Christmas Traditions Trivia

A Germany. Germans were bringing decorated evergreens indoors by the 1600s, and German immigrants carried the custom to America.

D Mistletoe. The custom was common in England by the 1800s and crossed the Atlantic along with plenty of other English Christmas habits.

C Jacob Marley. Marley has been dead seven years when the story opens, and he shows up wearing the chain he forged in life.

A December 1. Most store-bought calendars have 24 doors. The church season of Advent actually starts on a Sunday, anywhere from November 27 to December 3.

C Thanksgiving. It's treated as the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season.

A The Rockettes. The show has run every holiday season since 1933, usually from November into early January.

C The Marine Corps Reserve. Major Bill Hendricks started it in 1947 after his wife couldn't find anyone to take a homemade doll she wanted to donate.

D A Christmas Story. It started on TNT in 1997, with twelve showings in a row from 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve to 8 p.m. on Christmas Day.

D Hansel and Gretel. German bakers were making gingerbread houses by the 1800s. Food historians still argue over whether the Grimm tale started the trend or just described it.

C The NBA. The one year without a Christmas game was 1998, when a lockout wiped out half the season.

B December 23. It comes with a bare aluminum pole, the Airing of Grievances and the Feats of Strength. Writer Dan O'Keefe's family had been celebrating its own version since the 1960s.

A The Saturday after Thanksgiving. American Express started it in 2010 as a counterweight to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

B Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The engraving ran in the Illustrated London News. Albert was German-born and had grown up with the custom.

A The Blue Room. It comes from the grower who wins the National Christmas Tree Association's yearly contest. The room's chandelier is taken down every year to make space for it.

A 1843. It came out on December 19, 1843, and the first printing sold out by Christmas Eve. (1812 is the year Dickens was born.)

B Birth. It comes through French from the Latin natalis, meaning birth, the same root as "natal" and "nativity."

C Construction workers building the complex. During the Depression, workers pooled their money for a 20-foot balsam fir. The official lighting ceremony started two years later, in 1933.

B It's milled into lumber for Habitat for Humanity. The tree is usually a big Norway spruce donated by a homeowner, and the trunk ends up as boards in Habitat for Humanity houses.

D Thomas Edison's. Johnson was vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company and lit the tree in his New York City home with hand-wired bulbs.

D Henry Cole. Cole was too busy to write all his holiday letters by hand. His friend John Callcott Horsley drew the card, and some people grumbled that it showed a child sipping wine.

C Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans saw no biblical basis for the holiday and disliked the drinking that came with it. The fine was five shillings, and the law was repealed in 1681.

B 2005. Carol Aebersold and her daughter Chanda Bell self-published it. By 2012 the elf had its own balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

D The third week. The third Sunday, called Gaudete Sunday, is about joy, so the color lightens up.

D On Christmas Day. They run from December 25 to January 5, the eve of Epiphany, though some traditions count from December 26.

C Franklin D. Roosevelt. Critics called it "Franksgiving," and for two years states couldn't agree on which Thursday to use. Congress settled on the fourth Thursday in 1941.

D A king of Siam. The story goes that the king gave sacred white elephants to courtiers he disliked, knowing the upkeep would ruin them. Historians doubt it ever happened.

B The Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christ. Writers have used X as shorthand for Christ for centuries, so it was never a modern attempt to take Christ out of Christmas.

D Arlington National Cemetery. It started in 1992 when Maine wreath maker Morrill Worcester had about 5,000 extra wreaths. Volunteers now lay them at thousands of cemeteries.

D A Charlie Brown Christmas. Aluminum tree sales dropped off within a few years of the 1965 broadcast, and the trees are collectors' items now.

D Dyker Heights. Many homeowners hire professional decorators, and the biggest displays can cost $20,000 or more.

A As a parasite on tree branches. It taps into a host tree for water and nutrients while still making some of its own food. Birds spread the seeds from tree to tree.

A A surgical lamp. Perzy made surgical instruments and was testing water-filled glass to brighten a lamp. His family's Vienna shop still makes snow globes.

D 1973. The first collection had six glass ball ornaments and twelve yarn figures.

C Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is January 5 or 6, depending on how you count. Taking them down too early is supposed to be unlucky too.

D The Wish Book. Sears put out the first one in 1933, and generations of kids circled what they wanted in it.

C Christ's Mass. Cristes maesse shows up in English writing about a thousand years ago.

B San Francisco. Captain Joseph McFee set out an iron pot by the ferry landing with a sign that read Keep the Pot Boiling, to pay for a Christmas dinner for the poor.

C 1962. The 4-cent stamp showed a wreath, two candles and the words Christmas 1962. Nearly 862 million were distributed by the end of that year.

C Green. Green was a common choice in English pictures. Dickens dresses his Ghost of Christmas Present in "one simple green robe" bordered with white fur.

D The queen's crown and the prince's mustache. Without the crown and mustache, the royals passed for a well-off American family, and the picture helped sell the Christmas tree to the whole country.

B Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge pressed a button to light it on Christmas Eve. The tree was a balsam fir from his home state of Vermont.

A To honor Americans held hostage in Iran. Only the star on top was lit. Carter said the rest would stay dark until the hostages came home.

B Louis Prang. Prang, a German immigrant, started selling Christmas cards in the US in the 1870s. Joyce Hall came later and founded Hallmark.

A An old wagon wheel. It held a small candle for each weekday and a big one for each Sunday, so the children at his Hamburg mission school could count down to Christmas.

C Philadelphia. Officers used it for the traffic and crowds on the day after Thanksgiving. Retailers later spun it as the day stores go "into the black."

A A Pollyanna. The name comes from the cheerful heroine of the 1913 novel Pollyanna. The term is mostly used around Philadelphia and parts of New Jersey.

C San Francisco Ballet. Willam Christensen staged it on Christmas Eve 1944. George Balanchine's New York production followed in 1954.

B A different president, in order. The first ones were general designs, starting with a gold angel. After that the series began honoring presidents one at a time, starting with George Washington.

B A national forest. The Forest Service picks a different national forest each year, and the tree makes stops on its way to Washington. The yearly tradition dates to 1964.

A The Christmas side hunt. Hunters used to split into sides and see who could shoot the most birds. Ornithologist Frank Chapman suggested counting them instead, and 27 people took part that first year.

B Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. The Living Nativity goes back to the first show too. The number ends with the whole line of soldiers falling over like dominoes.