Senior QI elf John Mitchinson is your inquisitor (answers below)

This is a slightly different version of that traditional British pastime, the impossibly difficult Christmas quiz. It’s more of a diversion, really, a gathering of odd festive lore where the strangeness of the material is the main point: something to argue about over a steaming glass of negus and a bowl of filbert nuts. After all, Christmas is a festival that thrives on imprecision: no one really knows what day Jesus was born or who was there and why. The one thing we all agree on is that we need something to lighten the midwinter gloom. As the almost-always-right Dorothy Parker once observed, the best cure for boredom is curiosity (because there’s no cure for curiosity).

1. How many animals does the New Testament name as being present at the birth of Jesus?

2. Which Christmas icon was put on trial in 1648?

3. What, other than loneliness, is mistletoe reputed to cure?

4. Which Christmas icon, other than Mary, is capable of virgin birth?

5. Which Christmas classic single-handedly invented the author tour?

6. In which Christmas classic does the plot revolve around a beheading and a piece of ladies’ intimate apparel?

7. Singing which Christmas carol in public risks legal action?

8. When did Christmas become a public holiday in Scotland?​

9. Under a statute of 1677, what can’t working people in England do on Christmas Day?

10. According to medieval tradition, when should you take down your Christmas decorations?

ANSWERS

1. There is no mention in the New Testament of any animals being present at the Nativity. The closest we get to animals playing a part in the Nativity is a mention of nearby sheep in a field in St Luke 2:8. It was St Francis of Assisi who is credited with making the first crib, in 1223 in a cave in the hills above Greccio. He placed some hay on a flat rock (which can still be seen), put a baby on top, and added carvings of an ox and an ass (though there were no Joseph, Mary, Wise Men, Shepherds or angels).

2. Father Christmas himself was the subject of The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas, a Royalist pamphlet in which he is indicted with causing “Drunkenness, gluttony, & unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lasciviousness, Cursing, Swearing, abuse of the Creatures, some to one Vice, and some to another; all to Idleness”. He is duly acquitted and reflects: “Though I generally come at a set time, yet I am with him every day that knows how to use me.”

3. Since the 1920s mistletoe has been used as an alternative anti-cancer preparation called Iscador (from the Greek for mistletoe, ixos) developed by the founder of anthroposophy, or “spiritual science”, Rudolf Steiner, who observed that the parasitic nature of its growth mirrored that of a cancerous tumour. The official medical line is that mistletoe therapy appears to be beneficial when added to conventional treatment but cannot be considered a “proven” treatment.

4. Turkeys are the largest birds known to be able to give birth without having had sex, though all the offspring of such virgin births are male. The hatching of unfertilised eggs may be a way of ensuring successful reproduction when males are scarce or their sperm count drops. Such births have been recorded as happening as a result of changes in food or temperature and after viral infections. A male turkey is called a stag, gobbler or tom. The female is always a hen.

5. A Christmas Carol was the key to Dickens’s most audacious (and profitable) innovation as a writer: public readings. Between 1853 and his death in 1870, he gave 127 performances of his own edited version of the book, doing all the voices, relishing all the roles. As critic Robert Douglas-Fairfax writes: “It was a performance fully in keeping with his understanding of the spirit of Christmas: summoning the ghosts of the past; healing the wounds opened up by time.”

6. The great medieval alliterative poem “Sir Gawain & the Green Knight” opens on Christmas Eve at Camelot when the terrifying Green Knight is beheaded by Gawain. The knight picks up his head and challenges Gawain to a return match the following year. Gawain breaks his own chivalric code by accepting a girdle from his sexy hostess Lady Bertilak, who assures him that wearing it will protect him. It does, but his “token of untruth” becomes an emblem of his shame and he returns a sadder, wiser man.

7. The music that accompanies the line “Five go-old rings” in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was written in 1909 by the composer Frederic Austin and the copyright is held by the publishers, Novello and Co Ltd. Technically, you need permission from the copyright holder to use the “Five gold rings” melody in a public performance, recording, or arrangement; the rest of the carol’s verses are in the public domain.

8. The Commonwealth banned Christmas in England in 1647 until the Restoration made it a public holiday in 1660. In Scotland it was effectively banned from 1583 and only became an official public holiday in Scotland in 1958. The banning of Christmas was a huge own goal for the Puritans on both sides of the border. By demonising mince pies and good ale, they had inadvertently created the thing they most feared: the secular Christmas that the majority of the population still celebrate.

9. Their normal job – under a statute from 1677 which has yet to be repealed, “no servant or workman shall do any worldly labours of their ordinary calling” on Christmas Day. Idlers pay heed!

10. Until the Commonwealth it was usual for the Christmas season to start on 12 November (the day after the feast of St Martin of Tours) and only end with the taking down of the decorations on Candlemass Eve (1 February), making it the 82 Days of Christmas. In Robert Herrick’s 1648 poem “Ceremony Upon Candlemas Eve” he writes: “Down with the rosemary, and so down with the bays and mistletoe; Down with the holly, ivy, all wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas hall.”

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