Classic Christmas movies
Home Alone, Elf, Die Hard, A Christmas Story. The films that play on repeat from the first week of December are a shared vocabulary, which is what a quiz needs. Put a film round first. It is the warm-up, and the arguing starts early, which is the point.
Die Hard will come up. It was adapted from Roderick Thorp's 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, it takes place across a single Christmas Eve party, and reference works describe its status as a Christmas film as disputed. Do not try to settle it — make it a discussion question worth a bonus point for the best argument, then move on.
Q1.In Home Alone (1990), what is the surname of the family that accidentally leaves their son behind?Tap to reveal
Answer: McCallister
John Hughes wrote the part of Kevin specifically for Macaulay Culkin after working with him on Uncle Buck.
Q2.In It's a Wonderful Life, what is the name of the angel sent to show George Bailey what the world would be like without him?Tap to reveal
Answer: Clarence
He is introduced as a second-class angel who has not yet earned his wings, which is what the film's last line about a ringing bell refers to.
Q3.In A Christmas Story, what present does Ralphie spend the whole film campaigning for?Tap to reveal
Answer: A Red Ryder BB gun
Almost every adult he asks answers with the same warning about shooting his eye out, including the department store Santa.
Q4.What is the name of the human raised by elves at the North Pole in the 2003 film Elf?Tap to reveal
Answer: Buddy
Elf was shot largely with forced perspective and oversized sets rather than digital effects, so the size gap is mostly practical.
Q5.Which actor played Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)?Tap to reveal
Answer: Michael Caine
He said he would play the part completely straight, as if surrounded by Royal Shakespeare Company actors rather than puppets.
Q6.Die Hard takes place during an office Christmas party in which fictional Los Angeles skyscraper?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nakatomi Plaza
The building on screen is Fox Plaza in Century City, which was the film studio's own newly completed headquarters.
Q7.In the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, which real department store hires Kris Kringle as its Santa?Tap to reveal
Answer: Macy's
The court case is settled when the Post Office delivers sacks of letters addressed to Santa, which the judge treats as official recognition.
Q8.In The Santa Clause (1994), which actor plays Scott Calvin, the father obliged to take over as Santa?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tim Allen
The title is a pun on the small print on the card in the suit's pocket, which binds whoever puts the suit on.
Q9.In The Nightmare Before Christmas, what is the name of the town Jack Skellington rules over?Tap to reveal
Answer: Halloween Town
Tim Burton wrote the original poem and produced the film, but it was directed in stop motion by Henry Selick.
Q10.In Love Actually, what job does the character played by Hugh Grant hold?Tap to reveal
Answer: British Prime Minister
The film opens and closes at Heathrow Airport with footage of genuine arrivals, filmed over a week with a hidden camera crew.
Q11.In A Charlie Brown Christmas, which character explains the meaning of Christmas by reciting a passage from the Gospel of Luke?Tap to reveal
Answer: Linus
The network executives were nervous about both the scripture reading and the sparse jazz score by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
Q12.In The Polar Express, what does the boy choose as the first gift of Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: A silver sleigh bell
The film was one of the first features made entirely with performance capture, with Tom Hanks providing several separate characters.
Christmas carols and music
Silent Night, Jingle Bells, White Christmas — songs everyone can hum and almost nobody can date. The backstory is usually better than the answer.
Silent Night has a firm paper trail: Joseph Mohr wrote the German words in 1816, Franz Xaver Gruber set them to music, and it was first performed on Christmas Eve 1818 at the Nikolauskirche in Oberndorf, Austria. The part everybody repeats — that the organ had broken down, or that mice had eaten the bellows — is not established. That version traces back to a fictionalised American account published in the 1930s.
Jingle Bells is stranger. James Lord Pierpont copyrighted it as The One Horse Open Sleigh on 16 September 1857, the day after its first documented performance at Ordway Hall in Boston by the blackface minstrel performer Johnny Pell. It carried no Christmas content and only drifted into the holiday repertoire through the 1860s and 1870s. A plaque in Medford, Massachusetts claims it was written there in 1850, while the researcher Kyna Hamill proposes it was composed in Boston; where and when Pierpont wrote it is an unsettled question. The popular line that it was written for Thanksgiving rests on much thinner evidence than quiz sheets suggest.
