Christmas Quiz: This Page is for Items #1-4

NOTE: The correct answer in each case is highlighted in red bold.

Item 1: Which of these things did NOT happen on December 25?

  1. 25 December, 336: First documented sign of Christmas celebration in Rome.
  2. 25 December, 800: The coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, in Rome.
  3. 25 December, 1000: The founding of Hungary as a Christian kingdom by Stephen I.
  4. 25 December, 1066: William the Conqueror is crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey in London
  5. 25 December, 1776: George Washington and the Continental Army crossed the Delaware River and defeated the British Army at Trenton, New Jersey.
  6. 25 December, 2022: Joe Biden declared himself King of North America during a visit with the prime minister of Canada.

Item # 1: Commentary

Joe Biden saved us in 2020, but he was too old to save us again. He was a decent man, who improved the economy and did his best to repair our relationships with allies. He believed in America and democracy, but many voters do not, or, as we are learning now, many are regretting their stupidity during the 2024 election.

I wrote 50 posts during the 2024 election campaign warning of all that Trump is and is not. Everything we are seeing was predictable.

I continue to comment on the Trump tyranny and other concerns in a substack here. If you want to receive my political commentary, you can subscribe for updates by visiting the substack link — or just visit and don’t subscribe.

Item 2: Which Christmas carol or song includes the word “peace”?

  1. Away in a Manger
  2. Hark, the Herald Angels Sing
  3. Joy to the World
  4. Oh Christmas Tree
  5. The First Nöel
  6. We Three Kings

Item # 2: Commentary

Lyrics for: Hark the Herald Angels Sing:

Hark! The herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled.”
Joyful, all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies,
With th’angelic host proclaim:
“Christ is born in Bethlehem.”
Hark! The herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King!”

Item 3: Which Christmas song was written in 1857 for a “black face” minstrel show for the purpose of mocking black people?  Today, the song’s lyrics are slightly different to lightly hide the racism in the original version.

1883 Illustration mocking Black sleigh-riders
  1. Do You Hear What I Hear?
  2. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
  3. Jingle Bells
  4. Little Drummer Boy
  5. Oh Come All Ye Faithful
  6. White Christmas

Item # 3: Commentary [Excerpted from a Dec 8 2025 post by Kahlil Greene]

America’s most beloved Christmas song started as a racist joke. And almost no one knows. What we know today as “Jingle Bells” was written by James Lord Pierpont who was, by most accounts, a failure. Born in 1822 to a prominent Boston abolitionist family, he bounced between careers with little success. By the mid-1850s, Pierpont was broke, living off his father, and desperate for cash.

So he turned to minstrelsy. The minstrel show was one of the most profitable entertainment industries in antebellum America. White performers would darken their faces with burnt cork and perform caricatures of Black people for paying audiences. The shows depicted Black Americans as buffoonish, lazy, and incompetent. They were wildly popular. And for a man who needed money and had no scruples about where it came from, minstrelsy offered steady work. …

On September 15, 1857, Pierpont’s newest composition debuted at Ordway Hall in Boston. It was called “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” and it was performed by Johnny Pell, an “endman” who specialized in playing the blackface dandy, a character type used to mock Black men as vain, flashy, and obsessed with impressing women. The song fit the type perfectly. It was about dashing through snow, picking up girls, and showing off. The original lyrics include the line “laughing all the way,” which echoed a popular minstrel convention known as the “Laughing Darkie,” a routine that caricatured Black joy as simple-minded and absurd.

The song was not written for Christmas. It was written for racist comedy.

Sleigh songs were having a moment in the 1850s. White audiences in the North found it hilarious to watch Black characters, performed by white actors in blackface, attempt “respectable” winter activities and fail. Falling out of sleighs, getting “upsot” in snowbanks, and stumbling through courtship rituals were all standard bits. Pierpont’s song included all of these elements. It was not original. It was a product assembled from existing minstrel tropes, designed to make white audiences laugh at Black incompetence.

In 1859, Pierpont recopyrighted the song under a new title: “Jingle Bells.” He removed the dedication to Ordway, the minstrel hall manager. The new sheet music featured an engraving of bells and snow. No trace of its blackface origins remained.

MORE TO THIS STORY:

The above is an excerpt of a December 8, 2025 post at HISTORY CAN’T HIDE, a website of Kahlil Greene. It is only a partial explanation. Read the whole post here.

Fox News got wind of his post and attacked it without mentioning any of the detailed historical information in the post. Kahlil responded to Fox with this video:

Item 4: When was the first Christmas film released?

  1. 1878
  2. 1891
  3. 1898
  4. 1913
  5. 1922
  6. 1928

Item # 4: Commentary [Excerpted Wikipedia]

Santa Claus is an 1898 British silent trick film directed by George Albert Smith, which features Santa Claus visiting a house on Christmas Eve. The film, according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, “is believed to be the cinema’s earliest known example of parallel action and, when coupled with double-exposure techniques that Smith had already demonstrated in the same year’s The Mesmerist (1898) and Photographing a Ghost (1898), the result is one of the most visually and conceptually sophisticated British films made up to then.”[1][2] It is sometimes described as the first Christmas film and a technical marvel of its time, although American Mutoscope released Santa Claus Filling Stockings and The Christmas Tree Party a year earlier, in 1897.

Plot

Two children are being put to bed by a maid. She turns off the lights and the children fall asleep. Santa Claus is seen on the roof putting a Christmas tree down the chimney, then following it himself. He enters the room from the fireplace and proceeds to fill the stockings hanging from the children’s footboard. He then makes an abrupt gesture of farewell in the children’s direction and vanishes. The children wake up and joyfully applaud when they discover the contents of the stockings.

The 1 minute and 16 second movie! Wow! 1898!

Other Pages of Christmas Quiz Commentary Here:

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