100 Fun Facts About Christmas Decorations

Austrian Erwin Perzy hit on the snow globe while trying to build a brighter version of what?

A surgical lamp was the goal: Perzy made surgical instruments, and the water-filled globe he patented instead is still produced by his family firm in Vienna.

What did the crew find hiding inside the wrapped Rockefeller Center tree when it arrived in 2020?

A saw-whet owl, nicknamed Rockefeller, had ridden for days inside the spruce from upstate New York; a wildlife centre fed it up on mice and set it free.

Who put up the first Rockefeller Center tree in 1931, hung with cranberries and a few tin cans?

Construction workers building the Depression-era complex pooled their pay for a 20-foot balsam fir, and their families made the garlands.

Which metal did US tinsel makers give up in the early 1970s after the FDA flagged a risk to children?

Lead foil never tarnished like silver, which is why makers clung to it until the FDA talked them into quitting without a formal ban.

Which creature's ornaments hang on Ukrainian trees, thanks to a folktale said to explain tinsel?

A spider spun cobwebs over a poor widow's tree overnight, and the first sunlight turned them to gold and silver, so artificial webs hang on trees too.

Why did only the star light up when Amy Carter switched on the 1979 National Christmas Tree?

For the hostages in Iran, President Carter told the surprised crowd, the tree would stay dark until they came home, and it stayed largely unlit in 1980 as well.

In the Christmas pickle custom, what does the first to spot the ornament on Christmas morning get?

An extra present from Santa, or a year of good luck, rewards the finder, in a custom Americans credit to Germany that may really have begun as a way to sell imported glass ornaments.

In tests that debunked the deadly-poinsettia myth, which animals were fed the equivalent of 500 leaves without harm?

Rats showed no toxic dose in the Ohio State University tests, undoing a scare that began with a 1919 rumour about an Army officer's child said to have died after eating a leaf.

Which region's nativity scenes include the caganer, a squatting peasant with his trousers down?

Catalonia tucks the defecating figure into a corner for children to find, and Barcelona's council caused an outcry in 2005 by leaving him out of the city's official nativity.

A New Mexico luminaria, also called a farolito, is a votive candle standing in sand inside what?

A paper bag weighted with sand holds the candle, and northern New Mexicans insist the word luminaria belongs to a small bonfire, so they say farolito.

In Christmas colour symbolism, where red stands for the blood of Jesus, what does green represent?

Eternal life is green's meaning, borrowed from evergreens that keep their leaves all winter, while gold recalls the Magi's gift and signifies royalty.

The Scandinavian straw Yule goat is often linked to which Norse god, whose chariot was pulled by two goats?

Thor's goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr drew his chariot across the sky, and the last sheaf of the harvest was once kept as the Yule goat for the midwinter feast.

What makes the carousel of figures on an Ore Mountains Christmas pyramid spin round?

Heat from its candles rises and turns a rotor at the top, and the pyramids boomed from about 1830, once cheap paraffin replaced costly tallow and rapeseed oil.

What first brought German nutcracker dolls into American living rooms after the Second World War?

GIs bringing souvenirs home from postings in Germany started it, and Tchaikovsky's ballet, a mid-century US holiday fixture, turned the dolls into a seasonal icon.

Which first lady began giving the White House Blue Room tree a theme, starting with a Nutcracker motif?

Jacqueline Kennedy's 1961 tree carried toys, birds and angels from the ballet, and Barbara Bush went back to the same Nutcracker theme in 1990.

Which president lit a National Christmas Tree delayed to December 22 by 30 days of national mourning?

Lyndon B. Johnson lit the 1963 tree after a candlelight service at the Lincoln Memorial, the assassination of his predecessor having pushed the ceremony back four days.

Which New York store started the Christmas window tradition with an animated display in 1883?

Macy's animated window of 1883 set the pattern, and rivals such as Lord & Taylor and B. Altman later turned Fifth Avenue into a December window-gazing walk.

By tradition, what gave Tom Smith the idea of adding a bang to the bon-bons that became Christmas crackers?

A log crackling on the fire he had just stoked is said to have inspired the snap, and the sweet inside was eventually dropped in favour of a trinket.

What usually lit a 1960s aluminum Christmas tree, since strings of bulbs were thought unsafe on it?

A rotating colour wheel on the floor shone through tinted segments to tint the foil branches, because bulbs draped over the metal could cause a short circuit.

Which vegetable do Oaxaca's carvers shape into nativity scenes for a contest held every December 23?

