There are 13 Santas in Iceland, each leaving a gift for children. They come down from the mountain one by one, starting on December 12 and have names like Spoon Licker, Door Sniffer and Meat Hook.
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In the Ukraine, if you find a spider web in the house on Christmas morning, it is believed to be a harbinger of good luck! There once lived a woman so poor, says a Ukrainian folk tale, that she could not afford Christmas decorations for her family. One Ch
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The sun sets on 24 December at 3.55pm in the UK, and rises the following morning at 8.05am.
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The tradition of putting tangerines in stockings comes from 12th-century French nuns who left socks full of fruit, nuts and tangerines at the houses of the poor.
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Louis Prang, a Bavarian-born lithographer who came to the USA from Germany in the 19th century, popularized the sending of printed Christmas cards. He invented a way of reproducing color oil paintings
, the "chromolithograph technique", and created a car
, the "chromolithograph technique", and created a car
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US scientists calculated that Santa would have to visit 822 homes a second to deliver all the world's presents on Christmas Eve, travelling at 650 miles a second.
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The abbreviation Xmas isn't irreligious. The letter X is a Greek abbreviation for Christ.
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Gold-wrapped chocolate coins commemorate St Nicholas who gave bags of gold coins to the poor.
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