Facts You Probably don’t Need

• It’s a 50+ year old tradition in Sweden to watch a specific Donald Duck cartoon at exactly 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Approximately half the country tunes in to watch every year.

• Steve Carell used to be a mailman and during Christmas, he would write notes to kids who send letters to Santa and put it in their mailboxes. The note read, “Your letter to Santa has been picked up by special reindeer courier.”

• Dr. Seuss was the co-producer of the classic cartoon, “How The Grinch Stole Christmas.” Seuss himself wrote the lyrics for the famous song, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”

• In the UK, a White Christmas is defined by as, “one snowflake to be observed falling in the 24 hours of 25 December somewhere in the UK.”

• On the original fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me “colly birds,” aka blackbirds, not “calling birds” until “calling birds” became more popular in the 1970s.

• The reason why the snowman is abominable is because of a mistranslation by a journalist. The local name for the creature was “metoh-kangmi,” which translates to “Man-bear snow-man,” but the metoh part was mistranslated as filthy, which later got changed to abominable.

• The reindeer is the only mammal to change eye color to adjust the amount of light that enters the eyes in different seasons. They have golden eyes in summer and blue in winter.

Facts by Sean McVeigh, factologist.