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- 0001 Christmas, according to calendar-maker Dionysus Exiguus
- 0274 Roman Emperor Aurelian dedicates a temple to Sol Invictus on the supposed day of the winter solstice and day of rebirth of the Sun.
- 0336 The first1st recorded celebration of Christmas on Dec 25 occurs in Rome
- 0597 England adopts Julian calendar
- 0795 Adrian I ends his reign as Catholic Pope
- 0800 Coronation of Charlemagne (742-814) as Holy Roman Emperor, in Rome. While attending Mass in Rome, he was unexpectedly crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III. Unified most of Europe under his rule.
- 1066 Harold II is killed in the Battle of Hastings, and William the Conqueror is crowned as king of England, at Westminster Abbey, London.
- 1100 Baldwin of Boulogne is crowned as the first King of Jerusalem in the Church of the Nativity
- 1223 St Francis of Assisi assembles first Nativity scene (Greccio, Italy)
- 1261 John IV Lascaris of the restored Eastern Roman Empire is deposed and blinded by orders of his co-ruler Michael VIII Palaeologus.
- 1599 The city of Natal, Brazil is founded.
- 1621 Gov William Bradford forbids game playing on this day
- 1635 Samuel de Champlain c1567-1635 dies at Quebec on Christmas Day, age 68, after stroke paralyzed him in October;
- 1643 Christmas Island founded and named by Captain William Mynors of the East India Ship Company vessel, the Royal Mary.
- 1650 Thomas Cooper, former Usher of Gresham's School, England, hanged as a Royalist rebel.
- 1745 Treaty of Dresden gives much of Silesia to the Prussians
- 1758 Halley's comet first sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch during return
- 1760 Juptier Hammon, New York slave, publishes poetry in "An Evening Thought"
- 1775 Pope Pius VI encyclical on the problems of the pontificate
- 1776 George Washington and his army cross the Delaware River to attack the Kingdom of Great Britain's Hessian mercenaries in Trenton, New Jersey.
- 1776 Washington crosses Delaware and surprises and defeats 1,400 Hessians
- 1818 "Silent Night," by Franz Joseph Gruber and Joseph Mohr sung for first time
- 1818 First US performance of Handel's Messiah, Boston
- 1837 Battle of Lake Okeechobee: United States forces defeat Seminole Native Americans.
- 1837 Battle of Okeechobee-US forces defeat Seminole Indians
- 1843 First theatre matinee (Olympic Theatre, NYC)
- 1848 New Haven Railroad opens
- 1854 Opening of the Bytown and Prescott Railway between Prescott and Bytown (now Ottawa), 54 miles. First rail service to what is now Canada's Capital. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855 and the railway became the Ottawa and Prescott Railway Company, now part of Canadian Pacific.
- 1855 Soldiers of the Royal Canadian Rifles at the Tête du Pont barracks clear ice from Lake Ontario and use field hockey sticks and lacrosse balls to play what is reputed to be the first game of ice hockey
- 1862 40,000 watch the Union army men play baseball at Hilton Head, SC
- 1868 Despite bitter opposition, President A Johnson grants unconditional pardon to all persons involved in the Southern rebellion (the Civil War)
- 1868 U.S. President Andrew Johnson grants unconditional pardon to all Civil War Confederate soldiers.
- 1881 The ship Lord Bute, left Newcastle on Tyne and was not heard of again. It is speculated that she was lost with all hands the following day.
- 1914 Just after midnight on Christmas morning, the German troops along the Eastern and Western fronts cease firing their guns and artillery, and start singing Christmas carols and playing brass musical instruments; at first light, many German soldiers emerge from their trenches and cross No Man's Land, calling out Merry Christmas in English and French; at first the Allied soldiers suspect a trick, but soon they are shaking hands with the Boche; swapping cigarettes and plum pudding, and even playing soccer; the Christmas Truce lasts a few days, then it is back to the bloody conflict of World War I; there are no more Christmas Truces.
- 1914 SS Therese Heymann. This Ropner ship left the Tyne and was posted missing thereafter. No information about her fate is known but she may have been mined off Filey, Yorkshire as was the fate of many other vessels.
- 1914 World War I: Known as the Christmas truce, German and British troops on the Western Front temporarily cease fire.
- 1917 Why Marry?, first dramatic play to win a Pulitzer Prize, opens at the Astor Theatre in New York City.
- 1926 Emperor Taish of Japan dies. His son, Prince Hirohito succeeds him as Emperor Shwa.
- 1926 Hirohito became emperor of Japan (1926-1989)
- 1930 First US bobsled run open to the public (Lake Placid NY)
- 1931 New York's Metropolitan Opera broadcasts an entire opera over radio
- 1932 A magnitude 7.6 earthquake in Gansu, China kills ~70,000 people.
