Christmas “Did You Know?”
There are a lot of traditions, events, and other factors related to the Christmas celebration that folks might not be familiar with. I found that I definitely had some things to learn when I was researching for a few “Did you know?” points about the December holiday. Here are a few to share:
• The first recorded Christmas celebration occurred in Rome, December 25, 336 AD, as documented in Roman bishops’ records compiled in 354. In them, the following words appear in an entry for 336: “25 Dec: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae” (translation: “December 25th, Christ born in Bethlehem, Judea”)
• Nova Scotia has gifted the city of Boston a Christmas tree every year since 1971 as a symbol of gratitude and friendship. In 1917, a French cargo ship packed with explosives and acid collided with another ship in the capital city’s harbor. The blast destroyed property within a 1.5-mile radius of Halifax, resulting in 2,000 deaths and 9,000 injuries. Boston’s mayor and Massachusetts’ governor at the time immediately organized support for their Canadian neighbors. Within 12 hours of the explosion, a train bound for Halifax left Boston, carrying a team of medical personnel and supplies. People who saw ads in the Boston Globe asking for donations to the relief fund contributed to the initial $100,000 raised for Halifax. In all, Boston helped provide $750,000 in relief aid for the Halifax community. This year, for the 49th time, Halifax thanked Boston for their assistance during that time with a Christmas tree—a 45foot White Spruce.
“We thank Boston for their kindness during our time of need by send
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ing a big, beautiful Nova Scotia Christmas tree,” Nova Scotia Lands and Forestry Minister Derek Mombourquette said in a statement. “This important tradition symbolizes gratitude, friendship and remembrance.”
• Five months into World War I, gunfire ceased in many places along the Western Front on Christmas Day 1914, marking an unofficial ceasefire to celebrate the holiday. What is now known as The Christmas Truce began that year on Christmas Eve, when many British and German troops battling one another sang Christmas carols to one another across enemy lines. When morning broke on Christmas Day some German soldiers even emerged from their trenches, approaching the Allied lines while calling out “Merry Christmas” in English. Though they at first feared it was a trick, British troops climbed out of their own trenches to meet the unarmed enemy soldiers. They shook hands, exchanged presents like cigarettes and plum puddings and sang carols and songs. In one location, soldiers from both sides even took part in a game of soccer to celebrate.
“[It] was one of the last examples of the outdated notion of chivalry between enemies in warfare,” History.com writes. “It was never repeated— f uture attempts at holiday ceasefires were quashed by officers’ threats of disciplinary action—but it served as heartening proof, however brief, that beneath the brutal clash of weapons, the soldiers’ essential humanity endured.”
• During the Second World War, one US company worked with American and British Intelligence Agencies to make and distribute special gifts to Allied Prisoners of War. Intelligence officials helped the playing-cardproducer Bicycle create a deck of cards that became known as the “Map Deck” and sent them to German camps to be given as Christmas gifts to allied POWs. The cards hid maps of top-secret escape routes that POWs could see by soaking the cards in water and peeling them apart. The secrecy surrounding the “Map Deck” remained so high even after the war that it remains unknown how many were produced and how many still exist.
• Have you ever seen or heard of a spider or web ornament on a Christmas tree? A European folk tale attitude primarily to Germany, Poland and Ukraine, spiders and spider webs are common Christmas tree decorations. It stems from an old story about a widowed mother who couldn’t afford to decorate the family’s tree. Friendly spiders hear this plight and spend all of Christmas Eve night spinning webs on the evergreen. On Christmas Day, the family awoke to find their tree covered with intricate spiderwebs, the morning sun turning them to sparkling gold and silver.
A variation of this story puts these friendly, heroic spiders into the life of Jesus. In this story, Jesus, Mary and Joseph hid from nearby soldiers in a cave as they fled to Egypt, away from King Herod’s soldiers. Spiders spun webs to cover the entrance to the cave, so when King Herod’s soldiers passed by, they saw the webs, assumed no one had been in or out for some time and continued on their way without searching it.
• Each year since 1947, Oslo, Norway, has given the United Kingdom a Christmas tree as a token of gratitude for the UK’s assistance and allyship during World War II. This year’s 75-foot Norwegian spruce stands in Trafalgar Square, London, as each gifted tree does every year.
• The use of tinsel on Christmas trees extends as far back as 1610, when in Germany, reflective metal strips helped brighten the glow of candles on trees, spreading their light. These strips were initially real silver, to sparkle and shine, but the expensive practice was phased out, families opting to use aluminum and copper instead. When copper production was directed to war efforts during WWI, folks turned to lead to use as tinsel—no one knew the great dangers it presented. After it was revealed as problematic, folks eventually utilized plastic tinsel.
• The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) “Santa Tracker,” which provides updates on Santa’s travels to local news outlets, was born out of a misprint in the paper. Sears put an ad in the newspapers in 1955, telling the children that they could call the store and tell Santa what they wanted for Christmas. The problem? A misprint changed the store’s number by one digit. Instead of connecting callers to Sears, it rang the phone at the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD, NORAD’s predecessor) in Colorado Springs. Colonel Harry Shoup was at the operations center and answered the first phone call, expecting the person on the other end to be high-up military personnel. Instead, the voice of a child came across the line, asking if he was Santa Claus. He thought it was a joke at first, but when the child began to cry, he put on his best Santa voice. After they were finished talking, Shoup spoke with the child’s mother, who asked if he’d seen the newspaper. He saw the misprinted number in the Sears ad and got a few men to work the line as children’s’ calls poured in. After sorting things out with the phone company, Sears got Shoup’s old number and the top-secret command was set up with a new one. On Christmas Eve, Shoup saw that his airmen had drawn Santa’s sleigh and reindeer on the Canada/ US map they used to track planes. The airmen said that it was just a joke and offered to take it down, but Shoup stared at it for a bit and then made a call that launched the “Santa Tracker” tradition. He called the radio station, identified himself as commander at the CONAD Center and said he was tracking an unidentified flying object: “Why, it looks like a sleigh!” Every half hour or so, the stations called in for an updated report to relay.
CONAD did it the next two years and continued the “Santa Tracker’ when North American Aerospace Defense Command ( NORA) replaced it in 1958.
Today, the NORAD’s Santa tracking experience is on social media, websites, games, books and more. You can even ask Alexa to relay NORAD’s updates on tracking Santa.
• The popular Christmas song Jingle Bells was composed by James Lord Pierpont. There is a plaque at a Medford, Massachusetts Tavern, commemorating the spot where he likely wrote it, having been inspired by the sleigh races (drag races of the day) on Salem Street. It’s a song originally composed for Thanksgiving, not Christmas, and it was more of a tavern jam than a Sunday-school carol. There are a few verses that we don’t commonly hear of or sing when caroling Jingle Bells, like these two:
“A day or two ago, The story I must tell, I went out on the snow, And on my back I fell; A gent was riding by In a one-horse open sleigh, He laughed as there I sprawling lie, But quickly drove away” and “Now the ground is white; Go it while you’re young; Take the girls tonight and sing this sleighing song; Just get a bobtailed bay, Two forty as his speed; Hitch him to an open sleigh, And crack! you’ll take the lead.”
Kyna Hamill, professor of literature at Boston University and vicepresident of the Medford Historical Society says that these lyrics show Jingle Bells was a different kind of song when it was first written than it is now, as accepted by popular culture:
“If you think about the fact that one of the great industries of Medford was rum-making, and if you really think about the lyrics of the song, with the lens that these are drag races that are happening at top speed down the centre of this street, one of the suggestions is that it’s actually a drinking song.”