Christmas by the Numbers Trivia
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49 free Christmas by the Numbers trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every answer in this Christmas by the numbers quiz is a number, which makes it a perfect Christmas math trivia round for a classroom, a family table or an office party where somebody insists on keeping score. How many gifts does the true love send in total across the Twelve Days? How many reindeer pull the sleigh in the 1823 poem, and how many with Rudolph? How many ghosts visit Scrooge, and how many weeks did Dickens take to write the book? How many candles on an Advent wreath, doors on an Advent calendar, lights on the Rockefeller Center tree? The rest of the quiz runs through years and figures: when Silent Night was first sung, when Jingle Bells was written (for Thanksgiving), what year Home Alone came out and how much it made, how old Kevin McCallister is, when Rudolph was invented for Montgomery Ward, when the first Christmas card was printed and what it cost, the year the church settled on December 25, and how many copies of White Christmas have sold. Younger players can handle the counting questions; the dates are for the grown-ups. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the songs, films, traditions and history involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01If every gift in The Twelve Days of Christmas is repeated daily, how many gifts are sent in total?
364
364 gifts in all: each day's presents are repeated on every later day, so the twelve cumulative verses add up to 364, one short of a full year.
Q 02How many gold rings are given in The Twelve Days of Christmas?
5
The 1780 text says "gold"; "golden" caught on in North America after Mitch Miller's 1961 recording.
Q 03How many reindeer pull Santa's sleigh in the 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas?
8
The poem introduced most of the modern Santa; Rudolph did not join the team until 1939.
Q 04In what year was A Visit from St. Nicholas first published?
1823
1823: the poem appeared anonymously in the Troy Sentinel on 23 December that year; Clement Clarke Moore acknowledged it in 1837, though some scholars credit Henry Livingston Jr.
Q 05Rudolph is usually counted as which number reindeer on Santa's team?
9th
He is the youngest as well, and his nose leads the sleigh on foggy Christmas Eves.
Q 06In what year did Robert L. May create Rudolph for the Montgomery Ward department store?
1939
1939: May, a Montgomery Ward copywriter, wrote the Rudolph booklet for the store's holiday giveaway; Johnny Marks's song followed in 1949 and the stop-motion TV special in 1964.
Q 07How many copies of the Rudolph booklet did Montgomery Ward hand out in its first year?
2.4 million
2.4 million copies went out free to Montgomery Ward shoppers in the booklet's first season, a giveaway so popular the store reissued it once wartime paper shortages ended.
Q 08How many spirits does Marley tell Scrooge will visit him in A Christmas Carol?
3
Past, Present and Yet to Come; Marley's own ghost makes four visitors in all.
Q 09In what year was A Christmas Carol published?
1843
It came out on 19 December and had sold out by Christmas Eve.
Q 10How many weeks did Dickens take to write A Christmas Carol?
6
He began in October 1843 and finished the last pages in early December, "at white heat".
Q 11Into how many "staves" is A Christmas Carol divided?
5
Dickens used the musical word instead of chapters to fit the "carol" of the title.
Q 12How many candles are on a traditional Advent wreath?
4
One is lit each Sunday of Advent; some wreaths add a fifth white Christ candle in the middle for Christmas Day.
Q 13How many little doors are on a standard Advent calendar?
24
24 doors, one for each day from 1 December to Christmas Eve; Munich printer Gerhard Lang sold the first commercial printed calendars in the early 1900s and added little doors in the 1920s.
Q 14How many bulbs were on Edward Johnson's first electrically lit Christmas tree in 1882?
Q 21For how many years had the Grinch put up with Whoville's Christmas noise before he snapped?
53
53 years: 'For fifty-three years I've put up with it now!' the Grinch fumes in Dr. Seuss's 1957 book; Boris Karloff voiced him in the 1966 TV special.
Q 22How many sizes too small is the Grinch's heart?
2
It grows three sizes on Christmas morning when he hears the Whos singing anyway.
Q 23In what year did It's a Wonderful Life come out?
1946
1946: Frank Capra's film premiered in New York on 20 December 1946, disappointed at the box office, then became a TV fixture after a clerical error let its copyright lapse in 1974.
How many Academy Award nominations did It's a Wonderful Life receive?
80
80 bulbs: Johnson, an Edison associate, hand-wired eighty red, white and blue lamps the size of walnuts onto a revolving tree in his New York home; the White House followed with electric lights in 1895.
Q 15About how many LED lights are hung on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree?
50,000
About 50,000 multicoloured LED lights cover the tree, strung on miles of wire and switched on at the televised lighting ceremony each late November or early December.
Q 16How much does the 2018 Swarovski star atop the Rockefeller Center tree weigh?
900 pounds
900 pounds: the Swarovski star Daniel Libeskind designed for the 2018 season carries three million crystals on 70 spikes and weighs about 900 pounds.
Q 17Since what year has the Rockefeller Center tree been an annual tradition?
1933
1933: construction workers put up an unofficial tree on the muddy site in 1931, and the first formal lighting ceremony in 1933 began the annual tradition.
Q 18How old is Kevin McCallister in Home Alone?
8
He defends the family's suburban Chicago house from the Wet Bandits after everyone flies to Paris without him.
Q 19In what year was Home Alone released?
1990
1990: Home Alone opened on 16 November 1990 and held the Guinness record as the highest-grossing live-action comedy until The Hangover Part II in 2011.
Q 20How much did Home Alone gross worldwide?
$476.7 million
$476.7 million worldwide against a budget of about $18 million, a total beaten that year only by Ghost; Lost in New York, the first sequel, followed in 1992.
5
It won none, and lost money at the box office.
Q 25How many Oscars did Miracle on 34th Street win?
3
Edmund Gwenn won for playing Kris Kringle, plus two writing awards.
Q 26In what year was Elf released?
2003
2003: Elf opened in November 2003 with Will Ferrell as Buddy, raised at the North Pole and sent to New York; Jon Favreau directed on a budget of about $33 million.
Q 27In what year was Die Hard, the eternal "is it a Christmas film" debate, released?
1988
1988: Die Hard opened on 15 July 1988, with Bruce Willis's John McClane trapped in Nakatomi Plaza during a Christmas Eve party, and grossed about $140 million worldwide.
Q 28Roughly what was the budget of the 2004 motion-capture film The Polar Express?
$165-170 million
$165-170 million: Robert Zemeckis's motion-capture film, with Tom Hanks in several roles including the conductor, was reported as the most expensive animated feature to date in 2004 and grossed about $286 million in its first run.
Q 29In what year was Silent Night first performed, in Oberndorf, Austria?
1818
1818: Joseph Mohr's words, written two years earlier, were set by schoolteacher Franz Xaver Gruber and sung with guitar at St. Nicholas church in Oberndorf on Christmas Eve 1818.
Q 30In what year did John Freeman Young publish the standard English translation of Silent Night?
1859
1859: Episcopal priest John Freeman Young published the English version sung in most churches, 'Silent night, holy night! All is calm, all is bright', in New York in 1859.