13 Things You Didn’t Know About the Holiday Season
1
Who put the X in Xmas? Turns out the Greeks did. What we English speakers know as the letter X is the same shape as the Greek letter chi, best known for its supporting role in sorority house names as well as in the Greek word for Christ (Χριστός). Modern speakers aren’t the first to borrow Jesus’s Greek name for a holiday abbreviation: There’s evidence of Christmas being abbreviated to Xmas as far back as the 16th century; no offense intended then or now.
2
There is no right way to spell Hanukkah. That’s because it’s a Hebrew word beginning with the consonant het, which has no English equivalent (the closest is probably the throaty ch sound at the end of Bach). While there’s no official way to transliterate this in English, Google search results do declare a popular winner: Hanukkah, with about 17 million hits, soundly beats out runner-up Chanukah (with a mere 4.8 million hits).
3
Kwanzaa, on the other hand, is intentionally misspelled. The nonreligious festival (observed from December 26 to January 1) was created by Maulana Karenga in 1966 to empower the black community in the aftermath of the deadly Watts riots in Los Angeles. Modeling his holiday on traditional African harvest festivals, Karenga took the name Kwanzaa from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, which means “first fruits.” The extra a was added simply to accommodate the seven children at an early Kwanzaa celebration, each of whom wanted to represent a letter.
4
Another holiday invented in 1966: Festivus. Made famous by a 1997 episode of Seinfeld in which the Costanza family gathers around an aluminum pole for the annual “airing of grievances,” this secular nonholiday was actually invented decades earlier by Reader’s Digest editor Daniel O’keefe Sr., who wanted a low-pressure way to celebrate the anniversary of his first date with his wife. Festivus became an O’keefe family staple—and eventually a cultural icon, after Dan O’keefe Jr. shared his holiday memories with colleagues in the Seinfeld writers’ room. Festivus is celebrated worldwide on December 23.
5
In Korea, everyone’s birthday is New Year’s Day, regardless of the day anyone was actually born. Odder still, on the day you’re born, you’re considered to be one year old—so you will be considered two years old on the next New Year’s Day of your life. While most legal records in Korea use a person’s “international age,” the traditional age system still matters. A person can legally buy alcohol or tobacco in Korea, for example, on January 1 of the 19th year after his or her birth.
6
The Chinese Lunar New Year celebration (which starts on February 16 in 2018) brings with it the largest annual migration in the world, starting roughly 15 days before the festival and lasting 40 days. Known as the Chunyun period, it’s a seasonal travel rush of hundreds of millions of people returning to their hometowns to celebrate the holiday with family. In 2017, an estimated 2.98 billion passenger trips were made for the New Year festivities.
7
Want to celebrate Ethiopian
New Year? Mark your calendar for the first of Meskerem. Ethiopia is the only country in the world that hasn’t adopted the 12-month Gregorian calendar, instead using its own 13-month Coptic calendar (which contains twelve 30-day months and a 13th month that has five days— except in a leap year, when it has six). On our Gregorian calendar, Ethiopian New Year falls on September 11 every non–leap year.
8
In Japan, if it’s Christmas, you’re eating KFC. The tradition began in 1974 after a Kentucky Fried Chicken manager overheard a couple of foreigners talking about missing the Christmas turkey. KFC embraced the opportunity, debuting a special Christmas deal: a fried-chicken dinner (plus wine) for the equivalent of about $52. Today, families order their finger-licking-good Christmas chicken weeks in advance, to the tune of about 3.6 million orders a year.
9
If it’s Christmas in Peru, put up your dukes. Takanakuy is a festival held every Christmas Day in the province of Chumbivilcas. The festival consists of dancing and fist fighting, whether to settle old conflicts or simply to display manhood. (In the United States, we try to avoid fighting on holidays—theoretically.)
10
Krampus is the original Bad Santa. For hundreds of years, this half goat, half demon has served as the anti-santa in a number of European countries (including Austria, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic), encouraging kids to behave lest they be whipped, stuffed in a bag, and taken to the underworld. A lump of coal sounds peachy in comparison.
11
Jews have been celebrating Hanukkah with menorahs and fried food for the past 19 centuries or so. It was only in the late 1880s that eight nights of presents became part of the ritual. That’s when two Reform rabbis in Cincinnati intentionally brought a Christmasy feel to the festivities, hoping to make Jewish children more connected with their synagogues by turning Hanukkah into a gift-giving holiday. It took off.
12
Contrary to its pugilistic moniker, Boxing Day has nothing to do with prizefighting. It’s actually a celebration of charitable giving, held on the day after Christmas in the United Kingdom. The name comes from the ritual of opening “the box”—the alms box— in the local parish church and distributing the contents to the poor.
13
There’s a reason December has so many holidays. You can thank the winter solstice, which is not only the shortest day of the year but also kicks off six months during which sunset comes a little later every day and thus has been celebrated for thousands of years as a sort of birth of light. It is believed that when the Christian religion began marking the birth of Jesus Christ at the end of the third century, church officials chose December 25 to coincide with existing pagan solstice festivals, making it easier to persuade people to accept Christianity. Happy holidays!
Sources: National Geographic, smithsonian.com, npr.org, pbs.org, qz.com, festivusweb.com, and snopes.com