Christmas around the world
Five easy, nine medium and six hard. This is the round that earns the page: almost every question is about somewhere other than the United States or Britain, which means teams cannot coast on the same twenty facts they meet every December. Read each question twice, allow twenty-five seconds rather than twenty, and take the Icelandic, Catalan and Welsh answers in writing — they are spelled nothing like they sound and a spoken answer will start an argument.
Two of the six hard ones are correction questions, where the interesting part is what is false. The Christmas pickle is sold every year as a German tradition and is not one — YouGov's German polling found 91 per cent of Germans had never heard of it. The Christmas tree question is the other: Prince Albert made the tree fashionable in Britain, but Queen Charlotte, George III's German-born queen, had one at Windsor in 1800, four decades before the famous Illustrated London News engraving. Both come up in our other Christmas sets, so if your teams have played those, swap in two from the easy round below.
If you have an international room, say at the start that answers are accepted in any language and that nobody loses a point for pronunciation. It sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between half the table competing and half the table listening.
Q1.In Iceland, thirteen mischievous figures visit children on the thirteen nights before Christmas. What are they collectively called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Yule Lads (jólasveinar)
Their names are job descriptions: Þvörusleikir is the spoon-licker, Skyrgámur the skyr glutton, Hurðaskellir the door-slammer. Thirteen is the modern standardised set — something like eighty to a hundred Yule Lad names survive in the folklore record. Their mother is the mountain troll Grýla, and the household also has the Yule Cat to worry about, said to come after anyone who has not been given new clothes.
Q2.Iceland's Jólabókaflóð, the 'Christmas book flood', is the custom of giving what on Christmas Eve?Tap to reveal
Answer: Books
The flood is a real publishing pattern: the Icelandic Publishers Association has issued a catalogue of the year's new titles, Bókatíðindi, since 1890, and the trade concentrates its releases into the weeks before Christmas. The frequently repeated claim that the custom began because paper escaped wartime rationing is a press explanation rather than a documented one.
Q3.Which fast-food chain's Japanese Christmas campaign, launched in December 1974, made fried chicken the standard Christmas Eve meal there?Tap to reveal
Answer: KFC
The company's own corporate chronology dates its first Christmas campaign to December 1974, eleven years after it entered the Japanese market. Japan had no inherited Christmas dinner to displace, so a chain was able to supply one; families now order weeks in advance.
Q4.In Catalonia, a small figurine shown squatting with his trousers down is hidden in nativity scenes. What is he called?Tap to reveal
Answer: El caganer
The name means 'the defecator'. Catalan cultural bodies describe his origins as lost rather than dated, the usual explanation is fertilising the ground for the year ahead, and the joke is affectionate rather than blasphemous — modern versions are made in the likeness of politicians and footballers.
Q5.In the Netherlands, the main evening for exchanging gifts is not 25 December. Which date is it?Tap to reveal
Answer: 5 December, the eve of St Nicholas's feast
It is called pakjesavond, parcel evening. The Dutch Sinterklaas is the direct ancestor of the English Santa Claus: the dialect form Sante Klaas travelled to New York and is attested in English by the 1770s. Belgium does it differently, with the gifts found on the morning of the 6th.
Q6.In Alpine Austria and Bavaria, which horned figure accompanies St Nicholas to deal with badly behaved children?Tap to reveal
Answer: Krampus
Children leave boots out on the evening of the 5th to be filled for the 6th, and Krampus is the other half of the visit. Church authorities in Alpine regions tried to suppress the costumed Krampus and Perchten runs from the fifteenth century onwards, without much success.
Q7.What fish is the traditional Christmas Eve main course in the Czech Republic?Tap to reveal
Answer: Carp
Fried carp with potato salad, bought from live tanks set up in the street in the days beforehand. Keeping it in the bath until it is needed is a real custom rather than a joke, though a declining one — only around a sixth of buyers now take a live fish home.
Q8.In Poland, what thin unleavened wafer is broken and shared around the table before the Wigilia supper begins?Tap to reveal
Answer: The opłatek
The meal does not start until the first star is seen, and it is meatless throughout. Twelve meatless dishes are served, one for each apostle, and a place is laid for an unexpected guest — a custom of hospitality that spread in the nineteenth century.
Q9.Which Mexican tradition re-enacts Mary and Joseph's search for lodging across the nine nights from 16 to 24 December?Tap to reveal
Answer: Las Posadas
Posada means inn. The procession sings a request for shelter from outside the door and the household sings a refusal back before finally letting them in. The seven-pointed piñata is said to stand for the seven deadly sins — that reading is traditional teaching rather than documented history.
Q10.The Philippine city of San Fernando, in Pampanga, holds a famous Christmas festival of what?Tap to reveal
Answer: Giant lanterns
The Giant Lantern Festival, Ligligan Parul. The parol lanterns are wired constructions several metres across, built by rival barangays and judged on the patterns their thousands of bulbs can be made to run through.
Q11.Which Norwegian city has given London the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree every year since 1947?Tap to reveal
Answer: Oslo
It thanks Britain for sheltering the Norwegian king and government between 1940 and 1945, and it has been sent every year since — the longest-running gift of its kind between two capitals.
Q12.'Silent Night' was first performed on Christmas Eve 1818 in which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Austria
At St Nikola in Oberndorf, near Salzburg: Joseph Mohr wrote the words two years earlier, Franz Xaver Gruber set them for voices and guitar. It was added to Austria's national inventory of intangible cultural heritage in 2011 — a national listing, not a UNESCO one.
Q13.In Ethiopia, Christmas is called Genna. On which date does it fall?Tap to reveal
Answer: 7 January
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps its own calendar, which has thirteen months and runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian, so Ethiopia's Christmas and Ethiopia's year number are both its own.
Q14.Why do the Russian, Serbian and Ethiopian churches mark Christmas on 7 January?Tap to reveal
Answer: Because they follow the Julian calendar, which currently runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian
It is not a different date for Christmas — it is 25 December, counted on a different calendar. The gap widens by three days roughly every four centuries, so it becomes fourteen days in 2100 and the observance will slide to 8 January.
