Christmas Facts

     Can you believe it's December?! The year has flown by... It's so weird. Every year goes by a little faster than the year before. Well, since Thanksgiving has passed and all the Christmas decorations have been broken out (except for the few places that put them up before Thanksgiving - shame!) I thought I would throw some fairly random Christmas facts at you to think about. :)

     That's pretty much all I wanted to say! So here's the list...

Number One

     Anglo-Saxons called the holiday "midwinter" or "nativity."

Number Two

     The word Christmas originated from the words "Christ's Mass."

Number Three

     The letter X in Xmas actually stands for the Greek letter Chi which is the first letter of the Greek spelling of "Christ." So it's actually not crossing out Christ, it's just shorthanding it. :)

Number Four

     The word noel originated from the Latin word "natalis" which means "day of birth."

Number Five

     Christmas lights were invented in 1882 by Edward Johnson

Number Six

     Christmas caroling was originally an old English custom called wassailing and was considered a toast to long life.

Number Seven

     If Santa actually could visit all the homes on Christmas Eve he would have to visit 822 homes every second.

Number Eight

     Jingle Bells was originally written for Thanksgiving, not Christmas. The same with Joy to the World... Except that song was originally written about the second coming, not the first.

Number Nine

     St. Francis of Assisi started the tradition of singing carols in church.

Number Ten

     Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created as a coloring book character. Other names that were suggested included "Rollo" or "Reginald."

     So there are ten pretty random facts about Christmas! I know today is a shorter post, and it's probably going to be like that through the holiday season. Maybe I'll fit one longer post in there. 

     And don't forget! My new writing blog, Grace Iolene, launched last Friday! Be sure to check it out! I'm not sure how it will go running that blog, this blog, and contributing on TAJ, but I'm going to try to keep it up and have been planning ahead! :)

     Anyway - hope you enjoyed and have a great week!

~Anna