Guinness World Records credits Bing Crosby's White Christmas — Irving Berlin's song, introduced in the 1942 film Holiday Inn — with at least 50 million copies as the best-selling single of all time, while separately listing Candle in the Wind 1997 as the best seller since the UK and US charts began, because Crosby's record predates the charts.
Q1.Which singer recorded You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch for the 1966 animated special How the Grinch Stole Christmas!?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thurl Ravenscroft
He was also the voice of Tony the Tiger, and his name was left off the credits, an omission Dr. Seuss tried to repair by writing to newspaper columnists.
Q2.In The Twelve Days of Christmas, what gift is given on the fifth day?Tap to reveal
Answer: Five gold rings
The drawn-out way that line is sung comes from Frederic Austin's 1909 arrangement, which is the version nearly everyone now knows.
Q3.Who wrote the song White Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: Irving Berlin
Bing Crosby's recording of it is generally credited as the best-selling single ever released, decades before modern streaming charts existed.
Q4.In which country was Silent Night first performed, in 1818?Tap to reveal
Answer: Austria
It was sung in the village of Oberndorf with guitar accompaniment, written by priest Joseph Mohr and schoolteacher Franz Xaver Gruber.
Q5.Which two instruments did the Gemini VI-A crew smuggle into orbit in December 1965 and play Jingle Bells on over the radio to mission control?Tap to reveal
Answer: A harmonica and sleigh bells
Wally Schirra set the prank up by radioing a deadpan report of an object in a red suit heading south, and both objects are now in the Smithsonian's collection.
Q6.Which singer had the 1949 hit recording of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gene Autry
He was reluctant to record it and did so at his wife's urging, at the end of a session when time was nearly up.
Q7.Carol of the Bells is based on a folk chant from which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ukraine
The original, Shchedryk, is a New Year well-wishing song arranged by Mykola Leontovych, and its English Christmas lyrics were added later in the United States.
Q8.Which English hymn writer wrote the words to Joy to the World?Tap to reveal
Answer: Isaac Watts
He based the text on Psalm 98 and never intended it as a Christmas carol at all; it describes Christ's return, not his birth.
Q9.Who wrote and recorded the bilingual Christmas standard Feliz Navidad in 1970?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jose Feliciano
The Puerto Rican guitarist was already famous for a slow, radically reworked version of the Doors song Light My Fire.
Q10.Which duo released Last Christmas in 1984?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wham!
The single spent decades as a famous near-miss in Britain before finally reaching number one at the start of 2021.
Q11.In which year did Mariah Carey release All I Want for Christmas Is You?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1994
It did not reach number one on the main US singles chart until December 2019, twenty-five years after it came out.
Q12.Which carol is sung in Latin as Adeste Fideles?Tap to reveal
Answer: O Come, All Ye Faithful
It is usually credited to John Francis Wade, an eighteenth-century English Catholic music copyist living in exile in France.
Q13.Whose 1946 recording turned The Christmas Song, which opens with chestnuts roasting on an open fire, into a standard?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nat King Cole
Mel Torme and Bob Wells wrote it during a July heatwave, listing wintry images in an attempt to feel cooler.
Q14.Which charity supergroup recorded Do They Know It's Christmas? in 1984?Tap to reveal
Answer: Band Aid
Bob Geldof and Midge Ure wrote it for Ethiopian famine relief, and its success led directly to the Live Aid concerts the following summer.
Christmas traditions around the world
Sweden's Saint Lucia processions, Italy's La Befana, the Philippines' Simbang Gabi. Nobody grows up knowing more than one country's Christmas, so this is the round that stops the household champion sweeping the board.
The reliably good material: a 1970s Kentucky Fried Chicken campaign made a bucket of fried chicken a Christmas order Japanese families place weeks ahead; Iceland has thirteen Yule Lads arriving one per night across the thirteen nights before Christmas; Mexico's Las Posadas runs nightly processions from 16 to 24 December; Krampus turns up on 5 December in Alpine Austria and Bavaria; and many Orthodox churches keep Christmas on 7 January, following the Julian calendar, which currently runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian one. If somebody at the table grew up with one of these, ask them instead of asking the question.
Q1.In Mexico, what is the name of the nine nights of candlelit processions leading up to Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: Las Posadas
The word means lodgings, and the processions re-enact Mary and Joseph being turned away while looking for shelter.