Q15.Which Welsh midwinter custom involves a horse's skull, decorated and carried on a pole from house to house?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Mari Lwyd
The skull goes under a white sheet, and the party at the door and the household inside trade improvised insulting verses — the pwnco — until the household loses and everyone goes in for food and drink.
Q16.The Christmas cracker is credited to a London confectioner. What was his surname?Tap to reveal
Answer: Smith — Tom Smith
The company's own history has him bringing the Paris bonbon to London in the 1840s, replacing the almond inside with a trinket, and adding the snap only around 1860. The credit is worth qualifying: 'bonbon cracker' is attested in print by 1832, so the snapping novelty was not entirely his to invent.
Q17.The Swedish city of Gävle builds a giant straw figure each Advent that is notorious for being burned down. What animal is it?Tap to reveal
Answer: A goat
The first one went up on 1 December 1966, thirteen metres high and three tonnes of straw, and burned at midnight on New Year's Eve. It has been destroyed many times since. In Sweden the Yule goat was the gift-bringer before the tomte took the job over in the late nineteenth century.
Q18.What is the French name for the log-shaped Christmas cake?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bûche de Noël
The French dictionaries define the phrase both ways — the cake shaped like bark, and the log actually burned in the hearth, the older of the two meanings. The tidy story about a particular pastry chef inventing it in a particular year is not documented.
Q19.The British monarch's Christmas broadcast began in 1932. Which author wrote the first one?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rudyard Kipling
George V delivered it live by radio from Sandringham on Christmas Day, at the urging of the BBC's John Reith — it took years to persuade the king that the wireless was a suitable medium for a monarch.
Q20.The glass 'Christmas pickle' hidden on the tree is sold as a tradition from which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Germany
And it is not one. YouGov's German polling found 91 per cent of Germans had never heard of the custom and 2 per cent practise it. The tradition is American in everything but its claimed origin, and the origin is the selling point.
Hanukkah
Seven of these twenty are easy, nine medium and four hard, and the four hard ones are all about where the story actually comes from rather than how the festival is kept. Read each question twice and allow twenty seconds. Two need written answers: the four dreidel letters, and the two Talmudic schools in the candle-counting question.
One thing to say out loud before you start, because it changes how the round lands: Hanukkah is not a Jewish Christmas. It is a minor festival in Jewish law — work is permitted on it, which is the clearest legal marker of its rank — and its prominence in North America owes a great deal to the fact that it falls near December. The two holidays share a month and nothing else: different calendar, different story, no theological relation whatsoever.
The oil question is the one worth stopping on. The books of Maccabees describe an eight-day dedication festival and no miracle of oil at all. The cruse that burned for eight days first appears centuries later, in the Babylonian Talmud at Shabbat 21b. Josephus, writing in the first century, calls the festival Lights and gives the light of recovered liberty as the reason for the name. If a team knows this, give them the point twice over.
Q1.What does the word Hanukkah mean in Hebrew?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dedication
The Online Etymology Dictionary traces it to a root meaning 'he dedicated' — the festival is named for the rededication of the Temple, not for the lamps everyone associates with it.
Q2.How many nights does Hanukkah last?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eight
Eight nights, and one candle is added on each — which is why the lamp needs nine holders rather than eight.
Q3.Hanukkah begins on the 25th day of which month of the Hebrew calendar?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kislev
The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, so the Gregorian date wanders between late November and late December while 25 Kislev never moves. Strictly the festival begins on the eve of the 25th, as Jewish days start at sunset.
Q4.How many branches or candle holders does a Hanukkah lamp have?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nine
Eight for the nights plus one for the shamash. The Temple menorah of the Hebrew Bible had seven, which is why the nine-branched lamp has its own name.
Q5.What is the name of the extra ninth candle, used to light the others?Tap to reveal
Answer: The shamash
The word means attendant or servant. It sits higher or offset from the row precisely so that nobody miscounts which night it is.
Q6.What is the specific Hebrew name for the nine-branched Hanukkah lamp?Tap to reveal
Answer: A hanukkiah
Menorah simply means lamp and covers the seven-branched Temple lampstand as well; hanukkiah names the festival object exactly.
Q7.The Maccabean revolt was against the decrees of which Seleucid king?Tap to reveal
Answer: Antiochus IV Epiphanes
He desecrated the Temple around 167 BCE; Epiphanes was a title he took for himself, meaning roughly 'God manifest', and his opponents are said to have punned it into Epimanes, 'the mad'.
Q8.Which Maccabee led the purification and rededication of the Temple?Tap to reveal
Answer: Judah Maccabee
The rededication is traditionally dated to 164 BCE. Maccabee is usually glossed as 'hammer', though the derivation is not settled.
Q9.The story of one day's oil burning for eight days is not in the books of Maccabees. Which text is it first told in?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Babylonian Talmud (tractate Shabbat, 21b)
1 and 2 Maccabees describe an eight-day dedication festival with no oil miracle in it. The single jug that lasted eight days appears centuries later, at Shabbat 21b, which is also where the rules for lighting are set out.
Q10.Which first-century Jewish historian calls the festival simply 'Lights'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Josephus
In Antiquities of the Jews he writes that 'from that time to this we celebrate this festival, and call it Lights' — and the reason he gives is the light of liberty restored, not a lamp that would not go out.
Q11.What are the four Hebrew letters on a dreidel outside Israel?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nun, gimel, hey and shin
They are read as an acronym for nes gadol hayah sham, 'a great miracle happened there', and they also double as the rules: each letter tells the player what to do with the pot. Dreidels made in Israel swap the shin for a pey, turning 'happened there' into 'happened here'.
Q12.What fried potato pancake is eaten at Hanukkah?Tap to reveal
Answer: Latkes
The oil is the point, not the potato. Latkes are an Eastern European form; earlier versions were made with cheese, and potatoes only became cheap enough for the job in the nineteenth century.
