Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Christmas Holiday Facts  

Posted by Salraz in ,

There's no other holiday like Christmas. Many of us celebrate the holidays without knowing how our traditions got started or what they signify. Christmas is much more fun when you know some facts behind the holiday.

Most of these facts are very interesting and reminds us that there is quite a bit of history behind our family customs. Try using the Christmas Holiday Facts to make your own Christmas quiz for holiday parties and add a unique touch with personal favorites.

Christmas Holiday Facts: (World Amazing Facts)

  • The word Christmas is Old English, a contraction of Christ's Mass.

  • The first president to decorate the white house Christmas tree in the United States was Franklin Pierce.

  • Electric lights for trees were first used in 1895.

  • The first Christmas cards were vintage and invented in 1843, the Victorian Era

  • "It's a Wonderful Life" appears on TV more often than any other holiday movie.

  • "Rudolph" was actually created by Montgomery Ward in the late 1930's for a holiday promotion. The rest is history.

  • "The Nutcracker" is the most famous Christmas ballet.

  • "Jingle Bells" was first written for Thanksgiving and then became one of the most popular Christmas songs.

  • If you received all of the gifts in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas", you would receive 364 presents.

  • The poinsettia plant was brought into the United States from Mexico by Joel Poinsett in the early 1800's.

  • Holly berries are poisonous.

  • Contrary to common belief, poinsettia plants are non-toxic.

  • In 1843, "A Christmas Carol" was written by Charles Dickens in just six weeks.

  • The first state to recognize the Christmas holiday officially was Alabama

  • Christmas became a national holiday in America on June, 26, 1870.

  • Coca Cola was the first beverage company to use Santa for a winter promotion.

  • An angel told Mary she was going to have a baby.

  • Clearing up a common misconception, in Greek, X means Christ. That is where the word "X-Mas" comes from. Not because someone took the "Christ" out of Christmas.

  • Traditionally, Christmas trees are taken down after Epiphany.

  • More diamonds are sold around Christmas than any other time of the year.

  • In Mexico, wearing red underwear on New Year's Eve is said to bring new love in the upcoming year.

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Why We Never Lied to Our Kids About Santa  

Posted by Salraz in ,

There are many things to dislike about Christmas: the bloated newspaper ads, the second-rate music repeated endlessly in shopping malls, the inane evangelical bleating that " "Jesus is the reason for the season"", and the pressure to conform lest you be labeled a Scrooge, or, even worse, a Grinch.

Of course, there are things to like about Christmas, too. Everybody enjoys giving presents, and some even like receiving them. A break from work is always appreciated -- even if, like me, you just use it to catch up on work left undone -- and a house that smells of roast turkey is one worth coming home to.

But there's one Christmas tradition that my wife and I have never shared: deceiving our kids about the real nature of Santa.

You know -- Santa Claus, Jolly St. Nick -- the man in the red suit who delivers the presents, as immortalized in the classic poem by Clement Clark Moore. (Shhh - don't tell the kids that Moore, a dour, humourless man who owned slaves and opposed abolition, probably stole the poem and its authorship from Henry Livingston.)

Ever year, Christmas offers adults the opportunity to participate in an absurd fraud against your own children: to pretend that Santa Claus is real, that he spookily monitors their behavior, that Santa won't bring them presents if they misbehave, and that he somehow manages to invade a billion houses in one night, aided by eight (or is it nine?) aviating ungulates.

I can already hear the howls of outrage. "It's a harmless fantasy," some will say. But it's not that harmless. Someday your Santa lie will be discovered. If you lied to them about Santa Claus, kids will wonder, what else did you lie to them about?

"It's only a little lie," others will say. But it's not so little. Once you lie about Santa's existence, you have to lie another time when your kids see Santa in two different stores. You have to lie once again when the kids leave Santa cookies before going to bed, and in the morning they're gone. It starts small, but it soon becomes an elaborate deception. We refused to play along.

I have nothing against fantasy stories. As a child, I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read it over and over again. But it's important to know the difference between reality and fantasy. I never believed that Tolkien's Middle Earth was real, and my parents didn't lie to me that it was.

My wife and I never lied to our kids about Santa Claus. We treated him as a mythical figure, just like the the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin.

Our kids don't seem to have been permanently harmed by our choice. Both like reading and telling stories, and they enjoy fantasy and role-playing games. The Narnia books are some of their favorites. They've even been known to wear Santa hats and play Christmas carols on their violins.

"You deprived them of a magical experience," some will say. I don't think so. Our kids know there is magic in the world, because they've looked through a microscope at a cell, and they've looked through a telescope at the rings of Saturn. They know that the tilt of the Earth's axis is the real reason for the season, but they also know the magic of their parents' love.

So no, Virginia -- Santa Claus isn't real. But there's nothing phony about human imagination, fantasy, the telling of tales, the complexity of our universe, the desire for a better world to live in, and our ability to achieve that world if we work hard enough and care about others. We told our kids the truth about those things, too.

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