Christmas Decorations Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free Christmas Decorations trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every bauble, strand of tinsel and front-door wreath has a back story, and most of them are stranger than the glossy catalogue version. A toxic metal that hung on millions of trees for decades, a snow globe born from a failed medical gadget, a nativity figure with his trousers down, and a national tree deliberately left dark: the things we hang up each December carry more history than we notice. This quiz covers the objects themselves: blown-glass ornaments and who sold them, the German workshop traditions of the Ore Mountains, mistletoe and holly customs, stockings, Advent wreaths and calendars, nativity scenes from Naples to the Pyrenees, and the famous public trees of Rockefeller Center, Trafalgar Square and Washington. There is a small run of hard ones at the end for the collector who knows their Shiny Brite from their Lauscha. It suits a family round on Christmas Eve, an office party, or a pub quiz's festive week. Every answer is verified against an encyclopaedia or primary source, with a one-line explanation you can read out.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Austrian Erwin Perzy hit on the snow globe while trying to build a brighter version of what?
A surgical lamp
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.
Q 02What did the crew find hiding inside the wrapped Rockefeller Center tree when it arrived in 2020?
A saw-whet owl
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.
Q 03Who put up the first Rockefeller Center tree in 1931, hung with cranberries and a few tin cans?
Construction workers
Construction workers building the Depression-era complex pooled their pay for a 20-foot balsam fir, and their families made the garlands.
Q 04Which metal did US tinsel makers give up in the early 1970s after the FDA flagged a risk to children?
Lead
Lead foil never tarnished like silver, which is why makers clung to it until the FDA talked them into quitting without a formal ban.
Q 05Which creature's ornaments hang on Ukrainian trees, thanks to a folktale said to explain tinsel?
A spider
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.
Q 06Why did only the star light up when Amy Carter switched on the 1979 National Christmas Tree?
For the hostages in Iran
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.
Q 07In the Christmas pickle custom, what does the first to spot the ornament on Christmas morning get?
An extra present
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.
Q 08In tests that debunked the deadly-poinsettia myth, which animals were fed the equivalent of 500 leaves without harm?
Rats
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.
Q 09Which region's nativity scenes include the caganer, a squatting peasant with his trousers down?
Catalonia
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.
Q 10A New Mexico luminaria, also called a farolito, is a votive candle standing in sand inside what?
A paper bag
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.
Q 11In Christmas colour symbolism, where red stands for the blood of Jesus, what does green represent?
Eternal life
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.
Q 12The Scandinavian straw Yule goat is often linked to which Norse god, whose chariot was pulled by two goats?
Thor
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.
Q 13What makes the carousel of figures on an Ore Mountains Christmas pyramid spin round?
Heat from its candles
Q 21The three gold balls of the Saint Nicholas stocking legend are also the traditional shop sign of which trade?
Pawnbrokers
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.
Q 22Since 2007, what has happened to the Rockefeller Center tree's trunk after the display comes down?
Milled into lumber for housing
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.
Q 23National Poinsettia Day, December 12 in the US, marks which event in the life of Joel Roberts Poinsett?
His death
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.
Q 14What first brought German nutcracker dolls into American living rooms after the Second World War?
GIs bringing souvenirs home
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.
Q 15Which first lady began giving the White House Blue Room tree a theme, starting with a Nutcracker motif?
Jacqueline Kennedy
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.
Q 16Which president lit a National Christmas Tree delayed to December 22 by 30 days of national mourning?
Lyndon B. Johnson
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.
Q 17Which New York store started the Christmas window tradition with an animated display in 1883?
Macy's
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.
Q 18By 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
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.
Q 19What usually lit a 1960s aluminum Christmas tree, since strings of bulbs were thought unsafe on it?
A rotating colour wheel
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.
Q 20Which vegetable do Oaxaca's carvers shape into nativity scenes for a contest held every December 23?
Radishes
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.
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.
Q 24In English custom, a charred Yule log was kept under the bed to guard the household against what?
Lightning
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.
Q 25Candy canes given on Saint Nicholas Day are said to recall which object carried by a bishop?
A crosier
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.
Q 26The putz, a Pennsylvania German miniature Christmas landscape, is named for a verb meaning what?
To clean
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.
Q 27The first Herrnhut star was made at a boys' school in Niesky, Germany, as what?
A geometry lesson
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.
Q 28The Finnish himmeli, a geometric straw mobile hung at Christmas, takes its name from a Swedish word for what?
Heaven
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.
Q 29Saxony's Schwibbogen candle arch is thought to have begun at which trade's Christmas-shift dinner?
Miners
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.
Q 30Saxony's Räuchermann figure, made since about 1850, puffs smoke from its mouth by burning what inside?
An incense cone
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.