50 Christmas Facts, With the Myths Taken Out

Quick answer: Fifty Christmas facts that survive a fact-check, plus straight answers to the questions people ask most. Nobody knows for certain why Christmas falls on 25 December, and the pagan explanation is only one of two serious theories. The X in Xmas is a Greek letter, not a modern insult. Coca-Cola did not invent the red Santa. The oldest clear record of a decorated Christmas tree comes from Strasbourg, and Martin Luther had nothing to do with it. And the holiday suicide spike is a myth: December has some of the lowest suicide rates of the year.

Christmas fact lists copy each other, which is how the same pleasant errors travel from one December to the next. This one works the other way round. Every entry was checked against a historian, a museum, an archive or a peer-reviewed paper, and the source is linked wherever the claim is not obvious. Where the popular version is wrong, the correction is the fact.

If you want the quiz version, the 100 Christmas trivia questions cover the classics, from reindeer names to the first song played in space. This page goes one layer deeper.

Why is Christmas on December 25?

Because the Western church settled on that date in the fourth century, and nobody at the time wrote down why. The Bible gives no date for the birth of Jesus. The oldest record of a Christmas feast on 25 December is a Roman almanac known as the Chronograph of 354, and it points back to the year 336. Historians have two explanations for the choice. Both have evidence behind them, and neither is proven.

The sun theory. The emperor Aurelian built a temple to Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, in 274, and the same almanac of 354 marks 25 December as the birthday of the Unconquered. On this reading, the church placed the birth of Christ, whom Christians already called the light of the world, on a date Rome was celebrating near the winter solstice. The weakness is that no ancient Christian writer says so. The first known suggestion that the date was picked to replace a pagan feast is a note in the margin of a twelfth-century manuscript, and no surviving source says on which day Aurelian's own festival fell. Saturnalia, the other usual suspect, ran from 17 to 23 December, so it was over before Christmas began.

The calculation theory. Early Christians cared a great deal about the date of the crucifixion, and around the year 200 the writer Tertullian worked out that it fell on 25 March. An old idea held that a great prophet died on the same date he was conceived. Add nine months to 25 March and you arrive at 25 December. Augustine repeats the reasoning around 400. Christians in the East did the same sum from 6 April and landed on 6 January, which is why some Eastern churches kept that date. The historian Andrew McGowan lays out both cases in How December 25 Became Christmas.

The two theories do not cancel each other out. A date fixed by arithmetic could easily have caught on faster because it sat beside a midwinter holiday people already enjoyed.

Why is it called Xmas?

Because X is the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christos, Christ. Christians abbreviated the name with an X, and with the Chi Rho monogram, for many centuries, and English scribes were writing X for Christ by around 1100. The spelling X'temmas turns up in 1551, and Merriam-Webster dates Xmas itself to 1721. It is shorthand in the tradition of monks saving parchment, not a modern campaign to take Christ out of Christmas.

Origins and history

1. The Bible never gives a date. Matthew and Luke both describe the birth, and neither names a day or even a season. Around 200, Clement of Alexandria listed the dates Christians had proposed, in April and May. December was not among them.
2. The word Christmas is Christ's Mass. It first appears in late Old English as Cristes mæsse, in 1038, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
3. Matthew never says there were three wise men. Or that they were kings. He says magi came from the east with three gifts, and Western tradition counted the gifts. Some Eastern traditions put the number of magi at twelve.
4. Frankincense and myrrh are dried tree sap. Both are resins that seep from cuts in the bark of trees from southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, and both were costly luxuries, which is why they sit next to gold in the story.
5. Armenian Christians celebrate on 6 January. The Armenian Apostolic Church marks the birth and the baptism of Christ together on that day, keeping the older Eastern date.
6. Charlemagne was crowned emperor on Christmas Day. Pope Leo III placed the crown on his head in St Peter's in Rome on 25 December 800.
7. So was William the Conqueror, and his coronation ended in fire. He was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. When the congregation shouted its approval, the Norman guards outside thought it was an attack and set fire to nearby houses, according to English Heritage.
8. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, sort of. 25 December 1642 by the Julian calendar England still used, which is 4 January 1643 by the calendar we use today, as the Newton Project at Oxford notes.
9. Christmas Day was not a public holiday in Scotland until 1958. The Reformed Kirk abolished Yule along with saints' days in the sixteenth century, and Hogmanay became the big winter holiday instead. Historic Environment Scotland has the timeline.
10. Christmas Island is named after a date. Captain William Mynors of the East India Company ship Royal Mary sailed past it on Christmas Day 1643 and named it for the day, as Hakai Magazine tells it.
11. The first commercial Christmas card caused a scandal. Henry Cole's 1843 card showed a family raising glasses of wine, a small child included, and temperance campaigners were not amused, reports Smithsonian.
12. A Christmas Carol barely paid. Dickens financed the book himself and insisted on gilt edges and hand-coloured plates. The first printing earned him about £230, against the £1,000 he had hoped for, according to The Charles Dickens Page.
13. West Point once had an eggnog riot. On Christmas Eve 1826 cadets smuggled whiskey into the barracks for eggnog, the party turned violent, and nineteen cadets were court-martialed. Jefferson Davis, later president of the Confederacy, was confined to his quarters and escaped trial, says the US Army.
14. The 1914 Christmas truce began with carols. In several places along the Western Front, German soldiers sang Stille Nacht, the original Silent Night, and British soldiers answered with carols of their own, as The Conversation recounts.
15. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing started with a different first line. Charles Wesley wrote "Hark how all the welkin rings" in 1739. The preacher George Whitefield changed it in 1753 without asking him, and the tune came later still, from a cantata by Felix Mendelssohn.

Where did Santa Claus come from?

Santa Claus was assembled over roughly 1,500 years from a bishop, a Dutch nickname, an American satire, a poem and a Civil War cartoonist.

The bishop is Nicholas of Myra, who lived in the fourth century in what is now southern Turkey. Very little about his life is documented, but the legends spread across Europe. The most famous has him secretly throwing gold through a poor man's window on three nights so that the man's three daughters could marry, according to the St. Nicholas Center. His feast day, 6 December, became a day for giving presents to children in much of Europe.

Dutch settlers brought Sinterklaas to New York, but the American Santa was largely invented by New Yorkers. Washington Irving's comic History of New York of 1809 has Saint Nicholas riding over the treetops in a wagon to bring children their presents, as the New York Public Library explains. The poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, published anonymously in 1823, gave him a sleigh, eight named reindeer and the chimney. The German-born cartoonist Thomas Nast then drew him 33 times for Harper's Weekly between 1863 and 1886, and turned the elf of the poem into the round, bearded figure everyone recognises.

Coca-Cola arrived last. Haddon Sundblom's advertisements from 1931 onward fixed the jolly red Santa in the public mind, but they did not invent him.

16. Santa's first Harper's Weekly appearance was war propaganda. In Nast's Santa Claus in Camp, published on 3 January 1863, he wears a coat of stars and trousers of stripes, hands out gifts to Union soldiers, and dangles a puppet labelled Jeff, for the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, as Smithsonian describes.
17. Coca-Cola did not invent the red Santa. Puck magazine put him on its covers in red and white in the first years of the 1900s, and White Rock used a red-suited Santa to sell mineral water in 1915 and ginger ale in 1923. Coca-Cola popularised the look from 1931. It did not create it, as Snopes documents.
18. Christmas stockings come from the Nicholas legend. In later retellings of the dowry story, the gold lands in stockings that had been hung by the fire to dry.
19. Nicholas is also the patron saint of pawnbrokers. The three gold balls that hang outside pawnshops are traditionally read as his three bags of gold, notes the St. Nicholas Center.
20. His bones were stolen. In 1087 sailors from Bari carried his remains away from Myra, over the objections of the monks there. They still lie in the Basilica di San Nicola in southern Italy.
21. Donner and Blitzen started out as Dunder and Blixem. The 1823 poem used Dutch words for thunder and lightning. The spellings shifted in later printings, and by 1844 the poem's author had them as Donder and Blitzen, per Snopes.
22. Santa's reindeer are probably female. Reindeer are the only deer in which females grow antlers. Males shed theirs in late autumn, while females keep them through the winter, so a reindeer with antlers on Christmas Eve is most likely female, explains Britannica.
23. Reindeer and caribou are the same animal. Both are Rangifer tarandus. Caribou is the North American name, reindeer the Eurasian one, according to the US National Park Service.
24. Reindeer eyes change colour with the seasons. The reflective layer at the back of the eye is gold in summer and deep blue in winter, which helps them see through months of twilight. Researchers at University College London called it the first colour change of its kind shown in a mammal.
25. Reindeer can see ultraviolet light. Snow reflects UV while lichen, their winter food, absorbs it, so to a reindeer the lichen stands out dark against the white. The finding comes from a 2011 study in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
26. There is a peer-reviewed paper on Rudolph's nose. In the BMJ's 2012 Christmas issue, researchers found that the blood vessels in a reindeer's nose are about 25 percent denser than in a human nose, which helps keep it from freezing. The paper is titled, fittingly, Why Rudolph's nose is red.
27. Santa has a Canadian postal code. It is H0H 0H0, and since 1982 Canada Post has had volunteers answer the letters sent there.

