Tag Archives: Christmas Eve

Counting Down the Hours With Some Holiday Trivia!

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As you well know, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers, we usually post a puzzle to celebrate a given holiday.

But last year we started a new holiday tradition and offered you some trivia to help count down the hours until Christmas Day!

So this year, we’re doing it again. That’s right, twelve questions on holiday pop culture from around the world. How does that sound?

Feel free to cherry-pick from these questions for your own Yuletide trivia. We’ve tried to keep it relatively easy and accessible, though a few tougher historical questions might’ve snuck in alongside the song trivia and the food trivia.

Enjoy!

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1. What holiday song was the first song played in space?

2. How old was Brenda Lee when she recorded Christmas classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”?

3. Saint Nicholas, whom Santa Claus is based on, is from what country?

4. Which well-known Christmas song was originally a Thanksgiving song?

5. How many days of Kwanzaa are there?

6. When are gingerbread houses believed to have been invented? 

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7. Which founding father had a famously boozy eggnog recipe that forgot to note the number of eggs needed but included the instruction “Taste frequently”?

8. Who was the first U.S. president to recognize Hanukkah in the White House?

9. You can stay at the original “Home Alone” house through Airbnb. Where is the home – and film – located?

10. In Oaxaca City, Mexico, Noche de rábanos is celebrated every 23rd December. Which food gives this festival its name?

11. Which Christmas song’s second verse begins with “The cattle are lowing”?

12. After leaving Bethlehem, to which country did Joseph, Mary, and Jesus travel?

Do you have any favorite nuggets of holiday trivia? Please share it with us in the comment section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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A puzzly British Christmas card!

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One government agency in England celebrates Christmas a little bit differently than most.

The GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — provides security and intelligence services for the British government. Back when they were known as GC&CS — Government Code and Cypher School — they were responsible for funding the Bletchley Park successes cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War II.

And for Christmas this year, they’ve released a puzzly Christmas card that’s sure to challenge even the staunchest puzzlers.

Step 1 of the puzzle is a logic art puzzle where you have to deduce where to place black squares on an open grid in order to form a picture.

Each column and row has a series of numbers in it. These numbers represent runs of black squares in a row, so a 1 means there’s one black square followed by a blank square on either side and a 7 means 7 black squares together with a blank square on either side.

Once you’ve solved this puzzle, you can use it to unlock the next puzzle in the chain.

From an article on GCHQ.gov.uk:

Once all stages have been unlocked and completed successfully, players are invited to submit their answer via a given GCHQ email address by 31 January 2016. The winner will then be drawn from all the successful entries and notified soon after.

Players are invited to make a donation to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, if they have enjoyed the puzzle.

This is one majorly challenging Christmas card. After you’ve conquered the logic art puzzle, you’ll confront brain teasers, palindromes, pattern-matching, deduction, number progressions, codebreaking, cryptic crossword-style cluing, and more.

I would highly recommend teaming up with another puzzle-minded friend (or more) and trying your luck. Let us know how far you get! (And you can hit up this article from the Telegraph for aid as well.)

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