- 1932 December 25: First Empire Christmas Broadcast, with address by King George V. included contributions from Canada, and was distributed to all Canadian stations
- 1939 Montgomery Ward introduces Rudolph the 9th reindeer
- 1941 Admiral Chester W Nimitz arrives at Pearl Harbor to assume command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
- 1941 Japan announces surrender of British-Canadian garrison at Hong Kong
- 1941 Japan announces the surrender of the British-Canadian garrison by radio broadcast; 290 members of the Royal Rifles of Canada (a Québec unit) and the Winnipeg Grenadiers are dead, 493 wounded; Canadian survivors spend rest of war in Japanese POW camps
- 1944 Canadian Army captures Adriatic coast city of Ravenna, Italy
- 1946 Constitution accepted in Taiwan
- 1947 The Constitution of the Republic of China goes into effect.
- 1950 The Stone of Scone, traditional coronation stone of British monarchs, is taken from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalist students. It later turns up in Scotland on April 11, 1951.
- 1953 Avalanche of lava kills 150 (Ruapehu volcano, New Zealand)
- 1955 Visitor posting - Glorianne Wheatley was born(4.07am)Singapore
- 1959 A synagogue in Cologne Germany desecrated with swastikas
- 1963 Turkish Cypriot Bayrak Radio begins transmitting in Cyprus after Turkish Cypriots were forcibly excluded from Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation.
- 1963 Walt Disney's "The Sword In The Stone" is released
- 1965 The Yemeni Nasserite Unionist People's Organisation is founded in Taiz
- 1967 Paul McCartney and Jane Asher get engaged
- 1968 Frank Borman's Christmas reading while orbiting Moon
- 1971 In the longest game in NFL history (82m40s of game time), the Miami Dolphins defeat the Kansas City Chiefs at Kansas City Municipal Stadium 27-24.
- 1971 Worst hotel fire in history kills 163 at Taeyokale Hotel in Seoul
- 1973 The ARPANET crashes when a programming bug causes all ARPANET traffic to be routed through the server at Harvard University, causing the server to freeze.
- 1973 Tommy Chambers (Scotland) finishes 51 yr cycle tour (799,405 miles)
- 1974 Cyclone Tracy virtually destroys Darwin Australia
- 1974 Marshall Fields drives a vehicle through the gates of the White House, resulting in a four-hour standoff.
- 1976 Number one hit on UK music charts - Johnny Mathis - When A Child Is Born (Soleado)
- 1977 Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin meets in Egypt with President of Egypt Anwar Sadat.
- 1979 The Soviet Union airlifts forces into Afghanistan to begin its costly occupation.
- 1983 Live telecast of Christmas Parade
- 1989 Japanese scientist achieve -271.8øC, coldest temp ever recorded
- 1989 Nicolae Ceauescu, former communist dictator of Romania, and his wife Elena are condemned to death and executed under a wide range of charges.
- 1990 "Godfather III" premiers
- 1990 The first successful trial run of the system which would become the World Wide Web.
- 1991 The hammer & sickle red flag that symbolized 75 years of Soviet communism was lowered for the last time and replaced by 15 flags of 15 newly-independent republics. On January 1, 1992, the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist party officially ceased to exist.
- 1993 SS South of Ireland, a passenger steamer, built for the Great Western Railway, and completed in 1867, she was lost at Warbarrow near Lulworth on December 25th, inward bound to Weymouth.
- 2000 A Christmas day fire killed 309 people at a dance hall in the central Chinese city of Luoyang
- 2000 A bank machine in a supermarket in the town of Antibes France paid double the withdrawal amount while only recording the correct amount (Merry Christmas)
- 2000 Visitor posting - Toheeda Sheik was born on this day - South Africa
- 2003 The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe which was released from the Mars Express Spacecraft on December 19, disappears shortly before its scheduled landing.
- 2004 Cassini orbiter releases Huygens probe which successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005.
- 2007 The Queen's Annual Christmas Address to the nation and the Commonwealth is made available on the internet-site YouTube.
- 2009 A Viva Palestina supply convoy is stranded in Aqaba due to actions of the Egyptian government.
- 2009 American officials investigate a possible attempted terrorist attack after an incident on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.
- 2009 China sentences activist Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison for "subversion of state power".
- 2009 China's National Bureau of Statistics revised the growth rate of its gross domestic product (GDP) for 2008 to 9.6 percent from 9 percent.
- 2009 Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom remembers the dead soldiers of Afghanistan in the Royal Christmas Message.
- 2009 Six Filipino sailors and three Greek officers are missing after fire engulfs a ship in an incident off the coast of Venezuela.
- 2009 The 19th century St Mel's Cathedral of Longford in Ireland is destroyed by an ongoing fire in the town.
- 2009 The death by gunshot wound of Expresiones de Tulum journalist Alberto Velázquez, the 12th journalist to be killed in Mexico in 2009, is announced.
- 2009 The number of suicides in Japan exceeded 30,000 in 2009 according to officials, for the twelfth consecutive year.
- 2009 Two more bishops — Eamonn Oliver Walsh and Raymond Field — resign due to child sex abuse allegations contained within the Murphy Report. They were Dublin's only remaining two serving auxiliary bishops.
- 2009 Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a Nigerian Muslim citizen attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 with 289 people on board. - Nigeria
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