On the Twelfth Day of the Month

11 Holiday fun facts to drop into party small talk

1. Given the different time zones, Santa has 31 hours to deliver gifts, but his reindeer really have to fly, since that means visiting 823 homes per second.
2. Dreaming of a green Christmas? Household waste increases by 25 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. In the United States, trash from wrapping paper and shopping bags totals 4 million tons.
3. The year 2007 marks the 28th year that the National Chanukah Menorah—the world’s largest—in Washington, D.C., will be lit in a ceremony televised internationally.
4. The U.S. Postal Service delivers 20 billion cards and packages between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.
5. Rudolph first alighted on the holiday scene in 1939, when in-store Santas at Montgomery Ward stores distributed 2.4 million copies of the booklet “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” written by Robert L. May, a copywriter for the company. After executives vetoed the original name, Rollo, May’s young daughter suggested Rudolph.
6. The Löschner family of Neuhausen, Germany, owns the biggest nutcracker collection: 4,334. It is said that German craftsmen made the first decora-tive nut-crackers around 1800 as a way of mocking authority figures, leading to the phrase “a hard nut to crack.”
7. Despite their bad reputation, poinsettias aren’t deadly. Latex in the stems and leaves can be irritating, but not much more, to humans and animals.
8. The first candy cane dates back to 1670 in Germany. According to holiday lore, a choirmaster distributed sugar sticks bent into the shape of a shep-herds’ crook to quiet his young singers during Christmas services. Today more than 1.76 billion candy canes are made for the holidays, enough to stretch from Santa Claus, Indiana, to North Pole, Alaska, and back again 32 times.
9. Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” between October and November of 1843. The story was a hit, selling 6,000 copies by Christmas Day.
10. The largest ginger-bread man in the world is a dieter’s nightmare, weighing in at a whopping 466 pounds, six ounces. The Gingerbread House, in Rochester, Minnesota, baked the giant cookie on February 21, 2006.
11. An average of 5,800

the Christmas we became shepherds
by Anne Kreamer

December 1994 came two years after the death of my father and a little more than a year after my mother and grandmother died—coincidentally, tragically—on the same day. With my inheritance, my husband and I had bought a farm in the Hudson River Valley. I was still shell-shocked from all the loss and grief, as well as stressed from my job. A rural retreat where I could putter in the soil and where all of us—especially our two daughters, then ages four and six—could escape the cement and noise of New York City was incredibly alluring.

With the farm had come a little flock of 13 sheep—old sheep, the previous owner had said, when he asked us to keep them so they could “end their days peacefully.” Even for neophyte farmers, how tough could it be to feed a few geriatric sheep?

Christmas Day presented us with a classic holiday tableau—deep snow, a cloudless azure sky, a crackling fire beside the Christmas tree we had cut ourselves from our land. It was as close to a fairy-tale vision of the holiday as I could have imagined.

That morning we had just finished opening the presents. The girls were happily playing with their new toys, and my husband was contentedly reading, but memories of Christmases past with my parents weighed me down. I didn’t want to disturb the rest of the family, so I decided to take a walk and check on the sheep.

I trudged up to their shed and peeped in to discover, well, a miracle: One of our elderly ewes had given birth to a gorgeous baby lamb. I had been raised a Catholic, so the symbolic significance of such a scene was not lost on me. I took it as a message: time to stop mourning and fully embrace life.

I ran back to the house and corralled the whole family to come and see the baby lamb. We were all entranced—enough so that over the next few years we added to our flock of sheep and introduced Great Pyrenees shepherding dogs. And believe it or not, for the next decade we became part-time Merino-wool–producing farmers.

I’ve experienced many splendid Christmas mornings before and since, but I doubt if I’ll ever have one more perfectly surprising, resonant, and joyful.

Anne Kreamer is the author of Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters.