Festive facts
Six million rolls of Sellotape are sold in the run-up to Christmas. That's 369,000km of the sticky gift wrapping stuff, 55 times the length of the River Nile.
England has only known seven white Christmases in the entire twentieth century. According to the records of the Meteorological Office in London, snow fell on Christmas Day only in 1938 and 1976. (The definition of a white Christmas in England is when one snowflake falls on the roof of the London Weather Centre.)
A spiced porridge called 'frumenty' is thought to be the forerunner of the traditional, 17th century, Christmas pudding. Celtic legend claims that the harvest god Dagda, stirred a similar porridge made up of all the good things of the Earth.
December 25th was not celebrated as the birthday of Christ until the year AD 440.
Electric tree lights were first used just three years after Thomas Edison has his first mass public demonstration of electric lights back in 1879. Thomas Edison's assistant, Edward Johnson, came up with the idea of electric lights for Christmas trees in 1882. His lights were a huge hit. It took quite a few years, however, before they would be made available to the general public.
In 1895 Ralph Morris, an American telephonist, invented the string of electric Christmas lights similar to the ones we use today. The actual strings of lights had already been manufactured for use in telephone switchboards. Morris looked at the tiny bulbs and had the idea of using them on his tree.
In 1647, the English parliament passed a law that made Christmas illegal. Christmas festivities were banned by Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell, who considered feasting and revelry on what was supposed to be a holy day to be immoral. Anybody caught celebrating Christmas was arrested. The ban was lifted only when the Puritans lost power in 1660.
Postmen in Victorian England were popularly called "robins". This was because their uniforms were red. Victorian Xmas cards often showed a robin delivering Xmas mail. In the nineteenth century, the British Post Office used to deliver cards on Christmas morning.
British tradition says that a wish made while mixing the Christmas pudding will come true only if the ingredients are stirred in a clockwise direction.
At lavish Christmas feasts in the Middle Ages, swans and peacocks were often on the menu. These days popular exotic meats include kangaroo and ostrich.
In Victorian England, turkeys on their way to the Christmas market in London were supplied with leather boots for the journey. The boots protected their feet from the frozen mud of the road. Geese had to make do with a covering of tar to protect their feet.
The inventor of the Christmas cracker was Tom Smith who owned a sweet shop in London. Visiting France in the 1840's, he saw young men buying sweets wrapped in a twist of paper to give to their sweethearts. Tom did the same, adding love mottoes on small slips of paper and toys, and finally a snapper.
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