By Patty Chung, ERDT/SHARE! Office Administrator
While you deck your halls and jingle your bells, try trading trivia with your friends with these Christmas factoids—
The Nutcracker ballet was composed by Peter Tchaikovsky based on Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s fantasy story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” It is performed all over the world at Christmas time and has become the most frequently performed ballet in the world.
The movie Americans love the most around Christmas time is It’s a Wonderful Life starring James Stewart. “George Bailey” wishes he had never been born until an angel reminds him of how many lives he impacted positively and how different things would be if he was never there.
We all have personal favorites but the 1942 song “White Christmas” sung by Bing Crosby is #1 on most lists. Written by Irving Berlin for the 1942 Holiday Inn movie, this has been the best-selling single of all time.
Speaking of songs, the first Christmas song that was broadcast from space was “Jingle Bells” played by astronaut Cdr. Wally Schirra on his mini harmonica as fellow astronaut Thomas P. Stafford aboard Gemini 6 reported to Mission Control in Houston of a UFO sighting! “I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing red suit.” In the background, “Jingle Bells” could be heard and they got a good chuckle from Mission Control.
The world’s tallest fresh-cut Christmas tree measuring 140-feet tall resides in Enid, Oklahoma through January 6, 2022. After high winds snapped the to 27 feet off on Dec. 5, it was restored with structural support that made it closer to 141 feet tall.
While we were hunkered down during the 2020 COVID shutdown, total holiday retail sales in 2020 reached $789.4 billion, exceeded 2019 sales by 8.3 percent.
Everything is big in Texas including gingerbread houses. The world’s largest gingerbread house was built in 2013 by the Texas A&M Traditions Club with donations and help from the community. It measured 21-feet tall, approximately covered the area of a tennis court, and contained 35,823,400 sugary calories.
Imagine the goose-bump thrill of being one of a record-setting 68,357 voices singing “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night” in German). At Germany’s largest football stadium Borussia Dortmund, Christmas carols sung by children, adults and seniors rang out at the largest singing festival of its kind on Dec. 15, 2019.
The Statue of Liberty is the largest Christmas gift ever given. The people of France in 1886 gave the United States the 151-foot, 1-inch-tall copper-clad statue designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and continues to be an icon of freedom and a symbol of welcome to immigrants.
The gift that keeps on giving—the most popular day to propose happens to be Christmas Day!