The history of the Christmas tree, in brief

People brought evergreens indoors in midwinter long before Christianity, but the decorated Christmas tree is younger than most people assume, and it is German. One likely ancestor is the paradise tree, a fir hung with apples that stood in for the Garden of Eden in medieval plays about Adam and Eve, whose feast day was 24 December. Guild records from Tallinn (1441) and Riga (1510) describe trees at midwinter merchant celebrations, and the two cities still argue over which came first.

The first clear description of a decorated tree in a home comes from Strasbourg, then a German-speaking city, around 1605. People set up fir trees in their rooms and hung them with paper roses, apples, wafers, gold foil and sugar. The custom spread through Germany in the eighteenth century, and Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) put it in front of a wide reading public. Queen Charlotte, the German-born wife of George III, set one up at Windsor in 1800, as History Today records, and in 1848 the Illustrated London News showed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert around theirs, which made the tree fashionable. In America, German communities in Pennsylvania had trees in the early 1800s, and by the 1870s they were common in American homes.

28. Martin Luther did not invent the candlelit tree. The story of Luther walking home under the stars and fixing candles to a fir for his children is a legend that historians find no evidence for, as the religious historian James Lancaster writes in The Conversation.
29. America's first influential Christmas tree picture was a doctored royal portrait. In 1850 Godey's Lady's Book reprinted the Windsor engraving with Victoria's tiara and Albert's moustache removed, turning the royal family into an American one.
30. The first artificial trees were made of goose feathers. Germans in the nineteenth century dyed goose feathers green and wired them to branches, partly out of worry about how many real trees were being cut.
31. The Rockefeller Center tree was started by construction workers. On Christmas Eve 1931, deep in the Depression, the men building the complex pooled their money for a 20-foot balsam fir and decorated it with paper garlands and cranberries, according to the New-York Historical Society. The first official tree followed in 1933.
32. A typical Christmas tree takes about seven years to grow. Anywhere from four to fifteen years to reach six or seven feet, says the National Christmas Tree Association.
33. Only female holly bears berries. Common holly has separate male and female plants, and the red berries grow only on pollinated females, according to the Royal Horticultural Society.

Twelve Days of Christmas meaning

The twelve days of Christmas are the traditional Christmas season. They run from Christmas Day to 5 January, known as Twelfth Night, which is the eve of Epiphany on 6 January, when Western churches remember the visit of the magi. In the old calendar, in other words, Christmas started on the 25th rather than ending there.

The song is a counting game. It first appeared in print in 1780, in a children's book called Mirth Without Mischief, as a memory and forfeits game: each player repeated all the earlier verses and added one, and anyone who slipped paid a forfeit. The melody everyone sings today, with the long, drawn-out "five gold rings", was arranged by the English composer Frederic Austin in 1909. And the four calling birds were four colly birds in early versions, colly meaning coal-black, so the gift was blackbirds, as the Library of Congress explains.

What the song is not is a secret catechism. The claim that persecuted English Catholics used the gifts as coded lessons, with the partridge as Christ and the two turtle doves as the Old and New Testaments, spread online in the 1990s from an article by a priest named Hal Stockert, and no historical evidence supports it, as Snopes found. The supposed hidden teachings were also beliefs Protestants shared, so there was nothing to hide.

Christmas myths, corrected

34. Suicides do not spike at Christmas. CDC data show that November, December and January usually have the lowest average daily suicide rates of the year, and in 2023 December was the lowest of all twelve months. The Annenberg Public Policy Center has tracked the myth in news coverage since 1999. If the season is heavy for you anyway, talking helps; in the US you can call or text 988.
35. Jingle Bells never mentions Christmas. The theatre historian Kyna Hamill found that its first documented performance was at a minstrel show in Boston in 1857, and there is no evidence for the popular story that it was written for Thanksgiving, as NPR reports.
36. The candy cane was not designed as a J for Jesus. The story of white for purity, red for blood and a J for Jesus appears in modern devotional books, not in the historical record. Christmas cards from before about 1900 show plain white canes, according to Smithsonian.
37. Eating mince pies on Christmas Day is not illegal in England. The Puritan ban of the 1640s and 1650s covered Christmas celebrations in general, not pies, and it ended with the Restoration in 1660, as legal scholars at the University of Bristol explain.
38. Germans do not hide a pickle in the tree. The "German Christmas pickle" is an American custom. In a 2016 YouGov poll of 2,057 Germans, 91 percent had never heard of it.
39. Mice did not write Silent Night. A popular story says a mouse chewed through the organ bellows in Oberndorf in 1818, forcing a quick carol for guitar. The carol was written for voices and guitar, but there is no evidence the organ was broken.

