Christmas history and origins (hard mode)
Everyone knows Santa comes down the chimney. Far fewer know which retailer invented Rudolph, or why cadets at West Point once rioted over eggnog.
Nicholas is the safest ground here: a fourth-century bishop of Myra in Lycia, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey, near the modern town of Demre. Two stories attached to him are thinner than their retelling suggests. His attendance at the Council of Nicaea rests on a few late lists and is doubted by most historians, and the tale of him striking the heretic Arius first appears in the fourteenth century.
The 1647 ban wants the same care. Parliament abolished the Christmas feast days by ordinance, and Cromwell was a leading figure on the winning side, but he did not become Lord Protector until 1653 — the ban belongs to Parliament and the Puritan cause rather than to one man's decree. It also failed, and open celebration returned with the monarchy in 1660.
Rudolph, by contrast, survives checking almost exactly as told. Robert L. May wrote the booklet for Montgomery Ward in 1939 and the store gave away 2.4 million copies in the first year. What gets garbled is the framing: Ward was not inventing the Christmas giveaway, it had been buying booklets in each year and wanted a cheaper one it owned outright, and May nearly settled on Rollo, then Reginald. The eggnog riot has its own footnote — some seventy cadets were implicated, Jefferson Davis among them, though he escaped court-martial.
Q1."Jingle Bells" was originally written for which holiday?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thanksgiving
James Lord Pierpont published it in 1857 as "The One Horse Open Sleigh." The Thanksgiving origin is the traditional account and rests on later recollection rather than contemporary evidence; the song has no Christmas reference in its lyrics either.
Q2.What was the first song ever broadcast from space?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Jingle Bells"
Gemini 6 astronauts played it on a smuggled harmonica and sleigh bells in December 1965.
Q3.St. Nicholas, the bishop who inspired Santa Claus, lived in Myra — in which modern-day country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Turkey
Nicholas was a 4th-century Greek bishop in Lycia, on the Mediterranean coast of today's Turkey.
Q4.Which ancient Roman December festival contributed gift-giving and feasting customs to Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: Saturnalia
Saturnalia honored the god Saturn with banquets, gifts and role reversals in late December.
Q5.Under which English leader did Parliament ban Christmas celebrations in 1647?Tap to reveal
Answer: Oliver Cromwell
Puritans considered the feasting sinful; the ban was lifted with the monarchy's restoration in 1660.
Q6.Who commissioned the first commercial Christmas card in London in 1843?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sir Henry Cole
Cole was too busy to write letters, so he had artist John Callcott Horsley design 1,000 printed cards.
Q7.Which two of Santa's reindeer are named after the German words for thunder and lightning?Tap to reveal
Answer: Donner and Blitzen
The 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" originally called them Dunder and Blixem.
Q8.Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created in 1939 as a promotion for which retailer?Tap to reveal
Answer: Montgomery Ward
Copywriter Robert L. May wrote the booklet, and the store gave away 2.4 million copies the first year.
Q9.In 1826, cadets at which US military academy rioted after smuggling whiskey in for eggnog?Tap to reveal
Answer: West Point
The "Eggnog Riot" led to the court-martial of 20 cadets and one enlisted soldier; future Confederate president Jefferson Davis was among those implicated but not charged.
Christmas around the world
Thirteen trolls, a defecating log and a queue outside a fried-chicken shop. Christmas gets strange once you leave the Hallmark set, and this is the round where the well-travelled guest outscores the film obsessive.
The Yule Lads are older and messier than their tidy modern form. Grýla, an ogress from much older folklore, and her husband Leppalúði had a brood whose number varied by region until a 1932 poetry collection fixed the canonical thirteen. They arrive one a night from 12 December and leave gifts in shoes set on the windowsill, or a rotten potato for a child who has earned one.
Two answers can be sharpened. The Trafalgar Square tree is specifically a gift from the city of Oslo, sent every year since 1947. And the Oaxaca radish festival is no accidental folk survival — the mayor formalised the competition in 1897, and the radishes are deliberately over-fertilised and left in the ground long past harvest.
The poinsettia question hides a myth worth killing at the table. The plant is genuinely Mexican, cuetlaxóchitl in Nahuatl, and Joel Roberts Poinsett began sending cuttings to his South Carolina greenhouses possibly as early as 1826. It is not dangerous: a review of more than twenty thousand calls to poison centres found no fatalities, and the murderous reputation traces to an unverified 1919 story. The KFC answer is true while its usual origin story is not documented — the campaign dates from the 1970s, but the anecdote about a foreigner in Tokyo pining for turkey comes from the company itself.
Q1.In which country is a KFC dinner a hugely popular Christmas tradition?Tap to reveal
Answer: Japan
A 1974 "Kentucky for Christmas" campaign stuck, and families now order their buckets weeks in advance.
Q2.How many Yule Lads visit children in Icelandic folklore during the Christmas season?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thirteen
The mischievous brothers, with names like Spoon-Licker and Door-Slammer, arrive one per night before Christmas.
Q3.Which horned Alpine companion of St. Nicholas punishes naughty children on December 5?Tap to reveal
Answer: Krampus
Krampusnacht is still celebrated in Austria and Bavaria with parades of costumed, chain-rattling demons.
Q4.In Catalonia, children feed and care for the Tió de Nadal, a log that does what on Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: It "poops" out presents and sweets
Kids beat the blanket-covered log with sticks while singing, ordering it to deliver turrón and small gifts.
Q5.Which kindly witch delivers gifts to children in Italy on the eve of Epiphany?Tap to reveal
Answer: La Befana
Legend says she declined to join the Magi, regretted it, and has been delivering gifts ever since.
Q6.Which country has donated the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree to London every year since 1947?Tap to reveal
Answer: Norway
The tree is an annual thank-you for British support of Norway during World War II.
Q7.The poinsettia, the classic Christmas plant, is native to which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mexico
It's named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first US minister to Mexico, who sent cuttings home in the 1820s.
Q8.Which country's Christmas season famously kicks off in September, at the start of the "ber months"?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Philippines
Carols hit malls on September 1, giving the Philippines one of the longest Christmas seasons on Earth.
Q9.In Oaxaca, Mexico, December 23 is celebrated with a festival dedicated to carving which vegetable?Tap to reveal
Answer: Radishes
Noche de Rábanos features elaborate nativity scenes sculpted entirely from oversized radishes.
Christmas movie and TV deep cuts
Anyone can name the Grinch's dog. This round asks about fake gangster films, guardian angels' surnames and how many bulbs Clark Griswold staples to his roof. One of the nine is arithmetic rather than memory, which is why it works as a tiebreak. Die Hard, incidentally, was Alan Rickman's first feature; he came to it from the stage.
Miracle on 34th Street is better than it looks, because the film that helped define the American screen Christmas was not released at Christmas. Darryl F. Zanuck pushed it out in early summer — it opened in New York on 4 June 1947 — on the theory that more people go to the cinema in warm weather. Edmund Gwenn won best supporting actor all the same.
It's a Wonderful Life has the most misremembered history of any Christmas film. Philip Van Doren Stern could not place "The Greatest Gift" with a publisher, so he printed it as a 24-page pamphlet and posted 200 copies to friends at Christmas 1943. Capra's film then lost money: twenty-sixth at the American box office for 1947, and a recorded loss of $525,000 for RKO. It became a fixture only after a clerical error left the copyright unrenewed in 1974 and stations found they could screen it at will.
Two notes on the rest. "Angels with Filthy Souls" was shot for Home Alone, so anyone hunting for the original is hunting for a film that never existed. And the Grinch question is a credits story: Boris Karloff narrated the 1966 special and voiced the character, but the song is Thurl Ravenscroft, accidentally left off the credits and misattributed for decades.
Q1.Die Hard (1988) was the feature-film debut of which actor, who played Hans Gruber?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alan Rickman
Rickman was a 42-year-old stage actor when he landed the role that made him a movie star.
Q2.What is the name of the fake gangster movie Kevin uses to scare people in Home Alone?Tap to reveal
Answer: Angels with Filthy Souls
It was shot specifically for the film — many viewers spent years hunting for a movie that doesn't exist.
Q3.What do burglars Harry and Marv call themselves in Home Alone?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Wet Bandits
Marv insists on leaving the water running in every house — the calling card that later gets them caught.
Q4.In Elf, what are the four main food groups of the elves?Tap to reveal
Answer: Candy, candy canes, candy corns and syrup
Buddy recites the list before pouring maple syrup on spaghetti.
Q5.How many imported Italian twinkle lights does Clark Griswold put on his house in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation?Tap to reveal
Answer: 25,000
Clark specifies 250 strands of 100 bulbs each — enough to trigger a neighborhood-wide power surge.
Q6.Which actor won an Academy Award for playing Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1947)?Tap to reveal
Answer: Edmund Gwenn
Gwenn won Best Supporting Actor — reportedly saying on his deathbed that "dying is easy, comedy is hard."
Q7.It's a Wonderful Life was adapted from which short story?Tap to reveal
Answer: "The Greatest Gift"
Author Philip Van Doren Stern couldn't find a publisher, so he mailed the story out as a 1943 Christmas card.