Q2.In Japan, which fast-food meal has become a widely booked Christmas Eve tradition?Tap to reveal
Answer: KFC fried chicken
A 1974 advertising campaign built around the slogan Kentucky for Christmas created the custom, and orders are now placed weeks in advance.
Q3.In Sweden and Norway, which saint is honoured on 13 December by a girl wearing a crown of candles?Tap to reveal
Answer: Saint Lucia
Under the old Julian calendar that date fell on the winter solstice, which is why the festival is built around light.
Q4.How many Yule Lads visit Icelandic children in the nights before Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thirteen
Each one is named for his particular mischief, such as Door-Slammer and Sausage-Swiper, and children leave a shoe on the windowsill for them.
Q5.In Catalonia, children beat a hollow decorated log with sticks until it produces sweets. What is the log called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tio de Nadal
The log is fed small scraps and covered with a blanket for days beforehand so that it has something to give.
Q6.In the Netherlands, on which date do children traditionally receive their gifts from Sinterklaas?Tap to reveal
Answer: 5 December
Sinterklaas arrives weeks earlier by steamboat in a nationally televised event, which is why the gifts come before Christmas Day.
Q7.In Ukrainian folk tradition, which creature is considered lucky when represented among the decorations on a Christmas tree?Tap to reveal
Answer: A spider
The custom comes from a tale in which spiders spun webs over a poor family's bare tree and the webs turned to silver at dawn.
Q8.In Caracas, Venezuela, how do many people famously travel to early morning Christmas Masses?Tap to reveal
Answer: On roller skates
Some streets in the city are closed to cars in the early hours so that skaters can get to church safely.
Q9.Which vegetable-shaped glass ornament is widely sold as an old German Christmas tradition?Tap to reveal
Answer: A pickle
The first child to spot it on the tree is promised an extra gift, but the custom is documented mainly in the United States and is largely unknown in Germany.
Q10.In Norwegian folk custom, which household item is hidden away on Christmas Eve so that witches cannot take it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Brooms
Christmas Eve was believed to be a night when spirits roamed, so anything a witch might ride was locked out of sight.
Q11.The Philippine city of San Fernando holds an annual Christmas festival famous for what?Tap to reveal
Answer: Giant lanterns
The star-shaped parol represents the Star of Bethlehem and is the country's central Christmas decoration, hung in windows nationwide.
Q12.In Austria and Bavaria, what is the name of the horned figure who accompanies Saint Nicholas and deals with badly behaved children?Tap to reveal
Answer: Krampus
Krampus parades are held on the night of 5 December, with hand-carved wooden masks that are often handed down within families.
Q13.In Britain, what is traditionally hidden inside a Christmas pudding?Tap to reveal
Answer: A silver coin
Whoever finds it is promised luck for the year, and the pudding itself is traditionally mixed on Stir-up Sunday, weeks in advance.
Symbols and history
The tree, the mistletoe, the stocking, the man in the red suit. Each has a documented history and a tidier false one that travels faster. Nicholas himself was a fourth-century bishop of Myra, in what is now Antalya province in Turkey; his feast day is 6 December, and the story that made him a gift-giver has him throwing purses of gold through a poor man's window on three successive nights so that the daughters could marry.
Dates worth having to hand, because they are what people ask about afterwards: England's Puritan rulers banned Christmas in 1647 and the ban held until the Restoration in 1660; Boston outlawed the observance in 1659 and revoked it in 1681; Christmas became a United States federal holiday on 28 June 1870; and the first commercial Christmas card was commissioned by Henry Cole in London in 1843 and illustrated by John Callcott Horsley.
Q1.Which Christmas plant, associated with kissing, is a parasite that lives on the branches of other trees?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mistletoe
Its English name comes from old words meaning dung and twig, because birds spread the sticky seeds in their droppings.
Q2.The poinsettia is named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, who shipped cuttings home while serving as the first United States minister to which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mexico
He sent the plant to his South Carolina greenhouses in the 1820s, though locally it was already known as flor de Nochebuena, the Christmas Eve flower.
Q3.Which Roman midwinter festival is most often cited as an influence on later Christmas customs?Tap to reveal
Answer: Saturnalia
It involved feasting, gift-giving and reversals of rank between masters and servants, though historians still argue about how much passed directly into Christmas.