Weird Christmas facts from around the world

40. Sweden builds a giant straw goat that people keep burning down. The first Gävle goat went up in 1966 and was burned on New Year's Eve. Since then roughly half of them have been destroyed, mostly by arson, according to Atlas Obscura.
41. Catalan nativity scenes include a man relieving himself. The caganer, usually a peasant in a red cap with his trousers down, is tucked into a corner of the scene. Modern versions depict politicians, footballers and royalty.
42. Iceland has a Christmas cat that eats people. In folklore the Yule Cat eats anyone who has not received a new piece of clothing by Christmas, which kept farm workers finishing the autumn wool on time, says Smithsonian.
43. Norwegians hide their brooms on Christmas Eve. The old belief was that witches and spirits came out that night looking for something to ride.
44. Ukrainians decorate trees with spiders. Small ornaments called pavuchky recall a folk tale in which a spider decorated a poor family's tree with webs that turned to silver and gold, which some tell as the origin of tinsel.
45. Christmas crackers were invented to sell sweets. The London confectioner Tom Smith copied the French habit of wrapping sugared almonds in twisted paper in 1847, and later added the snap, according to Historic England.
46. The first Advent wreath had 24 candles. The Hamburg pastor Johann Hinrich Wichern built it in 1839 on a cart wheel for the boys in his care: four large white candles for the Sundays and small red ones for the weekdays, as the Hamburg history museum tells it.
47. The first printed Advent calendar came from Munich. In the early 1900s the publisher Gerhard Lang turned his mother's idea, 24 small biscuits sewn onto a piece of card, into a printed calendar of pictures to cut out and paste in, one for each day.
48. Stollen needed a letter from the Pope. Butter was forbidden during the Advent fast, so early Stollen was made with oil and water. In 1491 Pope Innocent VIII allowed butter in Saxony, in what is still called the Butter Letter, as katholisch.de recounts.
49. Germany's Christmas post office began with one kind postal worker. In 1984, in East Germany, a postal worker in the village of Himmelpfort answered two children's letters to Santa rather than return them. Today it receives hundreds of thousands a year, according to Deutsche Post.
50. The Christkind was a Protestant idea that the Catholic south adopted. Luther objected to the cult of saints and, from the 1530s, gave his family presents in the name of the "Holy Christ" instead of Saint Nicholas. Today the Christkind brings the presents mostly in Catholic southern Germany, while the Protestant north has the Weihnachtsmann, as the Protestant Church in Germany points out.

Where these came from

The entries on the date of Christmas follow Andrew McGowan's account for the Biblical Archaeology Society, which sets out both the solar and the calculation theories. The Santa entries draw on the St. Nicholas Center, the New York Public Library and Smithsonian. Scientific claims about reindeer come from the original papers or the universities that published them, and the myths section links to the researchers and fact-checkers who did the digging. We write short, fact-checked courses on topics like these at NerdSip, and this list was built the same way.

For a Christmas quiz night, the Christmas trivia questions and Christmas movie trivia are ready to read aloud, the Christmas riddles work for mixed ages, and the Christmas party games cover the rest of the evening. The Christmas page has a free interactive quiz and a countdown. And if you are simply in the mood for more, there are fun facts on every other subject and trivia questions by category.

Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.

Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.

Related Articles

100 Christmas Trivia Questions and Answers (Easy to Hard)

100 Christmas trivia questions with answers: easy questions for kids, Christmas song and movie…

50 Halloween Facts That Are Actually True

Fifty facts about Halloween with the sources attached, including the four errors every other list…

42 Facts That Will Blow Your Mind (2026)

42 facts that will blow your mind, sorted by space, your body, animals, history, physics, and…

50 Fun Facts About Germany That Surprise Germans Too

50 checked facts about Germany: 20,000 castles, 3,000 registered breads, a 31-centimetre street…

Cool Stories and Facts to Tell at Parties Without Sounding…

A practical list of cool facts and short stories you can actually tell at parties, plus the…

100 Interesting Facts, Sorted by What Kind of Conversation…

A conversation-focused interesting facts hub: science, psychology, history, money, space, and…