December 25th is

Pumpkin Pie Day

Christmas Pudding Day

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MORE! Charlemagne, Clara Barton and Cab Calloway, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Christianity – traditional date for the birth of Christ
Judaism – Second night of Hannukah

Angola – Family Day

Pakistan – Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader)
Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s birthday

Republic of the Congo – Children’s Day

Taiwan – Constitution Day

Tibet – Death of Tsongkhapa
(Gelug school of Buddhism teacher)

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On This Day in HISTORY

496 – Clovis I, king of the Franks, is baptized into the Catholic faith at Reims, by Bishop of Reims and later Saint Remigius

800 – Charlemagne is crowned first Holy Roman Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III

1000 – The Kingdom of Hungary is established as a Christian kingdom by Stephen I

1066 – William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy is crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey, London

1213 – King John of England orders 3,000 capons, 1,000 salted eels, 400 hogs, 100 pounds of almonds and 24 casks of wine for his Christmas feasts

1223 – St. Francis of Assisi assembled one of the first Nativity scenes, in Greccio, Italy

1415 – England’s Henry V orders food be given to citizens of Rouen trapped by his siege

1583 – Orlando Gibbons is born, English composer of keyboard works, madrigals and fantasias for viols – six of his pieces are included in the first printed collection of English keyboard music, Parthenia

1642 – Sir Isaac Newton is born, English mathematician  who wrote ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’ (1687)

1741 – Anders Celsius develops the Centigrade temperature scale

1776 – General George Washington and his troops cross the Delaware River for a surprise attack against Hessian forces at Trenton NJ

1809 –  Dr. Ephraim McDowell performs first ovariotomy, removing a 22-pound tumor from Jane Todd Crawford of Green County KY, who traveled 60 miles to Danville KY  to brave the surgery without anesthetic or antisepsis, returned home 25 days later, and lived another 32 years

1814 – Rev. Samuel Marsden holds the first Christian service on land in New Zealand at Rangihoua Bay

1815 – The Handel and Haydn Society, oldest continually performing arts organization in the United States, gives its first performance

1821 – Clara Barton is born, founder of the American Red Cross

1831 – The Christmas Rebellion, an 11-day uprising of 60,000 of Jamaica’s 300,000 slaves, was planned as a peaceful general strike. Led by ‘native’ Baptist preacher, Samuel Sharpe, blacks demanded more freedom and a working wage of “half the going wage rate.” They took oaths to stay away from work until their demands were met by the plantation owners, who refused all of their demands. The strike escalated into the largest slave uprising in the British West Indies – the reprisals were brutal, slaves were executed for any infraction, and buried in mass graves, and chapels of slave congregations were destroyed

1837 – Zachary Taylor leads 800 men in the Battle of Lake Okeechobee FL against less than 400 Seminoles. His troops suffered heavy casualties, while the Seminoles lost only about a dozen warriors, but Taylor’s men succeeded in driving the Seminoles away across the Lake. The ‘Florida War’ lasted from December 1835 to August 1842, and is the longest and most expensive of the U.S. conflicts with Native Americans

1868 – U.S. President Andrew Johnson granted an unconditional pardon to all persons involved in the Southern rebellion that resulted in the Civil War

1883 – Maurice Utrillo, French painter, is born

1899 – Humphrey Bogart is born, legendary American actor

1907 – Cab Calloway born, American Jazz composer-singer-bandleader

1917 – Why Marry? by playwright Jesse Lynch Williams, opens at New York’s Astor Theatre, the first dramatic play to win a Pulitzer Prize (1918)

1918 – Anwar el-Sadat is born, Egyptian president who won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peace treaty with Israel

1924 – Rod Serling born, Writer-Producer of the iconic TV series, The Twilight Zone

1926 – Hirohito beomes Emperor of Japan after the death of his father Emperor Taisho

1937 – Arturo Toscanini conducts NBC’s first radio broadcast of “Symphony of the Air”

1939 – “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens, is read on CBS radio for the first time

1941 – Admiral Chester W. Nimitz arrives at Pearl Harbor to assume command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

1946 – Jimmy Buffet born, songwriter-musician, is born

1950 – The Stone of Scone is taken from Westminster Abbey by four Scottish nationalist students and returned to Scotland, although broken in two during the extrication.  It is taken back by England in 1951, but ultimately returned to Scotland in 1996. The Stone of Scone is the ancient coronation stone of the monarchs of Scotland, captured by English King Edward I in 1296 and taken to Westminster Abbey, fitted into the base of a wooden chair, and subsequently used for the coronations of English monarchs. Although there is a legend that the true stone was hidden by monks from Edward’s army, and the English got a fake, the supposed real stone has not been found

1958 –‘The Chipmunk Song’ becomes the only Christmas song in U.S. history to be Number #1 on Christmas Day

1959 – Richard Starkey, 18, aka Ringo Starr, receives a drum set for Christmas

1962 – The Soviet Union conducts its final above-ground nuclear weapon test, in anticipation of the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

1968 – Apollo 8 performs the first successful Trans-Earth injection (TEI) maneuver, sending its crew and spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth from Lunar orbit

1977 – Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin meets with President Anwar Sadat in Egypt. They had met in November in Israel, and Sadat had addressed the Knesset

1989 – Deposed President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, First-Deputy Prime-Minister Elena are condemned to death and executed after a summary trial

1989 – Dissident playwright Vaclav Havel is elected president of Czechoslovakia

1991 – Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as President of the Soviet Union (the union itself is dissolved the next day). Ukraine’s referendum is finalized and it officially leaves the Soviet Union

2000 – Russian President Vladimir Putin signs a bill into law that officially establishes a new National anthem of Russia, with music adopted from the anthem of the Soviet Union that was composed by Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov.

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Visuals

• Happy Holidays banner
• Christmas Pudding
• Charles Dickens’ description of the pudding made by Mrs. Crachit in A Christmas Carol
• International flags
• Charlemagne crowned first Holy Roman Emperor- from Chroniques de France ou de Saint-Denis (14^th century)
• Nativity – painted by Duccio di Buoninsegna – 1308
• Washington Crossing the Delaware by George Caleb Bingham
• Notre-Dame-de-Clignantcourt by Maurice Utrillo
• Humphrey Bogart with scotch quote
• The Stone of Scone in the chair at Westminster Abbey
• Vaclav Havel with ideology quote

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