Q13.What jam-filled doughnut is the Hanukkah sweet of choice in Israel?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sufganiyot
Same logic as the latke — food fried in oil — and Israeli bakeries turn them out by the tens of millions across the eight days.
Q14.Is Hanukkah mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew Bible?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
The events are too late for the canon. They are recorded in 1 and 2 Maccabees, which Jewish tradition did not canonise but which are part of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.
Q15.Across the eight nights, are candles added one at a time or taken away one at a time?Tap to reveal
Answer: Added, one per night
The Talmud records a genuine dispute: the House of Shammai held that you begin with eight and reduce, the House of Hillel that you begin with one and build. Hillel's view became normative practice.
Q16.Which prayer of thanksgiving 'for the miracles' is inserted into daily prayers during Hanukkah?Tap to reveal
Answer: Al HaNissim
It goes into the Amidah and the Grace After Meals. Hanukkah adds almost nothing to Jewish liturgy beyond this and the Hallel psalms, which is itself a measure of the festival's rank.
Q17.Where is the lit hanukkiah traditionally placed?Tap to reveal
Answer: At the entrance to the house — in a doorway or, commonly today, a window facing the street
The Talmud puts it at the entrance, on the outside. The purpose is pirsumei nisa, publicising the miracle, and a separate lamp is required for your own use, because these lights are for display rather than for working by.
Q18.In Jewish law, is Hanukkah a major or a minor festival?Tap to reveal
Answer: Minor
Ordinary work is permitted on every day of Hanukkah except where it falls on Shabbat, which is the plain legal test. It is not a chag in the sense that Passover or Sukkot are.
Q19.What is Hanukkah gelt?Tap to reveal
Answer: Money — now usually chocolate coins — given to children
The custom of giving coins is older than the chocolate, and it is the thread that the modern habit of Hanukkah presents was grafted onto.
Q20.The dynasty that ruled Judea after the Maccabean revolt is known by which name?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Hasmoneans
The priestly family that led the revolt founded a dynasty that ruled for roughly a century until Rome intervened — a political outcome the festival's popular telling leaves out entirely.
Kwanzaa
Six easy, nine medium, five hard. The seven principles account for seven of the twenty and they are best run as a rapid block: give the English meaning, take the Swahili name. Written answers for those seven, because pronunciation will otherwise decide points that pronunciation should not decide.
Get the frame right before the first question. Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga and it is a cultural holiday with, in his own words, an inherent spiritual quality — not a religious one, and explicitly not a substitute for anyone's religion. His own material lists observers who are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Baha'i and Hindu. It is also not an alternative to Christmas; plenty of households keep both.
One detail for accuracy's sake, since this page is the sort of thing people quote: Karenga later became a professor and chair of Black Studies — now Africana Studies — at California State University, Long Beach, but he was leading the Us Organization when he created Kwanzaa in 1966. And the set of symbols below is the seven basic symbols; the official material also lists the Bendera, the flag, alongside them.
Q1.In what year was Kwanzaa created?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1966
It was created in the aftermath of the Watts rebellion of 1965, as a deliberate act of cultural construction rather than the revival of an existing American observance.
Q2.Who created Kwanzaa?Tap to reveal
Answer: Maulana Karenga
Also known as Maulana Ron Karenga. He was leading the Us Organization at the time; the professorship and chairmanship of Black Studies at California State University, Long Beach came later.
Q3.Kwanzaa runs for seven days. Which two dates does it fall between?Tap to reveal
Answer: 26 December and 1 January
Ending on 1 January is deliberate: the last principle, Imani, is meant to be taken up on the day people are already thinking about the year ahead.
Q4.The name Kwanzaa comes from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza. What does it mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: First fruits
Karenga has described the holiday as modelled on African first-fruits harvest celebrations, naming southern African ones such as the Zulu Umkhosi, which also runs seven days.
Q5.The Swahili word kwanza has six letters. Why does Kwanzaa have seven?Tap to reveal
Answer: An extra 'a' was added so the word would have seven letters, one for each day and principle
Karenga's own account adds a human detail: seven children at an early celebration each wanted a letter to hold, and the extra 'a' gave the seventh child one.
Q6.Is Kwanzaa a religious holiday?Tap to reveal
Answer: No — it is a cultural holiday
Karenga's official material puts it as a cultural holiday with an inherent spiritual quality, observed by people of many faiths, and not a replacement for anybody's religion.
Q7.What is the collective Swahili name for Kwanzaa's seven principles?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Nguzo Saba
Literally the seven principles. One is taken up on each day of the week, in a fixed order, and the greeting of the day is answered with that day's principle.
Q8.Which principle, marked on the first day, means unity?Tap to reveal
Answer: Umoja
Karenga's formulation reaches outward in stages — family, community, nation and race — rather than stopping at the household.
Q9.Which principle means self-determination?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kujichagulia
Glossed as defining, naming, creating for and speaking for oneself. It is the second day's principle and the longest word in the set.
Q10.Which principle means collective work and responsibility?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ujima
It is framed as building and maintaining community together and making a neighbour's problems your own to solve.
Q11.Which principle means cooperative economics?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ujamaa
The word will be familiar to anyone who knows Tanzanian history: Julius Nyerere used it for his own economic programme in the 1960s.
Q12.Which principle means purpose?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nia
Stated as making the collective vocation the building and developing of community, in order to restore a people to their traditional greatness.
Q13.Which principle means creativity?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kuumba
It falls on 31 December, alongside the feast, and asks that a community be left more beautiful and more useful than it was inherited.
Q14.Which principle, marked on the seventh day, means faith?Tap to reveal
Answer: Imani
Here faith means belief in a people, their parents, teachers and leaders, and in the righteousness of their struggle — the cultural rather than devotional sense of the word.
Q15.What are the three colours of Kwanzaa?Tap to reveal
Answer: Black, red and green
They come from the flag associated with Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, with the order and interpretation adjusted in the 1960s: black for the people, red for their struggle, green for the future.
Q16.The seven candles are the mishumaa saba. How are they distributed among the three colours?Tap to reveal
Answer: One black, three red and three green
The black candle stands in the centre and is lit first, on the first day; the red are to its left and the green to its right, and the rest are lit from left to right.