Radishes grown oversized for the night wilt within hours of cutting, so the carved scenes are shown only briefly and the queues to see them run long.

The three gold balls of the Saint Nicholas stocking legend are also the traditional shop sign of which trade?

Pawnbrokers have Saint Nicholas as their patron, and their sign is traced either to the gold he tossed to three poor sisters or to the arms of the Medici bankers.

Since 2007, what has happened to the Rockefeller Center tree's trunk after the display comes down?

Milled into lumber for housing, the timber goes to Habitat for Humanity, and 2007 was also the year the tree's lights switched to LEDs.

National Poinsettia Day, December 12 in the US, marks which event in the life of Joel Roberts Poinsett?

His death is what December 12 marks, not a flowering date; Poinsett had been shipping the plants from Mexico to his South Carolina greenhouses since the 1820s.

In English custom, a charred Yule log was kept under the bed to guard the household against what?

Lightning and, with some irony, fire were the threats it guarded against, and sparks counted as the log burned were read for the year's fortunes.

Candy canes given on Saint Nicholas Day are said to recall which object carried by a bishop?

A crosier, the bishop's staff, is what the cane's crook is said to stand for on the saint's feast, and the staff's own shape alludes to the Good Shepherd.

The putz, a Pennsylvania German miniature Christmas landscape, is named for a verb meaning what?

To clean is the everyday sense of putzen, which also means to adorn, and families once threw 'putz parties' to compete for the best display.

The first Herrnhut star was made at a boys' school in Niesky, Germany, as what?

A geometry lesson produced the paper star, and the bookseller Pieter Verbeek later devised a version that came apart, so that it could be packed up and posted.

The Finnish himmeli, a geometric straw mobile hung at Christmas, takes its name from a Swedish word for what?

Heaven, or sky, is what himmel means, and the mobile was once kept as a charm for the crops: the bigger the himmeli, the better the harvest was expected to be.

Saxony's Schwibbogen candle arch is thought to have begun at which trade's Christmas-shift dinner?

Miners' Mettenschicht dinners are thought to have inspired the arch, whose candles are read as the daylight the men went weeks without seeing in winter.

Saxony's Räuchermann figure, made since about 1850, puffs smoke from its mouth by burning what inside?

An incense cone smoulders inside the hollow two-part figure, and a small air hole feeds it and pushes the smoke up and out through the mouth.

Which denomination created the Christingle, at first just a red ribbon round a candle, in 1747?

The Moravian Church's Bishop Johannes de Watteville started it to turn children's thoughts to Jesus; it spread across Britain only from 1968, as a Children's Society fundraiser.

The oldest known pleated Christmas heart, kept in Odense, was folded in 1860 by which author?

Hans Christian Andersen folded it in 1860, though with no handle it probably never hung on a tree; the woven hearts only became a Danish staple around 1910.

Lost with all hands on Lake Michigan in 1912, the schooner Rouse Simmons was nicknamed what for its cargo?

The Christmas Tree Ship sold evergreens straight from its Chicago berth, where skipper Herman Schuenemann, known as Captain Santa, gave trees away to needy families.

Greenery missed on Twelfth Night must come down by which February feast, by old English custom?

Candlemas, on 2 February, closes the Christmas-Epiphany season in some churches, and leaving decorations up beyond it was held to bring bad luck.

Before the tree arrived, Polish peasants hung a decorated fir branch, the podłaźniczka, from where?

The ceiling rafters above the Christmas Eve table held the branch, which was meant to bring the household luck and plenty and to keep wolves and disease from the livestock.

Which American store founder grew rich selling glass baubles imported from Lauscha in Germany?

F. W. Woolworth's stores first stocked the German glass ornaments in 1880, and they sold so well that he took them nationwide as his chain grew.

The second half of the word mistletoe comes from the Old English 'tan', which meant what?

Twig is the sense of tān, so the plant's name is literally a mistle-twig, and the 'toe' spelling may come from mistaking the final -n for a plural ending.

The Hotel del Coronado lit the first recorded outdoor electric Christmas tree in 1904, across the bay from which city?

San Diego's neighbour beat Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1909 and New York in 1912, though McAdenville, North Carolina, still claims to have started the custom in 1956.

A 1953 Newsweek photo of which president's grandson with an Advent calendar sent US demand soaring?

Dwight Eisenhower's grandson did it, just as returning GIs were already carrying German-printed calendars back across the Atlantic.

Which glassmaker adapted its light-bulb line to blow Max Eckardt's Shiny Brite ornaments?

