50 Fun Facts About Christmas Decorations

Austrian Erwin Perzy hit on the snow globe while trying to build a brighter version of what?

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.

What did the crew find hiding inside the wrapped Rockefeller Center tree when it arrived in 2020?

A saw-whet owl, nicknamed Rockefeller, had ridden 170 miles inside the spruce over three days and became a media sensation.

Who put up the first Rockefeller Center tree in 1931, hung with cranberries and a few tin cans?

Construction workers building the Depression-era complex pooled their pay for a 20-foot balsam fir, and their families made the garlands.

After a 1971 FDA finding on child safety, US makers stopped producing tinsel made from which metal?

Lead foil never tarnished like silver, which is why makers clung to it until the FDA talked them into quitting by January 1972 without a formal ban.

Which creature's ornaments hang on Ukrainian trees, thanks to a folktale said to explain tinsel?

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.

Why did only the star light up when Amy Carter threw the switch on the National Christmas Tree in 1979?

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.

In the Christmas pickle custom, what does the first to spot the ornament on Christmas morning get?

An extra present from Santa, or a year of good fortune, rewards the finder, in a custom Americans credit to Germany that probably began in the 1890s alongside imported glass ornaments.

What spread the myth that poinsettias are deadly, later repeated in a 1944 poisonous-plants book?

A 1919 urban legend about a two-year-old dying after eating a leaf did it, yet rats fed the equivalent of 500 leaves showed no toxic dose.

Which region's nativity scenes include the caganer, a squatting peasant with his trousers down?

Catalonia has hidden the defecating figure in its nativity scenes since at least the 18th century, and modern versions depict politicians and celebrities.

A New Mexico luminaria, also called a farolito, is a votive candle standing in sand inside what?

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.

In Christmas colour symbolism, where red stands for the blood of Jesus, what does green represent?

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.

The Scandinavian straw Yule goat is often linked to which Norse god, whose chariot was pulled by two goats?

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.

What makes the carousel of figures on an Ore Mountains Christmas pyramid spin round?

Heat from its candles rises and turns a rotor at the top, and the pyramid is thought to be a forerunner of the Christmas tree itself.

What first brought German nutcracker dolls into American living rooms after the Second World War?

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.

Which first lady began giving the White House Blue Room tree a theme, choosing a Nutcracker motif in 1961?

Jacqueline Kennedy's Nutcracker tree started a tradition every first lady has followed since, though Lou Henry Hoover had claimed the first 'official' tree in 1929.

Which president lit the 1963 National Christmas Tree, delayed to December 22 by 30 days of mourning?

Lyndon B. Johnson lit it after a candle ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial, the assassination of his predecessor having pushed the lighting back from December 18.

Which New York store started the Christmas window tradition with an animated display in 1883?

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.

What gave Tom Smith the idea of adding a bang to the wrapped bon-bons that became Christmas crackers?

A log crackling on the fire he had just stoked inspired the snap, and the sweet inside was eventually dropped in favour of a trinket.

Why was tinsel often chosen over electric strings on the popular aluminum Christmas trees of the 1950s?

Lights risked starting fires on metal trees, some of which were made of flammable aluminized paper, so tinsel garlands supplied the safer sparkle.

Which vegetable do Oaxaca's carvers shape into nativity scenes for a contest held every December 23?

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.

The three gold balls of the Saint Nicholas stocking legend are also the traditional shop sign of which trade?

Pawnbrokers' three gold balls trace to the same tale, in which the gold Nicholas tossed into the drying stockings is sometimes told as three balls, also shown as oranges.

Since 2007, what has happened to the Rockefeller Center tree's trunk after the display comes down?

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.

National Poinsettia Day, December 12 in the US, marks which event in the life of Joel Roberts Poinsett?

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.

In English custom, a charred Yule log was kept under the bed to guard the household against what?

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.

Candy canes are given on Saint Nicholas Day because their crook recalls which object carried by a bishop?

A crosier, the bishop's hooked staff, is what the cane's crook stands for on the saint's feast, and the crook in turn alludes to the Good Shepherd.

The putz, a Pennsylvania German miniature Christmas landscape, is named for a verb meaning what?

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.

The first Herrnhut star was made in the 1830s at a boys' school in Niesky, Germany, as what?

A geometry lesson produced the illuminated star that now marks Advent worldwide, and a school alumnus began selling kits from his bookshop around 1880.

The Finnish straw himmeli, hung over the table until Midsummer, is named from a Swedish word for what?

Heaven, or sky, is what himmel means, and the mobile's 12-piece base stands for the months while its size was said to foretell the rye crop.

Saxony's Schwibbogen candle arch began as a centrepiece for which trade's Christmas-shift dinner?

Miners' Mettenschicht dinners, shared with the foreman and the smith, gave rise to the arch, first forged in metal in 1740 at Johanngeorgenstadt.

