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Christmas Quiz
How well do you know Christmas? Ten questions to amuse you over the festive season. The answers are on page…
1. What did you get for celebrating Christmas in Massachusetts in the 1600’s?
2. What did 2590 Britons decide to do on Christmas Day in 2017?
3. In which country were anti-Christmases popular in the 1920’s?
4. What did the Holly and the Ivy originally represent in the carol?
5. Good King Wencelas is set to a version of a 13th century carol usually sung when?
6. Why did Father Christmas stop smoking a pipe?
7. What did the placing of a mistletoe branch on the High Altar of York Minster on Christmas Eve indicate?
8. Why were holly bushes traditionally left uncut in British hedges?
9. By what name was the pagan Roman winter solstice festival, celebrated around 25 December, known?
10. Who was responsible for bringing this tradition of Christmas trees to the UK?
1. A fine. Under strict Puritan rules, Christmas was not simply uncelebrated but actively ignored with the ordinance: “anybody who is found observing, by abstinence from labour, feasting or any other way any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offence five shillings.”
2. They filled in their tax returns.
3. The USSR’s youth organisation Komsomol held 'anti–Christmas’ processions, with trucks bearing clowns mocking God, a figure of God embracing a naked woman, and mock priests and rabbis chanting indecent versions of religious liturgies and standing in ridiculous poses. This parade culminated in images of Buddha, Christ, Mohammed and Osiris being burned on the bonfire.
4. The holly represents Jesus – the prickles being the crown of thorns and the red berries his blood - and the ivy represents his mother, the Virgin Mary.
5. Early Spring. Hymn writer John Mason Neale’s 1853 lyric was set to the melody of 13th-century spring carol ‘Tempus adest floridum’ (‘The time is near for flowering’) which was first published in the 1582 Finnish song collection Piae Cantiones.
6. Coca-Cola. In the most common images of Father Christmas in the 19th century he carried a pipe but in the 1930s, the image of Santa we know today was popularised by Haddon H Sundblom for Coca-Cola adverts – and Santa lost his pipe, perhaps because he needed his hands free to hold bottles of cola.
7. A general amnesty for criminals. The Dean placed mistletoe at the high altar and made a "public and universal liberty, pardon and freedom of all sorts of inferior and wicked people at the Minster steps, and the gates of the city, towards the four quarters of heaven". In York, this was long held to mean an amnesty for local criminals on Christmas Eve if they came to the Minster.
8. In the 17th century it was commonly thought that witches travelled by running along hedge tops and hence by leaving holly bushes protruding from them the witches would be impeded.
9. Saturnalia. The first-century AD poet Gaius Valerius Catullus described Saturnalia as ‘the best of times’: dress codes were relaxed, small gifts such as dolls, candles and caged birds were exchanged.
10. Queen Charlotte. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, is usually credited with having introduced the Christmas tree into England in 1840. However, the honour of establishing this tradition in the United Kingdom belongs to ‘good Queen Charlotte’, the German wife of George III, who set up the first known English tree at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, in December, 1800.
