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50 free Christmas Decorations trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every bauble, strand of tinsel and front-door wreath has a back story, and most of them are stranger than the glossy catalogue version. A toxic metal that hung on millions of trees for decades, a snow globe born from a failed medical gadget, a nativity figure with his trousers down, and a national tree deliberately left dark: the things we hang up each December carry more history than we notice. This quiz covers the objects themselves: blown-glass ornaments and who sold them, the German workshop traditions of the Ore Mountains, mistletoe and holly customs, stockings, Advent wreaths and calendars, nativity scenes from Naples to the Pyrenees, and the famous public trees of Rockefeller Center, Trafalgar Square and Washington. There is a small run of hard ones at the end for the collector who knows their Shiny Brite from their Lauscha. It suits a family round on Christmas Eve, an office party, or a pub quiz's festive week. Every answer is verified against an encyclopaedia or primary source, with a one-line explanation you can read out.
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Q 01Austrian Erwin Perzy hit on the snow globe while trying to build a brighter version of what?
A surgical lamp
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.
Q 02What did the crew find hiding inside the wrapped Rockefeller Center tree when it arrived in 2020?
A saw-whet owl
A saw-whet owl, nicknamed Rockefeller, had ridden 170 miles inside the spruce over three days and became a media sensation.
Q 03Who put up the first Rockefeller Center tree in 1931, hung with cranberries and a few tin cans?
Construction workers
Construction workers building the Depression-era complex pooled their pay for a 20-foot balsam fir, and their families made the garlands.
Q 04After a 1971 FDA finding on child safety, US makers stopped producing tinsel made from which metal?
Lead
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.
Q 05Which creature's ornaments hang on Ukrainian trees, thanks to a folktale said to explain tinsel?
A spider
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.
Q 06Why did only the star light up when Amy Carter threw the switch on the National Christmas Tree in 1979?
For the hostages in Iran
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.
Q 07In the Christmas pickle custom, what does the first to spot the ornament on Christmas morning get?
An extra present
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.
Q 08What spread the myth that poinsettias are deadly, later repeated in a 1944 poisonous-plants book?
A 1919 urban legend
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.
Q 09Which region's nativity scenes include the caganer, a squatting peasant with his trousers down?
Catalonia
Catalonia has hidden the defecating figure in its nativity scenes since at least the 18th century, and modern versions depict politicians and celebrities.
Q 10A New Mexico luminaria, also called a farolito, is a votive candle standing in sand inside what?
A paper bag
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.
Q 11In Christmas colour symbolism, where red stands for the blood of Jesus, what does green represent?
Eternal life
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.
Q 12The Scandinavian straw Yule goat is often linked to which Norse god, whose chariot was pulled by two goats?
Thor
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.
Q 13What makes the carousel of figures on an Ore Mountains Christmas pyramid spin round?
Heat from its candles
Q 21The three gold balls of the Saint Nicholas stocking legend are also the traditional shop sign of which trade?
Pawnbrokers
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.
Q 22Since 2007, what has happened to the Rockefeller Center tree's trunk after the display comes down?
Milled into lumber for housing
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.
Q 23National Poinsettia Day, December 12 in the US, marks which event in the life of Joel Roberts Poinsett?
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.
Q 14What first brought German nutcracker dolls into American living rooms after the Second World War?
GIs bringing souvenirs home
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.
Q 15Which first lady began giving the White House Blue Room tree a theme, choosing a Nutcracker motif in 1961?
Jacqueline Kennedy
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.
Q 16Which president lit the 1963 National Christmas Tree, delayed to December 22 by 30 days of mourning?
Lyndon B. Johnson
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.
Q 17Which New York store started the Christmas window tradition with an animated display in 1883?
Macy's
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.
Q 18What gave Tom Smith the idea of adding a bang to the wrapped bon-bons that became Christmas crackers?
A log crackling on the fire
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.
Q 19Why was tinsel often chosen over electric strings on the popular aluminum Christmas trees of the 1950s?
Lights risked starting fires
Lights risked starting fires on metal trees, some of which were made of flammable aluminized paper, so tinsel garlands supplied the safer sparkle.
Q 20Which vegetable do Oaxaca's carvers shape into nativity scenes for a contest held every December 23?
Radishes
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.
His death
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.
Q 24In English custom, a charred Yule log was kept under the bed to guard the household against what?
Lightning
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.
Q 25Candy canes are given on Saint Nicholas Day because their crook recalls which object carried by a bishop?
A crosier
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.
Q 26The putz, a Pennsylvania German miniature Christmas landscape, is named for a verb meaning what?
To clean
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.
Q 27The first Herrnhut star was made in the 1830s at a boys' school in Niesky, Germany, as what?
A geometry lesson
A geometry lesson produced the illuminated star that now marks Advent worldwide, and a school alumnus began selling kits from his bookshop around 1880.
Q 28The Finnish straw himmeli, hung over the table until Midsummer, is named from a Swedish word for what?
Heaven
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.
Q 29Saxony's Schwibbogen candle arch began as a centrepiece for which trade's Christmas-shift dinner?
Miners
Miners' Mettenschicht dinners, shared with the foreman and the smith, gave rise to the arch, first forged in metal in 1740 at Johanngeorgenstadt.
Q 30Saxony's Räuchermann figure, first recorded in 1850, puffs smoke from its mouth by burning what inside?
An incense cone
An incense cone burns inside the hollow two-part wooden figure, and the smoke escapes through the little man's open mouth.