Q17.What is the candle holder called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The kinara
It represents ancestry — the stalk from which the people came — which is why it is a single holder for all seven candles rather than seven separate ones.
Q18.What is the woven mat that the other symbols are set on?Tap to reveal
Answer: The mkeka
It stands for tradition and history as the foundation everything else rests on, which is why it goes down first and everything else goes on top of it.
Q19.What is the shared cup called, used to honour the ancestors?Tap to reveal
Answer: The kikombe cha umoja, the unity cup
A libation is poured and the cup passed or raised — the one part of the celebration that most visibly borrows the form of an African ritual rather than its vocabulary.
Q20.What is the name of the feast held on 31 December?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Karamu
It falls on the sixth day, the day of Kuumba, and is the communal meal the whole week builds towards.
New Year's traditions around the world
Five easy, ten medium and five hard. The five hard ones are all about calendars and time zones rather than customs, which makes them the natural block to hold for the end of the round once the food questions have settled everyone. Twenty seconds each, read twice, and take the Times Square year and the 25 March answer in writing, because they are numbers and numbers get misheard.
This round travels furthest of the six, which is the point: a New Year's quiz built only on ball drops and champagne is a quiz about one country. There is food from Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and the American South, ritual from Japan, Scotland, Brazil and Ecuador, and four questions on the plain fact that most of the world has had, or still has, a new year somewhere other than 1 January.
The Auld Lang Syne question needs a ruling before you read it. Burns wrote to George Thomson in 1793 that the song had never been in print or in manuscript 'untill I took it down from an old man's singing', so the answer wanted is that he collected it. He also conceded that two of its five stanzas were his own work, which is the detail that makes the question worth asking rather than just worth correcting.
Q1.In Spain, what do people eat one of at each of the twelve chimes of midnight?Tap to reveal
Answer: A grape
Las doce uvas de la suerte. The tidy story that Alicante growers invented the custom in 1909 to clear a glut is a hoax: the Madrid press already describes it as an established custom in the mid-1890s, and by 1897 the count is twelve and the grapes are cheap. Why twelve, and whether it counts the months or the chimes, is still argued over.
Q2.In Japan, temple bells are rung how many times to see out the old year?Tap to reveal
Answer: 108
The ritual is Joya no Kane, and 108 is the traditional count of the defilements or worldly desires that bind a person. The ringing usually starts before midnight and carries across into the new year rather than landing on the stroke.
Q3.In Denmark, what do people stand on at midnight so they can jump off it into the new year?Tap to reveal
Answer: A chair (or the sofa)
The jump is genuine and current, and younger than it sounds — roughly sixty years old. The plate-smashing at friends' doors that English listicles pair it with is not in any official Danish account of the evening; the National Museum's version of the old pranks is piling objects against a door, not breaking crockery on it.
Q4.What is New Year's Eve called in Scotland?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hogmanay
Its most enduring custom is first-footing: the first person over the threshold after midnight sets the household's luck and arrives carrying something rather than empty-handed. The Scottish National Dictionary records the preference for a dark-haired first-foot mainly in the negative — it was very unlucky to let a fair-complexioned neighbour in first.
Q5.In Ecuador and Colombia, what is set on fire at midnight to see off the old year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Effigies — monigotes in Ecuador, muñecos de año viejo in Colombia
They are stuffed with old clothes, paper and sometimes fireworks, and often built to resemble a public figure who has had a bad year. Burning the year rather than merely ending it is the idea.
Q6.In Brazil, what colour do people traditionally wear on New Year's Eve?Tap to reveal
Answer: White
For peace, and now thoroughly mainstream, though its roots are in Candomblé and Umbanda. On the beaches the night also belongs to Iemanjá, the sea goddess: flowers are floated out and jumping seven waves is the accompanying custom, seven being an Umbanda number.
Q7.In the Philippines, what shape of fruit is displayed and eaten at New Year for prosperity?Tap to reveal
Answer: Round fruit
Twelve or thirteen of them. Where twelve is used the reason is one per month; the roundness is the separate bit of symbolism, because a round fruit reads as a coin. Polka dots follow the same logic through the rest of the evening.
Q8.In Greece, what is baked into the New Year cake vasilopita for one lucky person to find?Tap to reveal
Answer: A coin — the flouri
The cake honours St Basil, whose feast is 1 January, and the story attached to it has him returning a city's valuables by baking them into loaves so each family got its own back by chance. Offices go on cutting vasilopita right through January.
Q9.In Italy, which small pulse is eaten at New Year because it looks like money?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lentils
Lentils swell as they cook, which is the second half of the symbolism — a little wealth becoming more. They are usually served with pork, itself a symbol of richness and of moving forwards rather than scratching backwards like a chicken.
Q10.In the American South, which beans are eaten on New Year's Day for luck?Tap to reveal
Answer: Black-eyed peas
Served as Hoppin' John, with collard greens alongside — the greens are the part with the documented money symbolism, standing in for folding money. The dish's roots are West African, and the peas reached the Americas through the slave trade.
Q11.In the Netherlands, what deep-fried dough balls are eaten at New Year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Oliebollen
Literally oil balls. The other Dutch fixture is the nieuwjaarsduik, a New Year's Day plunge into the sea: Scheveningen's is the largest of well over a hundred, though the first was at Zandvoort in 1960.
Q12.In which year was the first New Year's Eve ball lowered in Times Square?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1907, seeing in 1908
The Times Square celebration itself had started three years earlier with fireworks; when fireworks were banned, the New York Times replaced them with a lowered ball of iron and wood strung with light bulbs, and it has descended almost every year since.
Q13.Robert Burns denied writing 'Auld Lang Syne'. What did he say he had done with it instead?Tap to reveal
Answer: Taken it down from an old man's singing — he collected it
He wrote as much to George Thomson in 1793, having first mentioned the song in a letter of December 1788. He did concede that only three of its five stanzas were old and that two were his. It reached print in the Scots Musical Museum in 1796, after his death, and Guy Lombardo's dance band is why Americans sing it at midnight.
