Despite the fact that Santa Claus is not predominant, his bright red suit is represented in the traditional flower of the season. This flower is the poinsettia, which has brilliant green and red leaves. The story connected with the poinsettia is really rather touching. It is believed that a young boy walking to the church to view the nativity scene showing the birth of Christ had realized on the way that he had no present to offer the Christ child. So, he gathered up several plain green branches and unwanted weeds to give. Many jeered as he walked into the church, but he was told that as long as his gift was from his heart, the child would value it. When he set his gift next to the manger, they changed into bright red and green leafs, and thus the poinsettia, or Christmas flower, was created.

The Mexican kids receive presents on Christmas day. They are blindfolded while they use a stick or a bat to try and break a decorated clay pinata that dangles and swings at the end of a string. Once the pinata has been broken, the children scampler to retrieve the candy that was inside the pinata. Those children who have been good also on January 6th receive a gift from the Three Wise Men, the same men who went to the newborn Christ child and brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Today’s Christmas lighting comes in an array of colors, many different watts and various sizes and shapes. You can spend a little bit of money on lights or you can spend a lot. Knowing which kind to choose depends on the size of your home, and how much ground you’d like to cover. If you don’t know what kinds of lights you need or want, you could end up getting the wrong lights and then having to take or send them back. So do a little planning before you head online or to the local store.

One of the newer choices you have in Christmas lights is LED lights. The initials LED stand for light emitting diode. These lights don’t take as much power to use and you can get a wider angle of light. These kinds of lights offer longer use (thousands of hours) and you can use them to decorate inside your home or outside in the yard. They’re a very safe because they don’t get hot like regular lights, which can sometimes be a fire hazard. With LED lights, you don’t have to worry if your tree dries out like you do with regular lights. They are a little more expensive than the run of the mill Christmas lights, but your family’s safety is worth the cost, and you’ll be helping the environment by using less energy.

Another choice you can go with is Christmas rope lights. These are lights inside of tubing. These lights come in different colors and you can get them in chasing lights or still versions. They can interconnect with other strands to form longer strands. These lights are perfect for those hard-to-decorate items areas and can be used indoor or outdoor. In addition, these lights can contain the same LED technology that saves energy.

You can also now choose solar Christmas lights to decorate outdoors. These lights have a solar panel that charges during the day and then automatically turns your lights on a dusk. They’re great for decorating anywhere you don’t have an outlet or don’t want to run an extension cord. They’re particularly great near roads or around mailboxes and lamp posts.

There are so many Christmas light options for you to choose from to make your holiday really shine this year. With a little research, you’ll find the ones that are just perfect for your home.

But it took a long time for the custom to reach America. The first documented example of the use of candy canes to celebrate Christmas occurred in 1847, when a German-Swedish immigrant by the name of August Imgard hung the candy canes from the branches of a Christmas tree.

At this time, candy canes were still all-white. It wasn’t until about 50 years later that the first red-and-white striped variety appeared. No historical records exist to show who or why the stripes were added, but prior to 1900, Christmas cards only showed all-white candy canes. After that year, striped candy canes started appearing.

Around this same time, it’s thought that candy makers started adding peppermint flavors to their candy canes, and this soon became the norm. Now candy canes can be found in all sizes and flavors, from green apple to chocolate, but the familiar red and white stripes are still the most popular.

Read more about Christmas Candy Canes.

I’ve always assumed “Xmas” was probably the modern invention of some advertising copywriter who couldn’t fit the word Christmas in a small space, so he came up with a quick shorthand, much the way people now use abbreviations like “tx” instead of “thanks” or “brb” instead of “be right back” in instant messages and email.

So I was quite surprised to learn the world’s very first Christmas stamp issued by Canada in 1898 had the word Xmas on it. That seemed strange. Then I dug a little further. It turns out Xmas actually puts the Christ IN Christmas.

Christ was often abbreviated as “Xp” or “Xt” in early times. According to The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style by Robert Hudson, “Oddly enough, the abbreviation has a long and established history in English, dating back to Old English form used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the twelfth century. The X is actually the Greek letter Chi and has been used as a symbol for the name of Christ (Christos) since the first century.”

So X means Christ, and Xmas isn’t really sacrilegious slang at all. The word has been around longer than New York copywriters.

In fact, Wikipedia says the “Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the OED Supplement have cited usages of “X-” or “Xp-” for “Christ-” as early as 1485…. The dictionary further cites usage of ‘Xtianity’ for “Christianity” from 1634. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, most of the evidence for these words comes from ‘educated Englishmen who knew their Greek.’”

