Christmas by the Numbers Trivia
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78 free Christmas by the Numbers trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every answer in this Christmas by the numbers quiz is a number, which makes it a perfect Christmas math trivia round for a classroom, a family table or an office party where somebody insists on keeping score. How many gifts does the true love send in total across the Twelve Days? How many reindeer pull the sleigh in the 1823 poem, and how many with Rudolph? How many ghosts visit Scrooge, and how many weeks did Dickens take to write the book? How many candles on an Advent wreath, doors on an Advent calendar, lights on the Rockefeller Center tree? The rest of the quiz runs through years and figures: when Silent Night was first sung, when Jingle Bells was written (for Thanksgiving), what year Home Alone came out and how much it made, how old Kevin McCallister is, when Rudolph was invented for Montgomery Ward, when the first Christmas card was printed and what it cost, the year the church settled on December 25, and how many copies of White Christmas have sold. Younger players can handle the counting questions; the dates are for the grown-ups. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the songs, films, traditions and history involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 78 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01If every gift in The Twelve Days of Christmas is repeated daily, how many gifts are sent in total?
364
364 gifts in all: each day's presents are repeated on every later day, so the twelve cumulative verses add up to 364, one short of a full year.
Q 02For how many nights do Las Posadas processions re-enact Mary and Joseph's search for lodging before Christmas?
9
9 nights, from December 16 to 24: each evening a candlelit procession calls at a different house to ask for shelter, as Mary and Joseph did in Bethlehem.
Q 03In PNC's 2024 Christmas Price Index, about how much did one set of the Twelve Days of Christmas gifts cost?
About $49,000
About $49,000: the bank prices the song's shopping list every year as a playful inflation gauge, and the 2024 bill of $49,263 was 5.4% higher than the year before.
Q 04In The Gift of the Magi, how much money does Della have for Jim's present?
$1.87
$1.87: Della sells her long hair for $20 to buy Jim a watch chain, only to find he has sold his watch to buy combs for her hair.
Q 05In what year did Robert L. May create Rudolph for the Montgomery Ward department store?
1939
1939: May, a Montgomery Ward copywriter, wrote the Rudolph booklet for the store's holiday giveaway; Johnny Marks's song followed in 1949 and the stop-motion TV special in 1964.
Q 06How many copies of the Rudolph booklet did Montgomery Ward hand out in its first year?
2.4 million
2.4 million: Montgomery Ward had asked copywriter Robert L. May for a children's story its stores could give away to Christmas shoppers, and his red-nosed misfit was an instant hit.
Q 07How many spirits does Marley tell Scrooge will visit him in A Christmas Carol?
3
Past, Present and Yet to Come; Marley's own ghost makes four visitors in all.
Q 08How many weeks did Dickens take to write A Christmas Carol?
6
6 weeks in the autumn of 1843: the first 6,000 copies sold out within days, yet the costly binding and colour plates left Dickens with disappointingly small profits.
Q 09In A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present says he has had more than how many brothers?
1,800
1,800: asked whether he has had many brothers, the Ghost answers 'More than eighteen hundred', and Scrooge mutters, 'A tremendous family to provide for!'
Q 10How many candles are on a traditional Advent wreath?
4
4 candles: one more is lit on each Sunday of Advent, so the light grows week by week until all of them burn on the last Sunday before Christmas.
Q 11How many little doors are on a standard Advent calendar?
24
24 doors, one for each day from 1 December to Christmas Eve: Advent itself begins on a Sunday that shifts from year to year, so printed calendars simply start on a fixed date.
Q 12How many bulbs were on Edward Johnson's first electrically lit Christmas tree in 1882?
80
80 bulbs: Johnson, a partner of Thomas Edison, hand-wired red, white and blue lamps the size of walnuts onto a revolving tree in his New York parlour, a safer show than the usual candles.
Q 13About how many LED lights are hung on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree?
50,000
50,000 multicoloured LEDs, strung along about five miles of wire by crews working from scaffolding built around the tree.
Q 21In It's a Wonderful Life, how much does Uncle Billy lose on Christmas Eve?
$8,000
$8,000: Billy absent-mindedly hands the Building and Loan's deposit to Mr. Potter inside a folded newspaper, and Potter keeps it, driving George Bailey to the brink of suicide.
Q 22Into how many staves, as Dickens called its chapters, is A Christmas Carol divided?
5
5 staves, from 'Marley's Ghost' to 'The End of It': a stave is a verse of a song, which suits a ghost story that Dickens chose to call a carol.
Q 23How much has Elf grossed worldwide?
$230 million
$230 million or so: the $33 million comedy became such a seasonal fixture that it has gone back into cinemas in most years since 2018.
Q 14How much does the 2018 Swarovski star atop the Rockefeller Center tree weigh?
900 pounds
900 pounds: architect Daniel Libeskind's star carries three million crystals on 70 backlit spikes, so it takes a crane to lift it onto the top of the tree.
Q 15Since what year has the Rockefeller Center tree been an annual tradition?
1933
1933: construction workers put up an unofficial tree on the muddy site in 1931, and the first formal lighting ceremony in 1933 began the annual tradition.
Q 16How many reindeer pull the sleigh in A Visit from St. Nicholas?
8
8 reindeer: the poem named every one of them, from Dasher to Blitzen, and fixed the picture of Santa arriving by flying sleigh on Christmas Eve.
Q 17How much did Home Alone cost to make?
$18 million
$18 million: Warner Bros. shut the film down when its costs passed the $10 million ceiling John Hughes had promised, and 20th Century Fox stepped in to finish it.
Q 18About how much did Home Alone gross worldwide?
$480 million
$480 million or so: the Christmas comedy opened in mid-November 1990 and was still the number-one film in American cinemas at the start of February.
Q 19For how many years had the Grinch put up with Whoville's Christmas noise before he snapped?
53
53 years: Dr. Seuss was 53 himself when the book came out in 1957, which biographers read as a hint that he saw something of the Grinch in himself.
Q 20How many sizes too small is the Grinch's heart?
2
2 sizes too small, the narrator guesses, until the Whos sing on Christmas morning without their presents and the Grinch's heart grows three sizes that day.
Q 24In Die Hard, how much in bearer bonds is Hans Gruber's gang trying to steal?
$640 million
$640 million: Gruber only poses as a terrorist making demands, and the siege of the Christmas Eve party is really cover for robbing the tower's vault.
Q 25Roughly what was the budget of the 2004 motion-capture film The Polar Express?
About $170 million
About $170 million: it opened only second, behind The Incredibles, but yearly Christmas re-releases have since lifted its takings to nearly twice its cost.
Q 26In 1942, Bing Crosby recorded White Christmas in a session that took about how many minutes?
18
18 minutes: the quick take was pressed so many times that the master wore out, and Crosby had to record the song again in 1947.
Q 27Which composer's ballet The Nutcracker premiered in December 1892?
Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky: the ballet was no success at first, and its composer died the following year, long before it became a Christmas fixture.
Q 28Roughly how many physical copies has Bing Crosby's recording of White Christmas sold?
50 million
50 million copies by the Guinness World Records estimate, the most for any single: Irving Berlin sensed it at once, boasting that he had just written the best song anybody had ever written.
Q 29How many weeks did White Christmas top the Billboard chart on its 1942 release?
11
11 weeks from October 1942: with America at war, the song's longing for Christmases past struck a chord, and armed forces radio played it again and again for the troops.
Q 30How many years after release did All I Want for Christmas Is You first top the Hot 100?
25
25 years: the 1994 song was not sold as a single at first, which made it ineligible for the chart, and it finally reached number one in December 2019.