Q14.Which Pacific country's islands are the first in the world to enter each new year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kiribati
Specifically its Line Islands, which sit at UTC+14 — the furthest-forward time zone on earth, adopted in 1995 so the whole country would share a calendar day. Only part of Kiribati goes first: the Gilbert Islands are at UTC+12 and the Phoenix group at +13.
Q15.In 2011, which country skipped a day entirely — going straight from 29 to 31 December — by moving across the international date line?Tap to reveal
Answer: Samoa
Friday 30 December 2011 simply did not exist there. The change realigned Samoa with Australia and New Zealand, its main trading partners, after more than a century on the American side of the line. Tokelau crossed at the same moment.
Q16.The Ethiopian new year, Enkutatash, falls in which month of the Gregorian calendar?Tap to reveal
Answer: September
On 11 September in most years, and on the 12th in the Gregorian year immediately before a leap year, because the Ethiopian year just ending had a six-day thirteenth month. The Ethiopian calendar runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian, so Ethiopia's year number is not the world's.
Q17.Nowruz, the Persian new year, falls at which astronomical moment?Tap to reveal
Answer: The spring (vernal) equinox — on or about 21 March
Because it is tied to an astronomical instant rather than a calendar square, the moment is calculated to the minute. UNESCO inscribed it in 2016 and extended the listing in 2024 to thirteen states, from Anatolia to India and Mongolia.
Q18.Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, falls on the first day of which Hebrew month?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tishrei
Which puts it in September or October. Tishrei is the seventh month by the biblical count, not the first, and that is not a contradiction: rabbinic tradition recognises four separate new years, of which 1 Tishrei is the civil one.
Q19.In Russia, which figure and his granddaughter bring children presents at New Year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ded Moroz — Grandfather Frost — and Snegurochka
New Year, not Christmas, is the big Russian winter occasion. Soviet authorities dropped Christmas as a holiday at the end of the 1920s; a Pravda article of 28 December 1935 rehabilitated the tree, and the presents and the gift-bringer moved onto 1 January with it. Snegurochka as his granddaughter is the Soviet pairing — in Ostrovsky's 1873 play she is his daughter.
Q20.Until the mid-eighteenth century, the English legal year began not on 1 January but on which date?Tap to reveal
Answer: 25 March, Lady Day
The Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750 moved the start of the year to 1 January with effect from 1752 — so the year 1751 in England ran only from 25 March to 31 December. The same statute dropped eleven days from September 1752.
Winter holidays beyond the big three
Three easy, ten medium and seven hard — the hardest round on the page, and the one to keep for teams who want to be beaten. Allow twenty-five seconds and take everything in writing: lussekatter, Bandi Chhor Divas, Newgrange and Shab-e Yalda are all going to be spelled creatively and none of them should cost a point.
One date correction to state before you begin, because it is the most common error in seasonal quizzes: Diwali is not a December festival. It falls in October or November. It is here because it is a festival of lights in the broad season people mean when they say 'the holidays', not because it shares a month with Christmas, and one of the questions makes that explicit.
The magi question produces the best argument of the round, so let it. Matthew 2 gives neither a number nor any names; three comes from the three gifts, and the Catholic Encyclopedia says as much — that the Fathers who spoke of three were very likely influenced by the number of the gifts. Teams answering 'three' are giving you the tradition rather than the text, and the honest thing is to say so before you mark it.
Q1.On which date is St Lucia's Day celebrated in Sweden?Tap to reveal
Answer: 13 December
It is marked before dawn, with a procession led by a girl in a white gown and red sash wearing a crown of candles, attended by tärnor and by star boys representing the wise men. The light symbolism has a real calendar reason and a false one: Sweden kept the Julian calendar until 1753, which put Lucia night at what was then reckoned the longest night — but the date itself is simply her Roman feast day, not a solstice choice.
Q2.Which expensive spice gives Sweden's St Lucia buns, lussekatter, their yellow colour?Tap to reveal
Answer: Saffron
Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world by weight — hand-picked crocus stigmas, thousands of flowers to the pound — which makes a tray of lussekatter a genuinely extravagant thing to bake for a breakfast.
Q3.According to tradition, St Lucia was a Christian martyr from which Sicilian city?Tap to reveal
Answer: Syracuse
Her story is hagiography rather than record, but her name is the reason the day looks the way it does: Lucia comes from Lucius, and behind that is the Latin lux, light — which is how a Sicilian martyr ended up presiding over a Scandinavian festival of candles.
Q4.The name Diwali, or Deepavali, literally means a row of what?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lamps or lights
And the row is literal: oil lamps set along walls, thresholds and parapets rather than hung above them, so the outline of a building is drawn in flame.
Q5.In which two months of the Gregorian calendar does Diwali fall?Tap to reveal
Answer: October or November
It is set by a lunar month — named Kartika or Ashvina depending on the reckoning used — so it moves within that window. It is an autumn festival, and calling it an Indian Christmas gets the season and the meaning wrong in one phrase.
Q6.Over how many days is Diwali traditionally observed?Tap to reveal
Answer: Five
Each day has its own observance, with Lakshmi Puja central for many Hindus, though communities differ over which day is the main one. In West Bengal and parts of eastern India the same new-moon night is kept as Kali Puja.
Q7.Sikhs mark this same period as Bandi Chhor Divas, which commemorates the release from imprisonment of which Guru?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guru Hargobind
The sixth Guru, held at Gwalior Fort. The tradition is that he refused to leave without the fifty-two princes imprisoned alongside him, and the name means the day of liberation. For Jains the same festival marks Mahavira's attainment of liberation, and some Buddhists observe it too — one date, four sets of meanings.
Q8.Between which two dates of the Gregorian calendar does Lunar New Year always fall?Tap to reveal
Answer: 21 January and 20 February
The Chinese calendar is lunisolar: the winter solstice has to fall in the eleventh month, which pins the new year to the new moon after it and keeps it inside that window. The latest it has fallen in recent centuries is 20 February, in 1985, and it is due there again in 2033.
