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One of the miracles associated with St Nicholas was the restoring to life of three young boys who had been dismembered by a cruel butcher and thrown into a brine tub.
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Victorian Christmas cards were often secular in theme and their content could be quite morbid: many featured dead birds or anthropomorphic frogs in various states of jeopardy.
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An early form of the ‘round robin’ letter was used by British Navy sailors petitioning their commanding officers– signatures were arranged in a circle around the demands to prevent the ring-leader being identified.
Image: The National Archives
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TROLL once meant "to sing loudly and clearly" - as in, "to troll the ancient Yuletide carol".
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Every 25 December in Chumbivilcas Province, Peru, residents go to the centre of town to have a communal fistfight. Residents claim it is cathartic.
Afterwards, fighters are encouraged to drink away the pain of their injuries.
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In 1956, Harper Lee's friends gave her a full year's salary as a Christmas gift, so that she could take time off to focus on writing.
She used that time to write To Kill A Mockingbird, which has now sold more than 40 million copies.
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0.5% of US births are to self-reported virgins.
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The steeper the street you live on, the less likely you are to be robbed.
Criminologists speculate that this may be because criminals don't feel like climbing hills.
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"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." NEIL GAIMAN and TERRY PRATCHETT
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Phrase of the day: FARE LA SCARPETTA (Italian) - using a piece of bread to mop the last bits of pasta sauce
(Image: James; CC BY-NC-ND.)
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An ATOMIC TYPO is a typo that results in a correctly spelled word, just not the one you intended to write.
For instance, you might type "pubic" for "public".
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Cowboys in the Old West were more likely to wear bowler hats than cowboy hats.
(Image: Oxfordian Kissuth; CC BY-SA.)
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Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the U.S. to earn the M.D. degree, was admitted to a medical school in 1847. The faculty allowed the all-male student body to vote on her admission, being sure they would reject her, but the students voted ‘yes’ as a joke.
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The real-life technology chief of MI6 is now called ‘Q’.
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From 1987 to 2015, it was more lucrative to invest in Lego than in bonds, wine, or gold. (Study: bit.ly/33tbVRq.)
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Word of the Day: WIKIRACING — a game whereby you have to get from a predetermined Wikipedia page to another one by navigating links in articles (excluding the ‘See also’ ones) quicker or clicking fewer links than your opponent.
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A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
SHERLOCK HOLMES
Image: David Iliff CC BY-SA 3.0
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In December 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes and more than 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine, which almost bankrupted it. Staff referred to Holmes’ death as ‘the dreadful event’.
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Macropinna microstoma is a deep-sea fish with glowing green eyes that look out from inside its transparent, fluid-filled forehead (the holes on the front of its face are nostrils).
Image: Ezra Weller, CC BY 3.0
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Word of the day: UHTCEARU, n. anxiety before dawn (Old English) – pronounced ‘oot-key-are-oo’.
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Japanese streets typically have no names. Instead, blocks are used as the unit for addresses: what we call a street is just an empty space between blocks in Japan.
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During WWII, a Great Dane named Juliana was awarded a medal by Blue Cross for her heroism in disarming a German incendiary device.
She urinated on the bomb.
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Queen Victoria owned a musical bustle that played the national anthem every time she sat down.
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Zebras are black with white stripes, not white with black stripes.
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We've all got a story about family board games at Christmas, but Sara's is a tough one to beat.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves