- 1 The first Christmas according to calendar-maker and Eastern Roman monk Dionysius Exiguus
- 336 Earliest theorized date that Christmas is celebrated on December 25th by the Catholic Church in Rome to replace pagan celebrations
- 597 St Augustine introduces the Julian Calendar to England
- 1013 English earls declare Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard the first Viking king of England, disposing Ethelred the Unready
- 1599 The city of Natal, Brazil, is founded.
Games Forbidden at Christmas
1621 Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony (now in Massachusetts) forbids game playing on Christmas Day
- 1758 Return of Halley's Comet first sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch
- 1760 Jupiter Hammon, an African American slave, composes the broadside poem "An Evening Thought" (the first poetry published by an African American in 1761)
- 1831 Louisiana and Arkansas are the first states to observe Christmas as a holiday
Stars & Stripes Forever
1896 Patriotic march "The Stars and Stripes Forever" is composed by John Philip Sousa
- 1914 Legendary "Christmas Truce" takes place on the battlefields of World War I between British and German troops; instead of fighting, soldiers exchange gifts, play football, and sing carols together
- 1917 "Why Marry," the first drama to win a Pulitzer Prize, premieres in NYC
- 1931 New York's Metropolitan Opera broadcasts an entire live opera performance for the first time - Englebert Humperdinck's "Hänsel und Gretel" over NBC radio
King's Chair Collapses
1932 During King George V's Christmas dinner speech, his chair collapses
A Christmas Carol
1949 First television adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" debuts in American syndication; low budget 30-minute production stars Taylor Holmes and is narrated by Vincent Price
1952 Queen Elizabeth II makes her first Christmas Day broadcast, thanking her subjects for their "loyalty and affection" and promising to carry on the tradition, which she does every year of her reign except 1969 [1]
To Kill a Mockingbird
1962 "To Kill a Mockingbird", a film adaptation of the novel by Harper Lee, directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck, is released (Gregory Peck - Best Actor Academy Awards 1963)
Apollo 8's Christmas Broadcast
1968 NASA Apollo 8 crew broadcast while orbiting the moon amd read passages from the Bible to celebrate Christmas
- 1973 1st pictures of a comet from space (Comet Kohoutek), taken by NASA astronauts Jerry Carr and William Pogue during a spacewalk from Skylab 4
- 1983 1st live telecast of Christmas Parade at the EPCOT Centre, Disney World Florida
- 1989 Japanese scientists achieve −271.8°C, the coldest temperature ever recorded in a laboratory
1989 Leonard Bernstein conducts Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, broadcast worldwide to an audience of 100 million
- 2022 Rare polar rain aurora, stretching for 3,000 km, is visible across the North Pole, caused by charged particles flowing from the Sun [1]
- 2023 Ncuti Gatwa makes his debut as the fifteenth incarnation of the Doctor in "Doctor Who", with Millie Gibson as his companion
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