Q9.Which festival closes the Lunar New Year period, about fifteen days in?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Lantern Festival (Yuanxiao)
It falls on the first full moon of the new year, which is exactly why it is a fortnight after the new moon that opened the period. The travel rush around the whole forty-day season, chunyun, is the largest annual human migration on earth — billions of journeys.
Q10.What is the Mandarin name for the red envelopes of money given at Lunar New Year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hongbao
The colour matters more than the amount, and the amount is expected to avoid the number four, which in Mandarin sounds close to the word for death. Sweeping on New Year's Day is also avoided, along with throwing anything out of the house.
Q11.The Vietnamese zodiac replaces one of the twelve Chinese animals with which other animal?Tap to reveal
Answer: The cat
It takes the rabbit's place, and the likeliest explanation is phonetic — the Chinese term for that year sounds like the Vietnamese word for cat. So the same year is the Year of the Rabbit in Beijing and the Year of the Cat in Hanoi.
Q12.In the Northern Hemisphere, in which month does the winter solstice — the shortest day — fall?Tap to reveal
Answer: December
It is a moment rather than a day, the instant the Sun reaches its southernmost point, so it lands anywhere from 20 to 23 December depending on the year and your time zone. The US National Weather Service has it on the 21st every year from 2025 to 2030.
Q13.Which Irish passage tomb is built so that the winter solstice sunrise shines through a roof-box into its inner chamber?Tap to reveal
Answer: Newgrange
The Office of Public Works dates it to around 3200 BC, which makes it roughly five thousand two hundred years old and older than any part of Stonehenge. Places inside the chamber for the solstice sunrise are allocated by public lottery.
Q14.What is the Chinese winter solstice festival called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dongzhi
The name means the extreme of winter, and it belongs to the traditional system of twenty-four solar terms, which divides the year by the Sun's position rather than the Moon's. What is eaten depends where you are: glutinous rice balls, tangyuan, in the south, and dumplings in the north.
Q15.What is the Iranian winter solstice celebration, spent eating watermelon and pomegranate and staying up through the longest night, called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Shab-e Yalda (Yalda Night)
UNESCO's listing describes the last night of autumn kept with pomegranates, watermelons, nuts, poetry and storytelling. The poetry is traditionally Hafez, opened at random for a verse read as an omen — a practice with its own name, fal-e Hafez.
Q16.In Britain and much of the Commonwealth, what is the public holiday on 26 December called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Boxing Day
It is 26 December in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland the same day is officially St Stephen's Day, which is also the setting of 'Good King Wenceslas' — the feast of Stephen is the day the carol opens on.
Q17.What was the 'box' that gave Boxing Day its name?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Christmas box — money and gifts collected for servants, tradespeople and the poor
That much is documented, and the custom is older than the phrase, which the Online Etymology Dictionary records from 1809. Which box is disputed: some accounts point to the servants' collecting box, others to alms boxes in churches emptied the day after Christmas. Two things it has nothing to do with are the sport and discarded wrapping paper.
Q18.On which date does Epiphany, known in Spain and Latin America as Día de Reyes, fall?Tap to reveal
Answer: 6 January
From the Greek for manifestation, and known in English as Twelfth Day. In Spain the Three Kings rather than Santa are the traditional bringers of children's presents, and Madrid's Cabalgata de Reyes parades on the evening of the 5th.
Q19.How many magi does the Gospel of Matthew say visited the infant Jesus?Tap to reveal
Answer: It does not say — no number is given
Matthew 2 names neither a number nor any of them. Three comes from the three gifts, and Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar appear in Latin tradition only from about the seventh century; Syriac and Armenian traditions give entirely different names.
Q20.In Italy, which figure brings children presents on the night of 5 to 6 January?Tap to reveal
Answer: La Befana
An old woman who arrives by broomstick with sweets for the good and coal for the bad — a gift-bringer keyed to Epiphany rather than Christmas, which is why Italian children have historically had to wait almost two weeks longer than British ones.
An easy mixed round to warm the room up
All twenty of these are marked easy, and that is the whole design. It is printed last and it should be played first. A team that scores nothing in the first ten minutes stops playing, and no later round wins them back; a team that scores eight out of ten will sit through a hard round afterwards and enjoy losing it.
Answers are one or two words throughout, so take them aloud and move fast — ten seconds each, no writing, and the round is over in five minutes. Nothing here needs a written sheet.
Read the context after each answer even though the questions are easy. Six of these twenty carry a correction in their notes, including two of the most repeated untruths about the season, and the corrections are the reason an easy round is worth running at all rather than a way of padding the page.
Q1.Which month is named after Janus, the Roman god of doorways and beginnings?Tap to reveal
Answer: January
Janus is shown with two faces, one looking back and one forward, because a doorway works in both directions — which is why the Romans gave him the hinge of the year.
Q2.On what date do most Western churches celebrate Christmas Day?Tap to reveal
Answer: 25 December
No gospel gives a date. The 25 December observance is attested in Rome by the middle of the fourth century, and scholars still argue over whether it was calculated from the date assigned to the Annunciation or chosen against an existing midwinter festival.
Q3.What is 24 December commonly called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Christmas Eve
In much of Europe it is the main event rather than the warm-up: Germany, Poland, Sweden, the Czech Republic and much of Latin America open presents that evening and treat the 25th as the quiet day.
Q4.What colour are holly berries?Tap to reveal
Answer: Red
Only on female plants — holly is dioecious, so a holly bush that never produces berries is not failing, it is male.
Q5.Which plant, hung in a doorway, are people traditionally supposed to kiss under?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mistletoe
It is a parasite. It grows on the branches of other trees and draws water and minerals from them, which is why it stays green while its host stands bare.
Q6.What is the four-week season of preparation before Christmas in Western churches called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Advent
From the Latin adventus, 'arrival' or 'coming'. It begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, so its length varies by up to a week from year to year.
