General Christmas Facts Page 4 at Santa's Net.

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"I will hold Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." - Charles Dickens.

Valentines Day should be every day of the year

General Christmas Facts Page 4

Tom Smith who owned a sweet shop in London was the originator of the cracker. In the 1840s Tom found that people like sugar almonds, but while he was in France he discovered a variety of sweets wrapped up in a twist of paper. These bonbons were popular, so Tom decided to copy them. When Tom noticed that young men were buying them to give to their sweethearts he began to place "love mottoes" on small slips of paper inside the sweet wrapping.
In 1846 Tom's thoughts turned towards Christmas - instead of sweets he thought he would place toys and novelties inside the twisted wrapping. He experimented with this and the idea of producing a wrapping that could be pulled apart - just like the cracker as we know it today.

The word carol is derived from the old French word caroller which derives from the Latin choraula. This itself was derived from the Greek choraules.

Births on 25 December:

W C Field (1946)
Alice Cooper (1945)
Princess Alexandra (1936)
Paul Borget (1935)
Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889)

Deaths on 25 December:

Conrad Hilton (1979)
Humphrey Bogart (1957)
Dorothy Wordsworth (1855)
Sir Isaac Newton (1727)

The biggest selling Christmas single of all time is Bing Crosby's White Christmas.

In Switzerland during the Reformation, al instrumental and choral music was banned from churches. In Germany, disapproval of carols resulted in some being converted into hymns.

Tinsel on the Christmas Tree is attributed to a woman whose husband died. She was left to bring up a large family of children herself. She was left to do everything working so hard and she was determined to make a happy time for them at Christmas. She prepared a Christmas Tree to surprise them on Christmas Day. Unfortunately spiders visited the tree, and crawled from branch to branch, making webs all over it. The Christ Child saw the tree and knew she would be devastated to find this on Christmas morning. He changed the spiders' webs to shining silver.

The first church the Dutch built in New York City was named in St Nicholas' honour -St Nicholas Church.

Many Christmas customs are carryovers from pre-Christian celebrations. Hanging gifts on trees is supposed to stem from tree worship of the Druids, and the belief that the tree was the giver of all good things. The Druids are also partly responsible for the use of mistletoe at Christmastime. They regarded the mistletoe as sacred, made certain that it never touched the ground, and dedicated it to the Goddess of Love, which explains the kissing that goes on under it. Originally, when a boy kissed a girl, he plucked a berry from the cluster and presented it to her. When the berries were gone, so were the kisses.