Christmas is upon us. Here are some “did you know” openers that you can present at Christmas dinner to keep the conversation flowing.
Did you know that Mariah Carey’s 1994 holiday hit “All I want for Christmas is You” earns Carey about $2.7 million every holiday season in royalties? Spotify has announced that “All I want for Christmas is You” is the first holiday song to surpass two billion streams and is the #1 streamed song every Christmas Day since 2016. CNBC estimates that that one song alone has generated over $103 million. Talk about the song that keeps on giving!
Canada Post strike be damned! Fed Ex alone will ship 106 million packages in the month of December.
On Christmas Eve, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, will receive in excess of 100,000 calls from kids looking for updates on Santa’s sleigh while millions of other kids will log in digitally to follow Santa’s progress. The annual Santa tracker started in 1955 after an accidental phone call by a child, who thought he was calling the North Pole after Sears in error, printed the NORAD phone number in a newspaper advertisement. That year NORAD received over 60 calls from kids on the NORAD hotline and a commander colonel named Harry Shoup saw an opportunity to boost morale and thus a tradition was born.
Did you know that in North America uses around 3.5 billion kWH to power Christmas lights in the month of December? A 20’ string of lights uses about 40 kWh. That means the amount of energy used in a month to power Christmas lights is greater than the ANNUAL energy consumption of countries including Ethiopia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Nepal! We can talk about global warming in January; leave my Christmas lights alone!
The earliest Christmas stockings were actually not stockings but shoes; a Dutch tradition of leaving shoes packed with food for Saint Nicola’s donkeys (not reindeer). Then again, every country seems to have claim to the origin of traditions, and another is that stockings have their roots with a fourth century bishop in what is today Turkey, named Saint Nicholas, who heard about a poor man with no money for his daughter’s dowries. In the dead of night he dropped gold coins down the man’s chimney which happened to land in the daughters’ stockings that were drying by the fire. So much for Dutch donkeys!
Have you ever wondered why red, gold and green are the colours most representative of Christmas? According to tradition, green is the symbol of life, red is the symbol of the blood of Christ and gold represents light, wealth and royalty. And as they say: red and green should never be seen unless its Christmas!
Tinsel was invented in Germany in the 1600s and was originally made from real silver strands. By the 1800s the United States had banned the use of tinsel because the silver was replaced with lead. Today’s tinsel is made from plastic and aluminium and nothing says Christmas more than plastic and aluminium!
The average Christmas tree stays in your house for just over three weeks, but they take 15 years to grow. I wish I didn’t know that! The first known decorated tree was in 1510 in Riga, Latvia and the first decorations used were apples which represent Adam and Eve.
In a digital age where every answer is just a click away, it’s heartwarming to know that according to an Exeter Santa Survey, an estimated 85% of American kids believe in Santa up until the age of eight, when they stop believing. In November and December, the United States Postal Service will receive 32,000 letters every day addressed to Santa and 2.1 billion Christmas cards will be sent globally. Speaking of Christmas cards, the first card produced was in 1843 and sent by British civil servant Sir Henry Cole, who used the card as a way of promoting the new British postal service.
According to History.com, candy canes were invented by the choirmaster of Germany’s Cologne Cathedral in 1670 and given to kids to keep them quiet during Christmas Eve service.
While you may think X-mas became the shortened form of Christmas during the digital age, it actually dates back to the 1500s and gets its origin from the Greek letter X which is the first letter in the Greek word for Christ. Who knew?
If your favourite thing to be at a family dinner is a know-it-all, remind everyone that Rudolph should not have antlers since male reindeers shed their antlers in winter. Thanks for that!
While we now all dream of a “white Christmas”, the concept of a white Christmas was invented by Charles Dickens when he wrote a Christmas Carol in 1843.
And lastly, the concept of the polar bear dip is a Canadian invention, a New Year’s Day tradition of plunging in a cold lake symbolizing a fresh start to the new year.
Whatever traditions you celebrate, we wish you the best for a joyous holiday and new year!
Read the back story behind the Christmas classic A Charlie Brown Christmas here.
Read all of our Holiday Gift Guides here.