Christmas Facts

"Hot cockles" was a popular game at Christmas in medieval times. It was a game in which the other players took turns striking the blindfolded player, who had to guess the name of the person delivering each blow. "Hot cockles" was still a Christmas pastime until the Victorian era.

"White Christmas" (1954), starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, was the first movie to be made in Vista Vision, a deep-focus process.

"The Nutcracker" is the name for the ballet performed around Christmas time each year. "The Nutcracker Suite" is the title of the music Tchaikovsky wrote.

"Wassail" comes from the Old Norse "ves heill"--to be of good health. This evolved into the tradition of visiting neighbors on Christmas Eve and drinking to their health.

A Christmas club, a savings account in which a person deposits a fixed amount of money regularly to be used at Christmas for shopping, came about around 1905.

A traditional Christmas dinner in early England was the head of a pig prepared with mustard.

According to a 1995 survey, 7 out of 10 British dogs get Christmas gifts from their doting owners.

According to historical accounts, the first Christmas in the Philippines was celebrated 200 years before Ferdinand Magellan discovered the country for the western world, likely between the years 1280 and 1320 AD.

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, Americans buy 37.1 million real Christmas trees each year; 25 percent of them are from the nation's 5,000 choose-and-cut farms.

After "A Christmas Carol," Charles Dickens wrote several other Christmas stories, one each year, but none was as successful as the original.

Alabama was the first state to recognize Christmas as an official holiday. This tradition began in 1836.

Although many believe the Friday after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year, it is not. It is the fifth to tenth busiest day. The Friday and Saturday before Christmas are the two busiest shopping days of the year.

The "pig's head" would have been the head of a wild boar (what the French call a sanglier) in earlier times. It was traditionally served up with an apple in its mouth and was regarded as something of a delicacy. The Boar's Head Carol that used to be sung at the Christmas feasts of Queen's College, Oxford, sometimes turns up in the programme of British carol concerts:

The boar’s head in hand bear I.
Bedecked with bays and rosemary.
I pray you, my masters, be merry,
Quot estis in convivio (As many as are at the feast).

CHORUS: Caput apri defero (I bring in the boar's head),
Reddens laudes Domino (Giving praises to the Lord).

The boar’s head, as I understand
Is the chiefest dish in all this land,
Which thus bedecked with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico (serve with a song).

Our steward hath provided this
In honour of the King of Bliss,
Which on this day to be served is
Reginensi in atrio (In the hall at Queen's).

Although Christmas clubs as we know them are probably an early 20th-century invention, the Victorians had their "goose clubs", into which the poor would pay a penny or two a week when they could to get their Christmas goose (which was by then the standard Christmas fare in England). There's a quotation about them in the OED dated 1859.