Saxony's Räuchermann figure, first recorded in 1850, puffs smoke from its mouth by burning what inside?

An incense cone burns inside the hollow two-part wooden figure, and the smoke escapes through the little man's open mouth.

Which denomination created the Christingle, at first just a red ribbon round a candle, in 1747?

The Moravian Church's Bishop Johannes de Watteville started it to get children thinking about Jesus, and how the orange later joined the candle is unclear.

The oldest known pleated Christmas heart, kept in Odense, was folded in 1860 by which author?

Hans Christian Andersen folded it in 1860, though with no handle it probably never hung on a tree; the woven hearts only became a Danish staple around 1910.

Lost with all hands on Lake Michigan in 1912, the schooner Rouse Simmons was nicknamed what for its cargo?

The Christmas Tree Ship was bound for Chicago with a hold full of evergreens when a storm sank it off Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and ghost sightings persist.

Greenery missed on Twelfth Night must come down by which February feast, by old English custom?

Candlemas, on 2 February, closes the Christmas-Epiphany season in some churches, and leaving decorations up beyond it was held to bring bad luck.

Before the tree arrived, Polish peasants hung a decorated fir branch, the podłaźniczka, from where?

The ceiling rafters above the Christmas Eve table held the branch, hung with apples, nuts, acorns and straw stars in a custom older than Christianity in Poland.

Which five-and-dime founder grew rich importing Lauscha baubles he found in Germany in the 1880s?

F. W. Woolworth's stores began selling Lauscha baubles in 1880, and the imported German glass ornaments became one of the five-and-dime chain's Christmas money-makers.

The second half of the word mistletoe comes from the Old English 'tan', which meant what?

Twig is the sense of tān, so the plant's name is literally a mistle-twig, and the 'toe' spelling may come from mistaking the final -n for a plural ending.

Which city lit the first recorded outdoor electric Christmas tree in 1904, five years before Appleton?

San Diego's 1904 tree beat Appleton in 1909 and New York in 1912, though McAdenville, North Carolina still claims to have started it all in 1956.

A 1953 Newsweek photo of which president's grandson with an Advent calendar sent US demand soaring?

Dwight Eisenhower's grandson did it, just as returning GIs were already carrying German-printed calendars back across the Atlantic.

Which glassmaker adapted its light-bulb line to blow Max Eckardt's Shiny Brite ornaments from 1937?

Corning blew the clear globes in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, for Eckardt's factories to hand-paint, after he foresaw that war would cut off his German imports.

Who traditionally switches on the Capitol Christmas Tree, while the president by custom stays away?

The Speaker of the House throws the switch beside an essay-contest winner, a routine fixed in 1964 after Speaker John McCormack proposed a yearly tree.

Which Hamburg pastor made the first modern Advent wreath in 1839 from an old cartwheel?

Johann Hinrich Wichern lit one small red candle each weekday and a large white one on Sundays so the children at his Rauhes Haus mission could count down to Christmas.

Which Michigan town with a pickle parade billed itself the Christmas pickle capital of the world?

Berrien Springs paraded its pickles from 1992 to 2005 and revived the festival in 2021 after a 16-year gap, despite the custom's German pedigree being apocryphal.

In which Saxon village did 'father of the nutcracker' Friedrich Füchtner first mass-produce the dolls?

Seiffen in Saxony was Füchtner's workshop town, and one origin story credits a Seiffen craftsman with carving the very first nutcracker doll.

Before Oslo's gifts began in 1947, how did a Norwegian spruce first reach Trafalgar Square in 1942?

Felled on a commando raid on the island of Stord, the tree was put up by naval intelligence officers and Norwegian commandos after a dinner at the Savoy.

Which California community's Santa Rosa Avenue, lit since 1920, claims the first public outdoor electric display?

Altadena's Christmas Tree Lane was organised by Fredrick Nash with the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, and a Palo Alto street later borrowed the name.

Which US firm introduced bubble lights in 1946, two years after Carl Otis patented them?

NOMA, then the largest US maker of Christmas lighting, sold the bubblers until miniature strings displaced them in the 1970s; the liquid is usually methylene chloride.

Which German chemist's 1850s silver nitrate technique gave blown-glass baubles their mirror finish?

Justus von Liebig's silvering solution, swirled inside the cooled glass, gave Lauscha's baubles their shine long before he became famous for meat extract.

Die-cut card ornaments beloved of families with small children took their name from which German city?

Dresden ornaments, pressed from card rather than blown from glass, were a new supply that appeared as American stores went national with tree trimmings around 1910.

Which Italian city of the Sassi cave districts staged the world's largest living nativity scene in 2010?

Matera's 2010 living nativity was performed through the Sassi, its historic cave quarter, and was the largest staged anywhere at the time.