Have you been good person this year? It seems that is what Santa is asking the little girl. A Telegraph file picture

The first commercial Christmas card sold was designed by London artist John Horsley. He was hired by a wealthy British man to design a card that showed people feeding and clothing the poor with another picture of a Christmas party. The first Christmas card said, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you”. Of the original 1,000 cards he printed for Henry Cole, only 12 exist today.

The abbreviation of Xmas for Christmas is not irreligious. The first letter of the word Christ in Greek is Chi, which is identical to the Latin X. Xmas was originally an ecclesiastical abbreviation that was used in tables and charts.

The first person to depict Santa Claus with a sleigh and reindeer was the famous 19th century American cartoonist Thomas Nast. He showed Santa Claus in a cartoon, riding a sleigh drawn by a reindeer, delivering Christmas gifts to soldiers fighting in the U.S. Civil War. The cartoon, entitled “Santa Claus in Camp”, appeared in Harper’s Weekly on January 3, 1863.

A Christmas Club is not a club at all, but a savings account in which a person deposits a fixed amount of money regularly to be used at Christmas for shopping.

St Nicholas, from whom Santa Claus derives his name, was bishop of the Turkish town of Myra in the early 4th century. It was the Dutch, who first made him into a Christmas gift-giver.

The Dutch settlers brought him to America where his name eventually became the familiar Santa Claus.

The four ghosts in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol were the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, Christmas Yet to Come and the ghost of Jacob Marley.

The popular Christmas song Jingle Bells was composed in 1857 by James Pierpont, and was originally called One-Horse Open Sleigh.

The eight reindeer that draw Santa Claus’s sleigh were first named in Clement Moore’s poem “The Night Before Christmas”. They are Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen. Rudolph made his first appearance later in 1939.

Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer was not one of the original reindeers that draw Santa Claus’s sleigh. He was included when in 1939 Robert May created this Christmas figure as a Christmas promotion for Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago.

Xmas was not formally celebrated on December 25. This practice started only in the fourth century, when, when Pope Julius I decreed in CE 320 that Jesus Christ was born on 25 December, and Emperor Constantine the Great ordained in CE 325 that Christmas would be celebrated as an immovable festival on 25 December.

The tradition of Christmas lights dates back to when Christians were persecuted for saying Mass. A simple candle in the window meant that Mass would be celebrated there that night.

The famous Christmas Carol “Silent Night” was written in 1818, by an Austrian priest Joseph Mohr. He was told the day before Christmas that the church organ was broken and would not be prepared in time for Christmas Eve. He was saddened by this and could not think of Christmas without music, so he wanted to write a carol that could be sung by choir to guitar music. He sat down and wrote three stanzas. Later that night the people in the little Austrian Church sang “Stille Nacht” for the first time.

In France, Christmas is called Noel. This is derived from the French phrase “les bonnes nouvelles,” which means literally “the good news” and refers to the gospel. The credit for depicting Santa Claus dressed in red goes to the American soft drink company Coca-Cola which hired Haddon Sundblom in 1931 to illustrate Santa Claus dressed in the red Santa Claus suit and Claus hat trimmed in white fur that helped standardize the image of the gift-bringer.