Q7.Which red-bracted plant, native to Mexico, is the standard Christmas houseplant?Tap to reveal
Answer: The poinsettia
Named for Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first United States minister to Mexico, who sent cuttings home to Philadelphia in 1828. And it is not the deadly plant of legend: Clemson University's horticulture service states plainly that poinsettias are not considered toxic, though the sap tastes foul and can irritate skin.
Q8.At what hour does the new year begin?Tap to reveal
Answer: Midnight
Midnight is a modern convention. Rome counted its civil day from midnight, but medieval Europe often reckoned the day from sunset or dawn, and several church calendars still begin the day the evening before.
Q9.What thick drink of eggs, milk, sugar and often spirits is served at holiday parties?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eggnog
The second half of the name is the puzzle: a noggin was a small wooden cup and also a measure of drink, and the drink's ancestor is the English posset, a hot mixture of milk curdled with ale or wine.
Q10.What decorated evergreen stands in the living room in December?Tap to reveal
Answer: A Christmas tree
It reached Britain from German-speaking Europe well before the Victorians — Queen Charlotte, George III's German-born queen, had one in the 1800s. Prince Albert popularised the tree; he did not introduce it.
Q11.In the carol, what is given on the first day of Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: A partridge in a pear tree
The claim that the song is a coded catechism for persecuted Catholics, each gift standing for a doctrine, has never had a shred of documentary support behind it and only starts circulating in the late twentieth century.
Q12.What hook-shaped white sweet with red stripes is hung on trees?Tap to reveal
Answer: A candy cane
The story of a Cologne choirmaster bending sugar sticks into shepherds' crooks in 1670 has no source behind it. The earliest documented canes are plain white, and the red stripes do not show up until around the turn of the twentieth century.
Q13.In the Northern Hemisphere, which month contains the shortest day of the year?Tap to reveal
Answer: December
The shortest day is not the coldest, and it is not the day of the earliest sunset either — because the solar day drifts against the clock, the earliest sunsets happen about two weeks before the solstice.
Q14.What bird is the standard centrepiece of a British or American Christmas dinner?Tap to reveal
Answer: Turkey
It is a New World bird, so no medieval European Christmas had one. Goose and, for the rich, boar or peacock held the place until turkeys arrived in the sixteenth century.
Q15.What is hung by the fireplace for Santa to fill?Tap to reveal
Answer: A stocking
The usual explanation runs back to St Nicholas of Myra and the story of gold dropped down a chimney or through a window for three dowryless sisters — the same legend that put three gold balls on the pawnbroker's sign.
Q16.Which reindeer has a red nose?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rudolph
He is younger than the other eight and was invented to sell things: Robert L. May wrote him for the Chicago department store Montgomery Ward in 1939, and Johnny Marks turned the story into the song a decade later.
Q17.What word, from a term for a joyful song, describes the Christmas songs sung from door to door?Tap to reveal
Answer: A carol
The word originally meant a ring dance with singing, which is why a carol was something you did with your feet before it was something you did with your voice.
Q18.What figure do children build out of snow, traditionally with a carrot for a nose?Tap to reveal
Answer: A snowman
They are older than they look in art history: a marginal drawing in a manuscript held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, dated to 1380, shows one being made.
Q19.What is the model of the stable and the manger, set out in homes and churches, called?Tap to reveal
Answer: A nativity scene (a crèche, or presepe in Italian)
Francis of Assisi is credited with staging the first one, a living tableau at Greccio in 1223, and the tradition of small modelled figures grew out of it in Italy.
Q20.In the Northern Hemisphere, which season holds Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa?Tap to reveal
Answer: Winter
Not everywhere, though — half the world's Christmases happen in summer, and Australian and South African carol services are outdoor evening events for that reason.
Hosting a multi-holiday quiz
A hundred and twenty questions is three sittings, not one. Read each question twice, allow twenty seconds, and a round of twenty takes about eighteen minutes including marking. The whole page is close to two hours with a break, which is longer than any room stays sharp. Pick three rounds, not six: the easy mixed round to open, one of the single-holiday rounds in the middle, and Christmas around the world or the beyond-the-big-three round to close. That runs fifty to sixty minutes and ends on a high rather than a slump.
Teams of three to five. Below three, the single-holiday rounds land unfairly — one person either knows what a shamash is or the team scores zero. Above six, the quieter half stops contributing. A mixed-background room is actually easier to run than a homogeneous one, because on any given round somebody at each table has a genuine advantage, and the advantage moves.
One point per question, no half points, nothing for spelling. That last rule matters more here than on most quiz pages: Kujichagulia, Jólabókaflóð, sufganiyot and Þvörusleikir are not going to be spelled correctly by a room with a biro, and marking them strictly turns a quiz into a transliteration exam. Take the seven Kwanzaa principles and the dreidel letters in writing anyway — not for spelling, but because they are list answers and spoken lists get half-remembered.
Read the answers aloud after each round rather than at the end. Almost every note on this page contains something the answer alone does not give you, and the notes are the reason people remember a quiz rather than just scoring one. Settling disputes one round at a time also stops them compounding into an argument about the whole evening.
The sheet prints either way, questions alone or with the answer key, so the answers can stay at the front of the room.
Getting other people's holidays right
A multi-holiday quiz has a failure mode that a Christmas quiz does not: it can be condescending without anybody intending it. Three habits avoid almost all of it.
First, do not define any holiday by its distance from Christmas. Hanukkah is not Jewish Christmas — it is a minor festival in Jewish law, work is permitted on it, and its December prominence in North America is an accident of the calendar rather than a feature of the festival. Kwanzaa is not a Black Christmas or an alternative to it; Maulana Karenga's own material describes it as a cultural holiday, observed by people who are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Baha'i and Hindu, and plenty of households keep Kwanzaa and Christmas both. Diwali is not the Indian Christmas, and it is not even in the same season — it falls in October or November.
Second, use the community's own words and get them right. The lamp is a hanukkiah, and the nine-branched Hanukkah lamp is a different object from the seven-branched Temple menorah. The Kwanzaa principles are the Nguzo Saba and they run in a fixed order, Umoja to Imani. The candleholder is the kinara and the mat is the mkeka. Getting these right costs nothing and getting them wrong is the thing people notice.
