Interesting Facts You Didn't Know About Christmas

While you're busy wrapping gifts and preparing to feast with family and friends, TIME brings you these bizarre Christmas facts to ponder

In spite of prevalent thinking, the Bible doesn't really say a particular date for Jesus' introduction to the world. Indeed, most students of history trust he was likely conceived in the spring, henceforth the Bible's portrayal of shepherds crowding creatures. Be that as it may, in the fourth century, when the Catholic Church chose to perceive Jesus' introduction to the world as an official occasion, Pope Julius I picked December 25 for the Feast of the Nativity. That the date happened to harmonize with the agnostic celebration known as Saturnalia more likely than not been unadulterated fortuitous event.

Five months into the principal World War, troops along the Western front took a Christmas Eve break from battling to sing hymns to each other over the combat zone. The next morning, German warriors rose up out of the trenches and started to approach Allied troops while getting out "Cheerful Christmas" in English. Fortunately, it wasn't a trap; many British warriors turned out to welcome them and shake hands, some notwithstanding trading cigarettes as blessings. Later named the Christmas Truce of 1914, it was one of the last cases of wartime valor.

The author best known for creating the Headless Horseman also created the iconic image of Santa flying in a sleigh. In his 1819 series of short stories The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, New York native Washington Irving described a dream in which St. Nicholas soared across the sky in a weightless wagon. The stories became so popular, they spawned a Christmas revival of sorts in the States, and even Charles Dickens is said to have credited Irving's work for inspiring his classic holiday tale A Christmas Carol.

In 1965 two astronauts on their way back to orbit spotted something in space they couldn't identify. Frantic, they radioed Mission Control. After several minutes of tense silence, engineers at Cape Canaveral began hearing the faint jingle of sleigh bells followed by a harmonica rendition of "Jingle Bells" ... played by none other than the two "frantic" astronauts. The men later donated the harmonica and bells to the National Museum of Space & Aeronautics in Washington, where they now sit on display.

As indicated by Celtic and Teutonic legend, mistletoe is otherworldly — it can mend wounds, increment fruitfulness, bring good fortunes and avert malicious spirits. The custom of kissing under the mistletoe didn't start until the Victorian period, an astonishing cause given the stuffy and sexually abusive conduct of the time. Really, it's not extremely shocking by any stretch of the imagination.

Indeed, even before the landing of Christianity, Germans enhanced evergreen trees to light up the dim, melancholy days of the winter solstice. The main "Christmas trees" showed up in Strasbourg in the seventeenth century and spread to Pennsylvania in the 1820s with the landing of German outsiders. At the point when Queen Victoria wedded Germany's Prince Albert in 1840, he conveyed the custom to England. After eight years, the principal American daily paper ran a photo of the illustrious Christmas tree, and Americans outside Pennsylvania immediately stuck to this same pattern.

Since the Great Depression, the Rockettes have imparted Radio City Music Hall to live homestead creatures — from camels to jackasses to sheep — to arrange a live nativity scene for its yearly "Christmas Spectacular." But the world saw its first living nativity in 1224, when St. Francis of Assisi re-made the introduction of Jesus to disclose the occasion to his supporters. Amid that first show, the trough was likewise utilized as a sacrificial stone for Christmas Mass.

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