Q4.How many wise men does the Gospel of Matthew say visited the infant Jesus?Tap to reveal
Answer: It gives no number
The familiar total of three comes from the three gifts listed, gold, frankincense and myrrh, and the names Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar were added centuries later.
Q5.Which royal consort helped popularise the Christmas tree in Britain after an 1848 newspaper illustration?Tap to reveal
Answer: Prince Albert
The engraving of the royal family around a decorated tree in the Illustrated London News was quickly copied by middle-class households on both sides of the Atlantic.
Q6.Which 1843 novella by Charles Dickens did more than any other book to shape the modern idea of Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: A Christmas Carol
Dickens wrote it in roughly six weeks and published it at his own expense; the first printing sold out within days.
Q7.Which soft drink company's advertising from the 1930s onwards helped standardise the image of a plump, red-suited Santa?Tap to reveal
Answer: Coca-Cola
Haddon Sundblom painted those ads, but red-and-white Santas had already appeared in American magazines decades earlier, so the company popularised rather than invented the look.
Q8.The 1823 poem beginning with the line about the night before Christmas is usually credited to which author?Tap to reveal
Answer: Clement Clarke Moore
The poem is what fixed the eight named reindeer in popular culture, and its authorship is still contested by descendants of Henry Livingston Jr.
Q9.Saint Nicholas, the historical figure behind Santa Claus, was a bishop in a city that lies in which modern country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Turkey
He was bishop of Myra in ancient Lycia, and his reputation for secret gift-giving is the root of the stockings-by-the-chimney story.
Q10.Which country sends a large Christmas tree to London's Trafalgar Square every year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Norway
The tree has been given annually since 1947 as thanks for British support during the Second World War, and it is cut from forests near Oslo.
Q11.In the abbreviation Xmas, what does the X stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Greek letter chi
Chi is the first letter of Christos in Greek, and the shorthand appears in church manuscripts centuries before anyone accused it of taking Christ out of Christmas.
Hosting Christmas trivia night
Fifty questions read aloud, with a beat for arguing, runs forty-five minutes to an hour. Under six people, play as individuals. Between six and sixteen, use teams of three or four — teams beat individuals at a Christmas table because they absorb the person who did not want to play. Above twenty, keep teams at four and appoint a second scorer.
Score one point per question and resist multipliers. The commonest way a Christmas quiz dies is a runaway leader by round two. Announce the scores only after the second and fourth rounds, and give the trailing team first refusal on anything the leaders miss. Mixed ages need a rule rather than goodwill: let any team pass twice per round without penalty, which lets a table with a seven-year-old on it stop guessing and keep playing.
When time runs short, cut whole rounds rather than trimming every round. Keep the first and the last — the first is the warm-up everyone can play, the last is the shortest at eleven questions and makes a clean finish. Never cut the closing questions of a round already under way; somebody will have committed to a comeback, and they will notice.
Which questions get missed, and what to hold back for a tiebreak
Hosts learn to predict misses by the shape of a question rather than its subject, and three shapes account for most of them. Negative questions come first. Anything phrased as which of these was not — and this set has several — tends to get missed more often than the same fact asked positively, because players recognise a familiar name and answer before they have processed the not. Read those twice and lean on the word, or you are testing listening rather than knowledge.
Questions wanting an exact figure, a full name, or three rules in the right order split a room cleanly: a team either knows it or does not, with no partial credit and nothing to argue about. That makes them tiebreak stock, so pull two or three out of the rounds before you start. So does the credited-versus-assumed question, where the famous name attached to something is not the person who did it.
Do not save the hardest question for the tiebreak; save the most decisive one. A tiebreak nobody can answer only moves the problem along.
The history behind the answers — including the parts that are wrong
Christmas attracts bad history more than any subject a quiz can cover, because the false versions are charmingly told and get repeated by people who are careful about everything else.
Coca-Cola did not invent the red Santa suit. Haddon Sundblom's advertisements from 1931 fixed the modern look in place, but red-suited Santas were already in wide circulation: Thomas Nast's drawings for Harper's Weekly, from 1863 onwards, did much to fix the familiar figure, Puck magazine ran covers with a red-and-white Santa in his current form in the first years of the twentieth century, and White Rock Beverages used colour Santa advertisements in 1923-25.
