With Christmas having so many different traditions it is hard to stay educated on everything that is going on.  While there are many common known facts about Christmas there are also hundreds, if not thousands of little facts that very few people are aware of.

The following interesting Christmas facts will hopefully help you walk away knowing just a little bit more about one of the most wonderful holidays in the world.

1. Santa has nine reindeers, their names are Dasher, Dancer Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and finally Rudolph the red nose reindeer!  The names of the reindeer were taken from a book and a song.  A Visit From St. Nicholas, by Clement C. Moore and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is from the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer".

2. Over the course of the twentieth century England has only received seven white Christmas'.  A White Christmas is defined by snow following on Christmas day itself.

3. In 1648 the first American written Christmas Carol is written by minister John de Brebeur.  The song was named "Jesus is Born"

4. Christmas day was not originally celebrated as the birth of Christ.  The tradition never began until the year AD 440

5. Christmas Lights were invented by Thomas Edison's assistant Edward Johnson just three years after Thomas Edison's mass public demonstration of electric lights in 1879.

6. In 1647 Christmas was banned in England and actually made illegal.  The idea was that feasting was considered immoral and wasn't right on a holy day.  If you were caught celebrating you were arrested!  The ban on Christmas was released in 1660.

7. 1856 Marks the first year a presidential Christmas Tree is decorated. President Franklin Pierce was the first president to start the tradition.

8. The Christmas card was first invented in 1843 by a man named Sir Henry Cole J.C. Horsley.  He commercialized the Christmas card by mass producing 1000 of them and selling them throughout London.

9. Canada released the first Christmas postage stamp in 1898.

10, The 26th of December is traditionally known as St Stephen's Day but to most of the world it is called Boxing day.  Most people go buck wild shopping for items due to door crashing sales but originally all the money collected at Church was handed out to the poor to spend on the 26th.

11. The abbreviation Xmas comes from the pronunciation of the Greek letter X. In Greek, X is pronounced Chi which is the beginning of the world Christmas.

After reading over these Christmas facts I hope that you will share a few of them with your friends, family and colleagues this holiday season.