Corning blew the clear globes in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, for Eckardt's factories to decorate by hand, when war cut off his German imports.

By tradition, who lights the Capitol Christmas Tree in Washington each year?

The Speaker of the House hosts the lighting, a routine fixed in 1964 after Speaker John McCormack suggested putting a tree on the Capitol grounds.

Hamburg pastor Johann Wichern built the first modern Advent wreath in 1839 out of what?

An old cartwheel, ringed with small red candles for weekdays and large white ones for Sundays, let the children at his Rauhes Haus mission count the days to Christmas.

A much-reprinted newspaper picture of which British monarch's decorated tree helped make Christmas trees fashionable?

Queen Victoria's tree appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1848, and when Godey's Lady's Book copied it for Americans in 1850 it removed her tiara and Prince Albert's moustache.

In which Saxon village did 'father of the nutcracker' Friedrich Füchtner first mass-produce the dolls?

Seiffen is where Füchtner's lathe turned the dolls out in quantity, their grim faces modelled on the authorities of the day, such as kings, soldiers and gendarmes.

Before Oslo's gifts began in 1947, how did a Norwegian spruce first reach Trafalgar Square in 1942?

Felled on a commando raid on the island of Stord, the tree was put up by naval intelligence officers and Norwegian commandos after a dinner at the Savoy.

Which Los Angeles County foothill community first lit the cedars of its Christmas Tree Lane in 1920?

Altadena's deodar cedars were planted in 1885 along the drive to a founder's mansion that was never built, and merchant Frederick Nash later persuaded the Pasadena Kiwanis club to light them.

Which Christmas lights did NOMA launch in 1946, two years after Carl Otis patented them?

Bubble lights hold a vial of liquid, usually methylene chloride, with a boiling point so low that the bulb's own warmth sets it bubbling.

Which German chemist of meat-extract fame devised the silvering that gives glass baubles their shine?

Justus von Liebig devised the silvering for telescope mirrors, not ornaments; swirled inside a cooled bauble, the same silver nitrate mix leaves its shine on the inside of the glass.

Embossed card ornaments, gilded or silvered to pass for metal, took their name from which city in Saxony?

Dresden's factories only stamped out the parts from damp card; cottage workers then assembled them at home, gluing the embossed halves into three-dimensional figures.

Which Italian city of the Sassi cave districts staged the world's largest living nativity scene in 2010?

Matera's Sassi so resemble ancient Jerusalem that Pasolini and Mel Gibson filmed the life of Christ there, and in 2010 the cave quarter staged the largest living nativity of its time.

Which material, also used on the Scarecrow's costume in The Wizard of Oz, once went into artificial Christmas snow?

Asbestos was prized because it would not burn, so it passed as fake snow, known as flocking, until the danger of breathing its fibres sank in.

Which animated special, whose hero picks a scrawny sapling, is credited with ending the craze for aluminum trees?

A Charlie Brown Christmas used the metal trees as a symbol of commercialism in 1965, and by 1967 the fad was all but over.

According to the 2005 book The Elf on the Shelf, what makes a scout elf lose its Christmas magic?

A child's touch is the one thing the book forbids; left alone, the elf flies to the North Pole each night to report to Santa.

Nova Scotia sends Boston a towering Christmas tree every year in thanks for help after which disaster?

The Halifax Explosion wrecked much of the city in 1917 and Boston rushed relief north; Nova Scotia has sent a tree in thanks every year since 1971.

Which Brothers Grimm fairy tale, later a Humperdinck opera, is credited with inspiring the first gingerbread houses?

Hansel and Gretel made the witch's edible cottage famous and bakers copied it, though some food historians think the Grimms were describing a custom that already existed.

Which Protestant reformer is said to have been the first to add lighted candles to an evergreen tree?

Martin Luther gets the credit only in legend, though German Protestants did take up the tree early: Strasbourg Cathedral had one by 1539.

The Festivus pole, a bare aluminum pole put up instead of a decorated tree, was introduced by which sitcom?

Seinfeld added the pole in the 1997 episode The Strike; the real family holiday behind it used a clock in a bag nailed to a wall.

Medieval paradise plays staged on 24 December, the feast of Adam and Eve, used a fir tree hung with what?

Apples stood for the forbidden fruit of Eden, and some historians trace the shiny red bauble straight back to them.

Early German artificial Christmas trees of the 1880s, a response to deforestation, had wire branches covered in what?

Goose feathers dyed green were wired to a central dowel, and by the 1920s American shops sold the trees in sizes from two inches to about eight feet.

Daniel Libeskind's 2018 star for the Rockefeller Center tree carries three million crystals from which maker?

Swarovski crystals cover all 70 of the star's spikes, which are lit by LED spots.

The first electric Christmas tree, hand-wired with 80 bulbs in 1882, stood in the home of which inventor's partner?

Thomas Edison's lighting company had the tree's owner as its vice president, and he had the walnut-sized red, white and blue bulbs specially made.

Which saint staged the first nativity scene with live actors in a cave at Greccio, Italy, in 1223?

Francis of Assisi had been inspired by a visit to the Holy Land, where he was shown the grotto revered as the birthplace of Jesus.

Which royal consort, the wife of George III, put up the first known English Christmas tree at Windsor in 1800?

Queen Charlotte had at first dressed a single yew branch, the custom of her native Mecklenburg-Strelitz, before putting up a whole tree for a children's party.

In Norse myth, which god was killed by mistletoe, the one plant that had sworn no oath to spare him?

Baldr's mother Frigg, in the best-known telling, had everything swear to spare him except the mistletoe, and Loki tricked blind Höðr into throwing it.

The showy red parts of a poinsettia, often mistaken for petals, are actually what part of the plant?

Leaves, known as bracts, do the showing off, and they only colour up after six to eight weeks of nights at least fourteen hours long.

Which German city, famed for Lebkuchen gingerbread, is where tinsel was invented around 1610?

Nuremberg's first tinsel was shredded real silver, which tarnished so quickly that makers swapped in other shiny metals.

A Christmas pomander is made by studding an orange all over with which whole dried spice?

Cloves scent the fruit as it cures dry, after which a pomander can last for years; medieval versions were balls of perfume such as ambergris or musk.

At Mexico's Las Posadas, the seven points of the traditional star-shaped piñata stand for what?

The cardinal sins sit one to a point, while the pot stands for evil and the blindfold on the person swinging the stick represents faith.

By one old custom, what was removed from the mistletoe after every kiss until the kissing had to stop?

A berry was plucked for every kiss, a rule attached to a custom first noted among servants in late eighteenth-century England.

Which country hangs the parol, a star-shaped Christmas lantern traditionally built on a bamboo frame?

The Philippines took the word from the Spanish farol, lantern, and the five-pointed star shape was only fixed during the American colonial period.

Which Swedish town's huge straw Yule goat, first built in 1966, has been burned down by arsonists many times?

Gävle's first goat stood 13 metres tall and was torched on 31 December, and later ones have burned despite guards and a firehouse close by.

The chichilaki, a tree of shaved hazelnut branches likened to Saint Basil's beard, is a Christmas tradition where?

Georgia's chichilaki is ceremonially burned on the eve of the Orthodox Epiphany in January, to carry off the troubles of the old year.

After Soviet authorities lifted a ban in 1935, decorated fir trees returned to Russian homes to mark which holiday?

New Year trees were urged on schools and children's clubs in a 1935 Pravda letter by Pavel Postyshev, after years in which the Christmas tree had been suppressed as religious.

Which Polish city's szopka nativity cribs use its own historic buildings as the backdrop to the manger?

Kraków's crib-making tradition dates from the 19th century and joined UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2018.

In which country do families set out candles and lanterns on December 7 for the Day of the Little Candles?

Colombia treats the night as the unofficial opening of Christmas; it falls on the eve of the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a public holiday there.

Santons, the hand-painted terracotta figures of French nativity scenes, are a traditional craft of which region?

Provence took to santons, whose name means little saints, during the French Revolution, when churches were closed and their large nativity scenes banned.

Which patriotic item, strung together in long garlands, is a traditional decoration on Christmas trees in Denmark?

Small flags on a string share the Danish tree with kræmmerhuse, decorated cornets that are filled with treats.

The Christmas cactus, a favourite holiday houseplant, grows wild in the coastal mountains of which country?

Brazil knows the plant as Flor de Maio, the May flower, because in the Southern Hemisphere it blooms in autumn rather than at Christmas.

Which crimson-flowered coastal tree, in bloom each December, is nicknamed the New Zealand Christmas tree?

Pōhutukawa was first called a Christmas tree in print in 1857, in a newspaper report of a feast held by Eruera Patuone.

In religious symbolism, the spiky points of holly in a Christmas wreath recall which object from the Passion?

The crown of thorns is what the prickly leaves recall, and the red berries stand for drops of blood; the carol The Holly and the Ivy casts holly as Jesus and ivy as the Virgin Mary.

On an Advent wreath with three violet candles, what colour is the fourth, lit on Gaudete Sunday?

Rose marks the third Sunday of Advent, whose Latin name means rejoice, as a pause in the penitential mood of the season.

According to Pliny the Elder, white-robed druids cut mistletoe from a sacred oak using what tool?

A golden sickle did the cutting and a white cloak caught the sprigs; Pliny is the only ancient writer to describe the rite, though Asterix readers know it from Getafix.

A sprig from a hawthorn linked to Joseph of Arimathea is sent to the British monarch each Christmas from which town?

Glastonbury's hawthorn flowers twice a year, the first time in winter, and legend says it grew from the staff Joseph thrust into Wearyall Hill.

Maine wreath-maker Morrill Worcester began an annual tradition in 1992 by sending 5,000 surplus wreaths to which site?

Arlington National Cemetery had stayed with Worcester since a boyhood trip, and his gesture grew into Wreaths Across America, founded in 2007.

Under which pope did Saint Peter's Square get a Christmas tree in 1982, a northern custom new to the Vatican?

John Paul II had grown up with the custom in Poland, and the square has paired its tree with a full-scale nativity scene from that first year.

The General Grant Tree in California, proclaimed the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926, is what kind of tree?

Giant sequoia is the species, and among all of them only the General Sherman Tree is bigger.

Which American magazine reprinted the British royal family's Christmas tree engraving in 1850, minus the queen's tiara?

Godey's Lady's Book also erased Prince Albert's moustache to make the scene look American, and the result was the first widely circulated picture of a decorated tree in the US.

Ukraine's didukh, a sheaf of wheat brought indoors at Christmas, is believed to house the spirits of whom?

Family ancestors are said to live in the sheaf over the holidays and bless the household; the word didukh literally means grandfather spirit.

The Froebel star, a Christmas decoration woven from four strips, is named after the educator who founded what?

Kindergarten was the idea of Friedrich Fröbel, who died in 1852; each of the star's four identical strips is 25 to 30 times longer than it is wide.

In which film does the Old Man win a light fitting shaped like a woman's leg in a newspaper contest?

A Christmas Story ends the prize's short reign when Ralphie's mother, who loathes it, breaks it in what she insists was an accident.

In which comedy does Clark Griswold cover his house in 25,000 lights and cause a citywide power shortage?

Christmas Vacation, the third of National Lampoon's Vacation films, has gone on to inspire real light displays themed on the movie.

Keepsake Ornaments, dated designs each sold for a single year since 1973, are made by which company?

Hallmark launched with just 18 ornaments, six of them glass balls, and by 1998 some 11 million American households were collecting them.

Carson Williams's 2004 home light show, an early viral video, was synchronised to Wizards in Winter by which group?

Trans-Siberian Orchestra supplied the soundtrack for 16,000 lights that took Williams about two months to rig, with the music broadcast to car radios on a low-power FM frequency.

The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights, long a Disney holiday attraction, began at a home in which state?

Arkansas's Supreme Court shut down Jennings Osborne's home display in 1995 after complaints about traffic, and it reopened that year at a Disney park in Florida.

Which maker of lit ceramic Christmas villages began in 1976 inside Bachman's, a Minneapolis florist?

Department 56 was simply its number in the florist's internal system, and its first Snow Village release ran to just six ceramic buildings.

Bronner's, which bills itself as the world's largest Christmas store, is in which German-themed Michigan town?

Frankenmuth's store even includes a replica of the Austrian chapel dedicated to the carol Silent Night, built in 1992 with Austria's permission.

The tune of Deck the Halls, the carol about decorating with holly, was borrowed from a winter carol of which nation?

Wales supplied the 16th-century melody, known as Nos Galan, while the English words were added in 1862 by a Scottish musician.

California's Ecke family built the poinsettia's Christmas fame by shipping free plants to which recipients?

Television stations showed the plants on air, and a secret grafting method that made bushier plants kept the family's near-monopoly safe until a researcher published it.

Which president's family had the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House, in the 1890s?

Grover Cleveland's young daughters had the tree in the White House library, hung with tiny coloured electric lamps in place of the old wax candles.

Via San Gregorio Armeno, a street of workshops selling nativity figures all year round, is in which Italian city?

Naples sets its nativity scenes not in ancient Bethlehem but in the everyday bustle of the city in the 1700s, under the Bourbons.