Why 25 December was chosen is genuinely unsettled. The version everybody has heard — that the date was picked to absorb Saturnalia or the feast of Sol Invictus — is one of two serious hypotheses. The rival calculation hypothesis starts from the traditional dating of the Annunciation to 25 March and counts nine months forward. The Chronograph of 354 does name 25 December as the birthday of Sol Invictus. Anyone telling you the question is settled is telling you their preference.
Xmas is not a modern erasure. The X is the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christos; a form of the abbreviation appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle around 1100, and Xmas itself is attested in English by 1721.
Prince Albert did not bring the Christmas tree to Britain. Queen Charlotte, German-born, had one at a children's party in 1800. Albert made it national: the 1848 Illustrated London News engraving of the royal family around a tree at Windsor was copied everywhere, and its 1850 republication in Godey's Lady's Book carried the fashion to America.
Rudolph is true history, usually told wrong. Robert L. May wrote him in 1939 as a giveaway booklet for the retailer Montgomery Ward, which handed out 2.4 million copies in the first year. The song is a separate creation from a decade later, written by his brother-in-law Johnny Marks and recorded by Gene Autry in 1949.
Two smaller ones. The candy cane story about a Cologne choirmaster bending sugar sticks into shepherds' crooks in 1670 has no trace before the mid-twentieth century; stick candy is documented from 1837 and a recipe for white peppermint sticks with coloured stripes appears in 1844. And the claim that The Twelve Days of Christmas was a coded catechism for persecuted Catholics has nothing behind it — none of the listed items would have distinguished a Catholic from a Protestant.
One last correction, and the most important. The line about suicides peaking at Christmas is false, and repeating it does harm. CDC and National Center for Health Statistics figures put suicide rates in the United States at their lowest in the winter months and highest in spring and summer, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center has tracked news outlets repeating the myth year after year.
Adapting it for a family table, an office party, a classroom or a video call
Family table. Play between courses rather than after the meal: one round with the starters, one with the main, one with the pudding. Attention collapses once everyone has eaten, and a quiz spread across the meal keeps people at the table. Print two copies, one with the answer key for whoever is reading.
Office party. Assume half the room does not know the other half and draw team names out of a hat; the quiz is the excuse for the mixing. Two rounds and twenty minutes, early enough that nobody has had enough to drink to start disputing answers. A film round beats a carol round here, because it depends less on where somebody grew up.
Classroom. Rounds of five rather than thirteen, everyone answering on paper and marking a neighbour's sheet. The history above is the part worth teaching, and it comes with a ready-made task: find a Christmas claim repeated everywhere and check whether it holds up. The Coca-Cola Santa story is the ideal first exercise.
Video call. Halve the questions and double the time allowed. Cross-talk destroys buzzer-style play, so run it written — read the question, everyone types an answer into the chat on a count of three, score from the log afterwards. Share your screen with the question visible, because much of the difficulty on a call is simply mishearing it.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should I host a Christmas trivia night?
Any evening when the people you want are already in the room. Given a free choice, early to mid December is best: it comes before travel and the run of gatherings take over the diary. Length matters more than the date: fifty questions read aloud takes about an hour, which is the ceiling for most rooms.
What categories should Christmas trivia cover?
Films, music, world traditions, food and history make a solid five. Weight it towards film and music when the group is mixed, and keep the history to the surprising end of it — the Puritan ban, the real Saint Nicholas of Myra — rather than dates for their own sake.
Where can I find more Christmas trivia questions?
This set is free, needs no signup, and carries the answer under every question. The related Christmas articles listed alongside it cover films, songs and a printable set separately, so you can build a longer night from several rounds without repeating a question.
Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
The host decides, which is why it makes a better discussion question than a scored one. The facts are not in dispute: it is set across a single Christmas Eve party, and reference works describe its status as a Christmas film as disputed.
How many questions should a Christmas quiz have?
Thirty to fifty for a full evening. If you have less time, drop whole rounds rather than shortening each one — a round that ends early feels unfinished, while one fewer round goes unnoticed.
Which Christmas facts should I keep out of a quiz?
The ones that are wrong: that Coca-Cola invented the red Santa suit, that Prince Albert brought the Christmas tree to Britain, that Xmas takes Christ out of Christmas, and that the church certainly chose 25 December to displace Saturnalia. And never the claim that suicides peak at Christmas — the figures put winter rates at their lowest, and repeating it does real harm.
