A traditional Christmas dinner in early England was a pig’s head prepared with mustard.
It wasn’t until 1917 that Joyce C. Hall of the Hallmark Company introduced a thicker paper with holiday designs to replace tissue paper for wrapping presents.
The Latin alphabet lacks a letter for the English sound “th,” so early writers borrowed a runic letter called thorn, which looks like a downward-facing triangle on a stick. Thorn eventually fell out of use because it looked too much like the letter “Y.” It has stuck around, however, in phrases like, “Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe.” The first word is not meant to be pronounced “ye” but rather “the.”
In 1995, the WWE introduced wrestler Xanta Klaus, Santa’s evil twin from the South Pole who steals presents. “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase paid off Xanta to attack Savio Vega. The wrestler later went under the name Balls Mahoney, “the Chair Swinging Freak.”
Alice in Wonderland was a Christmas present given in November 1864 to Alice Liddell from Charles Dodgson, who wrote the story under his pen name, Lewis Carroll.
This article appears in December 21 • 2012.