Q8.What is the full name of George Bailey's guardian angel in It's a Wonderful Life?Tap to reveal
Answer: Clarence Odbody
Clarence is an "Angel Second Class" who finally earns his wings when the bell rings.
Q9.Which horror-movie icon narrated the original 1966 TV special How the Grinch Stole Christmas!?Tap to reveal
Answer: Boris Karloff
Karloff both narrated and voiced the Grinch, winning a Grammy for the album version.
Christmas music obscura
The final round is for carol nerds: session singers, celesta solos and the arithmetic hiding inside "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It is also where the received wisdom is thinnest.
The "best-selling single of all time" claim needs care, because two records get muddled. Guinness World Records settled the argument in 2009 by naming two winners: Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997" as the best-selling single since the UK and US charts began, and Crosby's "White Christmas" as the world's best-selling single overall, with estimated sales above 50 million physical copies. The song was written for Holiday Inn and won the 1942 Academy Award for best original song, but its first public performance came a year earlier, on Crosby's radio programme The Kraft Music Hall on Christmas Day 1941.
Two origin stories here are weaker than their telling. "Silent Night" was first sung at Oberndorf on Christmas Eve 1818 to a guitar, Mohr's words of 1816 set that day by Gruber; why a guitar is genuinely open, and the familiar version — the organ failing at the crucial moment, or mice eating through the bellows — traces to a fictional story published in the United States in the 1930s. "Jingle Bells" is documented only as far as its copyright, taken out as "The One Horse Open Sleigh" on 16 September 1857, with no Christmas content in the lyric. The Thanksgiving story rests on later recollection, and even the place is contested between Medford and Boston.
Three brisk corrections for the remainder. The celesta was invented by the Parisian harmonium builder Auguste Mustel in 1886, and Tchaikovsky was not the first to put one in an orchestra — Ernest Chausson used one in December 1888. "Fairytale of New York" reached number two in the UK in 1987 and has never been a Christmas number one. And the 364 gifts are arithmetic, not code: the claim that the song was a secret Catholic catechism was floated in 1979 without evidence.
Q1.Whose recording of "White Christmas" is the best-selling single of all time?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bing Crosby
Irving Berlin wrote it, and Crosby's version has sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide.
Q2.In which 1942 film did "White Christmas" make its debut?Tap to reveal
Answer: Holiday Inn
The song won the Oscar for Best Original Song before headlining its own movie in 1954.
Q3."Silent Night" was first performed in 1818 in a small village church in which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Austria
Joseph Mohr wrote the words and Franz Xaver Gruber the melody, first sung in Oberndorf with a guitar.
Q4.Who sang "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" — a singer also famous as the voice of Tony the Tiger?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thurl Ravenscroft
Ravenscroft's name was left off the credits, so Dr. Seuss personally wrote to columnists to set the record straight.
Q5.Which jazz pianist composed the soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vince Guaraldi
His trio's "Linus and Lucy" and "Christmas Time Is Here" made the 1965 special timeless.
Q6.Who duets with The Pogues on the 1987 classic "Fairytale of New York"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kirsty MacColl
Producer Steve Lillywhite brought in MacColl, his wife, after the band's original attempts stalled.
Q7.In what year did Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" finally hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100?Tap to reveal
Answer: 2019
It topped the chart 25 years after its 1994 release — and has returned to No. 1 every December since.
Q8.Which keyboard instrument gives the Sugar Plum Fairy's dance in The Nutcracker its bell-like sound?Tap to reveal
Answer: The celesta
Tchaikovsky secretly imported the newly invented instrument from Paris so rivals couldn't copy the idea.
Q9.If you add up every gift given in "The Twelve Days of Christmas," how many gifts are there in total?Tap to reveal
Answer: 364
Each gift repeats on every later day — twelve partridges, twenty-two turtle doves and so on down the list.
How to run this as a quiz night
Thirty-six questions is a full evening: four rounds of nine, read at a steady pace with time to write, runs to about forty minutes, or an hour with scoring breaks. With only half that, cut to two complete rounds rather than trimming every round to five — a round that stops early feels unfinished.
Teams of three to five work best on a set this hard. Below three, people stall on questions nobody happens to know; above five, the quieter members stop contributing. Take written answers rather than shouted ones, because with obscure material the first confident voice anchors everyone else. One point a question, no half marks, and read the explanation straight after each answer.
The running order matters. History first, world traditions second, film third, music last, because film and music are the rounds where one specialist can carry a team from behind. When time runs short, keep history and film: world traditions reads slowest, since the place names need repeating.
Which questions people get wrong, and what to hold back
The question likeliest to be missed is the Grinch vocal. Nearly everyone credits Boris Karloff, because his is the voice they remember, and the correction — Karloff narrated and voiced the character, Ravenscroft sang — starts an argument every time.
Two more catch strong teams. St Nicholas invites "Greece" rather than "Turkey", and that one deserves explaining rather than a bare cross, since the instinct behind it is sound: he was a Greek-speaking bishop, but Lycia is Anatolian. "Donner and Blitzen" gets answered with any two names off the sleigh team, because few people notice that six of the eight are English and two are not.
Hold the two numeric questions back as tiebreaks. The total in "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and the number of lights on the Griswold house both have exact answers that nobody simply knows, which makes them ideal nearest-wins deciders: a number on a slip of paper, closest takes it, no conferring. Drop the eggnog riot if the room is not American, and be ready to describe the Oaxaca radishes, which read as a joke until somebody produces a photograph.
Christmas claims that do not survive checking
More confident nonsense circulates about Christmas than about almost any other subject, largely because the false versions are the better stories.
Coca-Cola did not invent the red suit. Haddon Sundblom's advertisements from 1931 onwards fixed one particular Santa in the popular imagination, but a red-and-white Santa was already standard. Thomas Nast had been drawing him for Harper's Weekly since 1863, and by the opening years of the twentieth century the figure appears in red and white, essentially in its modern form, on covers of Puck. White Rock Beverages was advertising with a Santa from 1915 and in colour from 1923. The company inherited the image rather than designing it.
Nobody can tell you with certainty why 25 December was chosen. The familiar claim is appropriation of Saturnalia, or of Sol Invictus, whose festival had been marked on that date since AD 274. The rival account, the calculation hypothesis, derives the date from a traditional date for the Annunciation on 25 March, nine months earlier. Both are seriously argued and neither is settled. The question in the first round asks only which Roman festival contributed feasting and gift-giving customs, a much narrower claim.
"Xmas" does not take Christ out of Christmas: the X is chi, the first letter of Χριστός, and a form of the abbreviation appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle around 1100. And Prince Albert did not bring the Christmas tree to Britain — Queen Charlotte, German-born like him, had one at a children's party in 1800. The Illustrated London News engraving of 1848 is what carried it into middle-class homes. Albert popularised the tree; he did not introduce it.
Adapting the set for a family table, a work party, a classroom or a video call
At a family table the difficulty is the point, but the scoring need not be. Play it as one shared team against the questions rather than adults against children, keep a running tally out of 36, and let anybody answer. A hard set flattens the age gap more than an easy one does, because nobody at the table knows who Thurl Ravenscroft was.
At a work party the structure does the organising: four rounds of nine map onto four teams, with a different person reading each round. In a classroom the history and world traditions rounds carry the most teaching — the Christmas card opens onto the Penny Post, the Trafalgar Square tree onto the occupation of Norway, the poinsettia onto Nahuatl plant names — and the myth-busting above works as a short exercise in checking a claim rather than passing it on.
On a video call, cut to twenty-four questions and drop the arithmetic pair, since a number is the easiest thing in the world to look up. Read each question twice, take answers by private message, and reveal a round at a time. Copied out, the set works as a place-setting sheet: questions on one side, answers and explanations on the other, which needs no host at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
How hard are these Christmas trivia questions?
Hard by design — written as a final round or a tiebreaker for groups that clear standard holiday quizzes without effort. Half the set is film and music, so a group with one obsessive in it beats a group of generalists.
How should I mix hard Christmas trivia into a party quiz?
Run two easy warm-up rounds first, then use one of these as the decider. Doubling the points on the hard round keeps a trailing team interested, and saying so before the round begins is what makes it work.
How long does a 36-question quiz take?
About forty minutes read straight through with writing time, or an hour with scoring breaks between the four rounds. Half an hour means two complete rounds rather than trimming all four.
Can I use these questions for free?
Yes. There is no signup and nothing to buy. Every answer carries its explanation, so a single copy of the set works as a host sheet.
What is the hardest question in this set?
The Grinch vocal. Nearly everyone credits Boris Karloff, who narrated the 1966 special and voiced the character, but the singer is Thurl Ravenscroft, left off the credits.
Are the answers verified?
Each answer was checked against the documentary record rather than the version usually repeated. Where the evidence is thin or historians disagree — the origin of "Jingle Bells", why "Silent Night" was first sung to a guitar, why 25 December was chosen — the sections above say so.
