December 25th is

Christmas Day

Christmas Pudding Day

Pumpkin Pie Day

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MORE! Anders Celsius, Clara Barton and Ringo Starr, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Christianity – traditional date for the birth of Christ

Angola – Family Day

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

Taiwan – Constitution Day

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On This Day in HISTORY

274 – A temple is dedicated to Sol Invictus by Roman Emperor Aurelian

Sol Invictus, usually identified by his seven-rayed ‘halo’

336 – The first recorded celebration of Christmas on December 25, during the reign of Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor

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

Merovingian coin from the reign of Clovis I

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 assembles 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 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 born, English mathematician who wrote ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’ (1687)

1665 – Lady Grizel Baillie born, Scottish songwriter; “And werena my heart light I wad dee” is her best-known song; her meticulously kept account books (1692-1746) contain much information about social life in 18^th century Scotland

1741 – Anders Celsius develops the Centigrade temperature scale; in the same year, he had also overseen the building of the Uppsala Observatory, the oldest astronomical observatory in Sweden, where he worked on the temperature scale

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

Washington Crossing the Delaware, by George Caleb Bingham

1781 – Sydney, Lady Morgan born, Irish novelist; The Wild Irish Girl

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 – Reverend 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 born, founder of the American Red Cross

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

1865 – Evangeline Booth born, British theologist; first woman to become the General of the Salvation Army

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

1876 – Muhammad Ali Jinnah born, founder of the nation of Pakistan, and its first Governor-General

1883 – Maurice Utrillo born, French painter

Notre Dame de Clignantcourt, by Maurice Utrillo

1883 – Hana Miesel born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire; Israeli agronomist, Zionist and feminist; founder of Havat HaAlamot (the maidens’ farm) and a women’s agricultural school at Hahalal

1890 – Robert Ripley born, American anthropologist and publisher

1899 – Humphrey Bogart born, legendary American actor and film star

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 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 becomes Emperor of Japan after the death of his father Emperor Taisho

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

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, American songwriter-musician

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 #1 on Christmas Day

1959 – Richard Starkey, 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 as 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

2004 – The Cassini orbiter releases Huygens probe which successfully lands on Saturn’s moon Titan on January 14, 2005

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