While we take a break to be with friends and family this holiday weekend, we wanted to share some holiday facts from around the world.
We wish you all a happy, healthy holiday season and new year.
- A popular tradition in Japan is to eat KFC for Christmas. It is so popular, in fact, that orders must be placed two months in advance.
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer got his start as an advertising gimmick for Montgomery Ward in 1939.
- Jingle Bells was originally a song about Thanksgiving, written in 1857.
- More than 400,000 illnesses are caused by spoiled holiday leftovers. (OK, maybe this isn't a fun fact.)
- Kwanzaa is derived from the Swahili phrase Matunda ya Kwanza, which roughly translates as "first fruits of the harvest."
- There is no wrong way to spell Hanukkah, Hannuka, or Chanukah (the list goes on). Because there is no correct way to directly translate the Hebrew sounds to English, the word can be spelled a variety of different ways, each equally correct.
- Hanukkah dishes are fried for a reason: people fry their food in oil for Hanukkah as a symbol of the miracle oil that burned for eight nights straight.
- The abbreviation X in X-mas is not an abbreviation; it actually stands for “Chi,” meaning Christ in Greek.
- December got its name from the Latin word decem meaning 10; it was originally the tenth month of the year in the calendar of Romulus c. 750 BC, which began in March.
- Did you know that December is National Pear Month? Perhaps this is where the 12 days of Christmas came from? On the first day of Christmas/My true love sent to me/A partridge in a pear tree.