Take a break from all your last minute errands and enjoy this fun bit of trivia! (I found most of them on History.com if you want to look up more!)
In the Ukraine, if you find a spider web in the house on Christmas morning, it is believed to be a harbinger of good luck!
There once lived a woman so poor, says a Ukrainian folk tale, that she
could not afford Christmas decorations for her family. One Christmas
morning, she awoke to find that spiders had trimmed her children’s tree
with their webs. When the morning sun shone on them, the webs turned to
silver and gold. An artificial spider and web are often included in the
decorations on Ukrainian Christmas trees.
In many households,
part of the fun of eating Christmas pudding is finding a trinket that
predicts your fortune for the coming year. For instance, finding a coin
means you will become wealthy. A ring means you will get married; while
a button predicts bachelorhood. The idea of hiding something in the
pudding comes from the tradition in the Middle Ages of hiding a bean in
a cake that was served on Twelfth Night. Whoever found the bean became
"king" for the rest of the night.
Each year, 30-35 million real Christmas trees are sold in the U.S. alone. There are 21,000 Christmas tree growers in the U.S., and trees usually grow for about 15 years before they are sold.
Christmas wasn't a holiday in early America—in fact Congress was in session on December 25, 1789, the country's first Christmas under the new constitution.
Poinsettia plants are named after Joel R. Poinsett, an American
minister to Mexico, who brought the red-and-green plant from Mexico to America in 1828.