Third, be careful with dates that move. Hanukkah is fixed to 25 Kislev, Diwali to a lunar month in Ashvin or Kartika, Lunar New Year to the lunisolar calendar — all of which means the Gregorian date is different every year. Write questions about the religious calendar rather than this year's calendar, and they stay true. Every dated question on this page is either a fixed Gregorian date or a date range for exactly this reason.
And if you are unsure whether a question is a fair one to ask, the test is simple: would you be comfortable reading it out with a member of that community at the table? Most of the questions people get nervous about are fine. The ones that fail the test are usually the jokey ones.
Five holiday claims that keep being repeated
The oil miracle is the most interesting of these, because the correction makes the story better rather than smaller. The books of Maccabees describe the recapture of the Temple and an eight-day festival of dedication, and no miracle of oil appears in them at all. Josephus, writing in the first century, calls the festival Lights and explains the name by the light of liberty restored. The single jug that burned for eight days first appears in the Babylonian Talmud, at Shabbat 21b, centuries after the events. The same passage is where the rules for lighting come from, including the dispute between the House of Shammai, who held that you start with eight candles and reduce, and the House of Hillel, who held that you start with one and build. Hillel won, which is why the light grows across the week.
Coca-Cola did not invent the red Santa suit. Santa was appearing in red before the company's Haddon Sundblom campaigns began in 1931 — in Thomas Nast's illustrations for Harper's Weekly in the nineteenth century, on magazine covers, and in advertising for other brands. Coca-Cola standardised an image that already existed and made it globally uniform, which is a real achievement and a different one.
Prince Albert did not introduce the Christmas tree to Britain. He made it fashionable, largely through the 1848 Illustrated London News engraving of the royal family around theirs. But Queen Charlotte, George III's German-born queen, had a decorated tree at Windsor in 1800, and German households in Britain had them earlier still. Nor does Xmas take Christ out of Christmas: the X is the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christos, and the Online Etymology Dictionary records the abbreviation in English from 1551.
The Christmas pickle is not a German tradition. It is sold as one every year, and Germans overwhelmingly have never heard of it. The likeliest explanation is commercial: Germany exported enormous quantities of glass figural ornaments to America in the nineteenth century, including fruit and vegetable shapes, and a story of German provenance was attached to one of them because it helped it sell.
And the one that does real harm: suicides do not peak at Christmas. The figures put winter rates at or near their lowest, with spring the higher-risk season, and the claim is repeated confidently every December by people who would stop if they knew. If it comes up at your table, correct it.
Which questions to hold back for a tiebreak
A tiebreak has to end an argument rather than start one. That rules out anything with two acceptable answers, anything needing a list, and anything where pronunciation decides the point. It rules in fixed numbers and fixed dates, marked nearest without going over.
Three here do the job cleanly. The number of strikes of the temple bell on a Japanese New Year's Eve, 108, is fixed and nearest-without-going-over settles it in seconds. The number of days the Julian calendar currently runs behind the Gregorian, thirteen, is arithmetic. The year the first Christmas broadcast was made, 1932, is a matter of record.
Three to keep well away from a tiebreak, though all three are good mid-round questions. The seven Kwanzaa principles need a full list and will produce a six-out-of-seven dispute at the worst possible moment. The Talmudic tractate for the oil story is a hard question with an unfamiliar citation attached, and teams will argue about how close is close enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa?
They are three unrelated holidays that happen to share a month. Christmas is a Christian feast marking the birth of Jesus, fixed to 25 December in Western churches and 7 January in churches on the Julian calendar. Hanukkah is a Jewish festival marking the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabean revolt, beginning on 25 Kislev in the Hebrew calendar, so its Gregorian date moves every year. Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday created in the United States in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, running 26 December to 1 January and built around seven principles, the Nguzo Saba. None is a version of any other, and households often keep more than one.
Is Hanukkah the Jewish Christmas?
No, and it is worth being precise about why. Hanukkah is a minor festival in Jewish law: ordinary work is permitted on it, which is the clearest legal test of rank, and it adds very little to the liturgy. Its prominence in North America is largely a function of falling near December in a culture saturated with Christmas. The story it commemorates has no connection to Christianity at all — it predates it by roughly two centuries.
Why does the date of Hanukkah change every year?
It does not change in the Hebrew calendar, which is where it lives. Hanukkah always begins on the eve of 25 Kislev. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar — its months follow the moon and are periodically corrected against the solar year with an extra month — so a fixed Hebrew date lands on a different Gregorian date each year, anywhere from late November to late December. The same logic applies to Diwali and to Lunar New Year.
Does Diwali belong in a winter holiday quiz?
It belongs in a holiday quiz, with one correction stated out loud: Diwali is an autumn festival, falling in October or November, not a December one. If your quiz is billed as a winter or December quiz, put Diwali questions in a general holidays round rather than implying it shares the season with Christmas. It is observed by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and some Buddhists, and it means different things to each — for Jains it marks Mahavira's attainment of liberation, and Sikhs observe Bandi Chhor Divas, which commemorates Guru Hargobind's release from imprisonment at Gwalior along with fifty-two princes held with him.
How many questions should a holiday quiz have, and how long does it take?
Twenty to thirty for an office party or a family table, forty to sixty for a full quiz night. Reading each question twice and allowing twenty seconds, a round of twenty takes about eighteen minutes including marking. Three of the six rounds on this page make a sixty-minute evening. Cut whole rounds rather than thinning each one — a round that ends early feels finished, a thinned round feels flat.
Which rounds work for a mixed-age family table?
Open with the easy mixed round, then Christmas around the world, and stop. Pitch difficulty at the youngest player rather than the average one: an adult who gets an easy question right stays in the game, a child who scores nothing stops playing within two rounds. Keep the Hanukkah and Kwanzaa rounds for adults or for a group that observes them, since without that background they become guesswork rather than trivia.
Can I print these questions and answers?
Yes. The page prints as a question sheet on its own or with the answer key included. It is free, there is no account, and you can take as many rounds as you need.
