening of 5 December. A poem published anonymously in New York in 1823, 'A Visit from St. Nicholas', gave him a sleigh and eight named reindeer, and the cartoonist Thomas Nast later drew his workshop at the North Pole. Other countries have their own visitors. In Russia, Ded Moroz arrives at New Year with his granddaughter Snegurochka, and in Italy an old woman called La Befana delivers sweets on the night of 5 January.
Food on the table
There is no single Christmas meal. In Britain the pudding is traditionally mixed weeks ahead, on a day nicknamed Stir-up Sunday, with each member of the family taking a turn with the spoon. Italy's tall, airy panettone comes from Milan. In Japan the seasonal cake is a light sponge with whipped cream and strawberries. Many Central European families eat fish rather than meat on Christmas Eve, and in parts of Scandinavia a bowl of rice porridge hides a single almond for one lucky guest.
Lights and greenery
Evergreen branches have long been brought indoors in winter, and candles were fixed to trees despite the obvious fire risk. In 1882 Edward Johnson, a colleague of Thomas Edison, hung eighty hand-wired red, white and blue electric bulbs on a tree in his New York home, the first known electric tree lights. Printed Advent calendars with little pictures appeared in the early 1900s, and public trees in city squares became a fixture during the twentieth century.