Of course, these days most people who use the word aren’t aware that X is the Greek letter used as a symbol for Jesus Christ. They ARE using it as a shortened version of the word Christmas. But the tradition behind the word was never meant to take Christ out of Christmas. In fact, it was the very opposite.

Merry Christmas!

Reprinted with permission from Xmas vs Christmas – It’s All Greek to Me on HubPages

Wikipedia says, “the ‘nog’ part of its name may stem from the word “noggin”, a Middle English term used to describe a small, wooden, carved mug used to serve alcohol.” Or it may have derived “from the name “egg-and-grog”, a common Colonial term used to describe rum. Eventually the term was shortened to ‘egg’n'grog,’ then ‘eggnog’.”

Modern eggnog typically consists of milk, eggs, and sugar mixed together and may be served with or without added spirits. Other ingredients include spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, or allspice, and frequently the substitution of cream for some portion of the milk, making a much richer drink. Whiskey, rum, brandy, or cognac can be added to eggnog.

Originally served warm, egg nog has been served cold and without alcohol since the mid 1960s, both of which are significant departures from its historical origins. It’s even available in a soy-based formula for those with dairy allergies or who are vegan.

Egg nog has long been the drink of choice to toast the holiday season. So hoist a cup and have a happy holiday season!

Easy Egg Nogg Recipe
from AllRecipes.com
Ingredients

* 2 eggs, beaten
* 3 tablespoons sugar
* 2 1/3 cups low-fat milk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 1 dash ground nutmeg

Directions

1. Blend together eggs, sugar, milk, vanilla and nutmeg. Serve chilled.

An advent wreath is a ring or set of four candles, usually made with evergreen cuttings and used for household devotion by some Christians during the season of Advent, or the holy season for the Christian church. Many churches illuminate these candles in succession through the four weeks leading up to Christmas as part of their Sunday services.

Typically, three of the candles are violet-colored, and one is rose-colored, but some choose to use all purple or all blue candles. When used in household devotion, one candle is lit on the first evening of Advent, which falls on a Saturday night. Each Saturday evening thereafter during Advent another candle is lit. Others light the candles on Sunday, rather than Saturday evening. Some wreaths have a large white candle in the center which is lit on Christmas Day to signify Christ’s birth.

The first Advent wreath was invented by Johann Hinrich Wichern; a Protestant parson in Hamburg, Germany in the 1830’s and 1840’s and was in charge of an orphanage. The children of the orphanage made a wooden ring and affixed red and white candles on one side of it. During each service of daily prayer a child would light one candle, until on Christmas Eve all of them would be illuminated. It is thought that children liked this ring so much that they decorated it with evergreen twigs, mainly from fir trees. Later the number of candles was reduced to the four main ones.

The tradition of hanging a Christmas wreath took a while to catch on in Germany. When German immigrants came to America, they brought this old tradition with them, and now it’s a household tradition for many families to have a wreath made from evergreen hanging upon the front door of their home.

The gift-giving bishop St. Nicholas was never portrayed as having a wife, and only when he was transformed, via Sinterklaas, into the more secular Santa Claus in the early 19th century did a wife appear.

The wife of Santa Claus is first mentioned in the short story “A Christmas Legend” (1849), by James Rees, a Philadelphia-based Christian missionary. In the story, an old man and woman, both carrying a bundle on the back, are given shelter in a home on Christmas Eve as weary travelers. The next morning, the children of the house find an abundance of gifts for them, and the couple is revealed to be not “old Santa Claus and his wife”, but the hosts’ long-lost elder daughter and her husband in disguise.

Mrs. Santa Claus is mentioned by name in the pages of the Yale Literary Magazine in 1851, where the student author (whose name is given only as “A. B.”) writes of the appearance of Santa Claus at a Christmas party:

[I]n bounded that jolly, fat and funny old elf, Santa Claus. His array was indescribably fantastic. He seemed to have done his best; and we should think, had Mrs. Santa Claus to help him.

An account of a Christmas musicale at the State Lunatic Asylum in Utica, New York in 1854 included an appearance by Mrs. Santa Claus, with baby in arms, who danced to a holiday song.

A passing references to Mrs. Santa Claus was made in an essay in Harper’s Magazine in 1862; and in the comic novel The Metropolites (1864) by Robert St. Clar, she appears in a woman’s dream, wearing “Hessian high boots, a dozen of short, red petticoats, an old, large, straw bonnet” and bringing the woman a wide selection of finery to wear.

