Get Festive With This Quiz on Winter Holiday Traditions

In the Catholic religion, Christmas lasts for 12 days, and its last day on January 6 is the Feast of Epiphany. But throughout Latin America, the date is celebrated as Three Kings Day. Children are brought gifts not by Santa Claus, but by Balthazar, Melchior, and Gaspar, the three wise men who brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the baby Jesus, according to the Bible. Celebrations also involve parades and a round cake called “Roscón de Reyes,” or “King’s Cake.”

Italian American families have a tradition of eating a meal of seven fishes, each prepared in different ways, on December 24 every year, in celebration of Christmas Eve. The origin of the tradition isn’t certain, but both the fish and the number seven have religious symbolism in Christanity.

Chinese New Year lasts 15 days, starting between January 21 and February 20. Its many traditions include red envelopes containing money, which are given by elders to the young, symbolizing good fortune; cleaning the home, which represents getting rid of the old to make room for the new; and sticky rice cakes known as “nian gao,” meaning “year high,” which are said to bring good fortune.

The early Christian church followed the Julian calendar, created by Julius Caesar in 40 BCE. In 1054, the Great Schism split Christianity into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. When Pope Gregory XIII established the modern Gregorian calendar in 1582, the Eastern Orthodox church didn’t accept it and continued to follow the Julian calendar instead, which observes Christmas Day on January 7.

Before New Year’s resolutions became personal goals for the upcoming year, they were inspired by Bible verses. The first known resolutions were found in a 1671 diary kept by Lady Anne Halkett, a member of Scottish high society. They were taken from Bible verses such as “I will not offend any more,” listed out on a page, and titled “Resolutions.” She wrote them on January 2, linking the practice with the new year.

In Swahili, Kwanzaa means "first,” referring to the first fruits of the harvest. The seven-day festival, which is observed from December 26 to January 1, is celebrated by many Americans of African descent, and a Swahili word was chosen to promote the common African language as a unifier. Each Kwanzaa, celebrants light seven candles, give gifts, and fast until the final feast of Karamu.

Though it's been celebrated for thousands of years, Christmas wasn't declared an official federal holiday in the United States until 1870. Toward the end of that year's legislative session, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill adding Christmas to the list of governmental days off, possibly in an effort to promote holiday unity in the years following the Civil War.

Saturn, the ancient Roman god of agriculture, was honored with a festival every winter solstice called Saturnalia. The festival lasted for a week beginning on December 17. During the party, no one worked, not even the enslaved people. Participants dressed in bright colors and spent their time gambling, giving gifts, singing, feasting, playing music, and enjoying general revelry.

In the first century CE, Celtic Druids put mistletoe on its path to becoming the holiday kissing plant of modern times. Mistletoe blossoms even in the frigid winter, and the Druids connected that symbolically to fertility and vivacity. They gave it to both humans and animals to boost fertility.

For more than 100 years, a giant sparkling ball has dropped down from the roof of One Times Square in Manhattan, leading us through the countdown to the new year. When the tradition began in 1907, the first ball was made of iron and wood. Despite being smaller in size than today’s ball, it weighed some 700 lbs. Since then, the ball has gone through several different materials, including aluminum and the current Waterford Crystal permanent Big Ball.

In 1882, the first known string of holiday lights debuted in the windows of a New York City townhouse belonging to inventor Edward Hibberd Johnson, who had invested in the Edison Lamp Company’s development of lightbulbs. Around Christmastime, he had an idea. Most Christmas trees at the time were decorated with candles, which were a fire hazard. So Johnson strung 80 red, white, and blue Edison light bulbs together, wrapped the string around a tree, and displayed it on a rotating platform in the window.

Queen Elizabeth I of England is credited with the invention of gingerbread men. Foreign dignitaries were visiting her court in the 16th century, and to give them something special, she had her gingerbread baker prepare cookies in their likenesses. The visitors loved it — and so did everyone else — and the tradition took off from there.

The very first Christmas trees weren’t called Christmas trees at all — they were called paradise trees, and they were put up in Germany and decorated with apples. The tradition of setting up paradise trees emerged from a popular medieval play about the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve (hence the apples); the tree was a prop in the performance. By the 16th century, paradise trees merged with another Christmastime decoration, the Christmas Pyramid (a pyramidical shelf holding holiday trinkets) to become today’s Christmas tree.

Yule was a pre-Christian pagan festival celebrated by many Germanic tribes, originating with the Norse people. By the ninth century, it was absorbed into Christian tradition and became an alternate term for Christmas. One element that survives is the Yule log (often represented in cake form), on which Vikings would carve runes that represented wishes for the gods.

The non-religious, anti-commercialist holiday Festivus (December 23) was invented in 1966 by a man named Dan O’Keefe. It remained a family tradition until 1997, when O’Keefe’s son Daniel included the holiday in his script for the 1997 “Seinfeld” episode “The Strike.” Celebrating the “holiday for the rest of us” involves an unadorned Festivus pole, “airing of grievances,” dinner, and “feats of strength.”

The Talmud of Judaism recounts the story of a group of Jewish rebel warriors called Maccabees who defeated the oppressive forces of the Seleucid king in 164 BCE, and rededicated the desecrated Second Temple in Jerusalem. They lit a lantern in the temple, and when their one-day supply of lamp oil lasted eight days, it was considered a miracle. Today Hanukkah celebrates that miracle for eight days starting on the 25th day of Kislev according to the Hebrew calendar.

Advent calendars only date back to the early 20th century, when a German printer, Gerhard Lang, created one inspired by a calendar that his mother had made for him out of cardboard. Lang’s version had little doors to open for daily surprises in the days leading up to Christmas. In 1946, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was pictured in newspapers opening an advent calendar with his grandkids, and the tradition then began in earnest in the U.S.

Baby New Year represents rebirth and fresh start. He’s often shown keeping company with the aged figure of Father Time, who represents passing time and the vanishing previous year. The new year was depicted as a baby as early as 600 BCE in Greece, but the modern version was popularized by illustrator Joseph Christian Leyendecker’s famed “Saturday Evening Post”covers that ran from 1907 to 1943.

Traditionally, in Great Britain and some Commonwealth countries, the day after Christmas was when charitable alms boxes collected by churches were distributed to the poor, and the wealthy left gift boxes for their servants and employees. Boxing Day became an official U.K. holiday in 1871, observed on December 26 each year.

Mulled wine — wine that has been heated and mixed with spices and citrus — has been a European holiday tradition since the Middle Ages, first cited in English in 1596. Glogg is the Scandinavian version of the drink, often using a stronger base such as aquavit. Eggnog is an English winter drink that involves milk with spices and brandy or rum. But a daiquiri is a cold Cuban rum cocktail that is most popular in summer.