A woman who may or may not be Mrs. Santa Claus appeared in the children’s book Lill in Santa Claus Land and Other Stories by Ellis Towne, Sophie May and Ella Farman, published in Boston in 1878. In the story, little Lill describes her imaginary visit to Santa’s office (not in the Arctic, incidentally):

“There was a lady sitting by a golden desk, writing in a large book, and Santa Claus was looking through a great telescope, and every once in a while he stopped and put his ear to a large speaking-tube.

“Presently he said to the lady, ‘Put down a good mark for Sarah Buttermilk. I see she is trying to conquer her quick temper.’

“‘Two bad ones for Isaac Clappertongue; he’ll drive his mother to the insane asylum yet.’”

Later, Lill’s sister Effie ponders the tale:

Effie sank back in the chair to think. She wished Lill had found out how many black marks she had, and whether that lady was Mrs. Santa Claus—and had, in fact, obtained more accurate information about many things.

Much as in The Metropolites, Mrs. Santa Claus appears in a dream of the author E. C. Gardner in his article “A Hickory Back-Log” in Good Housekeeping magazine (1887), with an even more detailed description of her dress:

She was dressed for traveling and for cold weather. Her hood was large and round and red but not smooth, — it was corrugated; that is to say, it consisted of a series of rolls nearly as large as my arm, passing over her head sidewise, growing smaller toward the back until they terminated in a big button that was embellished with a knot of green ribbon. Its general appearance was not unlike that of the familiar, pictorial beehive except that the rolls were not arranged spirally. The broad, white ruffle of her lace cap projected several inches beyond the front of the hood and waved back and forth like the single leaves of a great white poppy, as she nodded emphatically in her discourse.

Her outer garment was a bright colored plaid worsted cloak reaching to within about six inches of the floor. Its size was most voluminous, but its fashion was extremely simple. It had a wide yoke across the shoulders, into which the broad plain breadths were gathered; and it was fastened at the throat by a huge ornamented brass hook and eye, from which hung a short chain of round twisted links. Her right arm protruded through a vertical slit at the side of the cloak and she held in her hand a sheet of paper covered with figures. The left arm on which she carried a large basket or bag — I couldn’t tell which — was hidden by the ample folds of the garment. Her countenance was keen and nervous, but benignant.

Santa Claus’ wife made her most active appearance yet by Katherine Lee Bates in her poem “Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride” (1889). “Goody” is short for “Goodwife”, i.e., “Mrs.”

In Bates’ poem, Mrs. Claus wheedles a Christmas Eve sleigh-ride from a reluctant Santa in recompense for tending their toy and bonbon laden Christmas trees, their Thanksgiving turkeys, and their “rainbow chickens” that lay Easter eggs. Once away, Mrs. Claus steadies the reindeer while Santa goes about his work descending chimneys to deliver gifts. She begs Santa to permit her to descend a chimney. Santa grudgingly grants her request and she descends a chimney to mend a poor child’s tattered stocking and to fill it with gifts. Once the task is completed, the Clauses return to their Arctic home. At the end of the poem, Mrs. Claus remarks that she is the “gladdest of the glad” because she has had her “own sweet will”.

Since 1889, Mrs. Claus has been generally depicted in media as a fairly heavy-set, kindly, white-haired elderly female baking cookies somewhere in the background of the Santa Claus mythos. She sometimes assists in toy production, and oversees Santa’s elves. She is sometimes called Mother Christmas, and Mary Christmas has been suggested as her maiden name.

Her reappearance in popular media in the 1960s began with the children’s book How Mrs. Santa Claus Saved Christmas, by Phyllis McGinley. Today, Mrs. Claus is commonly seen in cartoons, on greeting cards, in knick-knacks such as Christmas tree ornaments, dolls, and salt and pepper shakers, in storybooks, in seasonal school plays and pageants, in parades, in department store “Santa Lands” as a character adjacent to the throned Santa Claus, in television programs, and live action and animated films that deal with Christmas and the world of Santa Claus. Her personality tends to be fairly consistent; she is usually seen as a calm, kind, and patient woman, often in contrast to Santa himself, who can be prone to acting too exuberant. In some modern adaptations, Mrs. Claus is shown with a younger, even sexier appearance.

– Source: Wikipedia: Mrs. Claus”