Trivial Holiday Answers

Another Tuesday is upon me and I survived the Holidays … barely.  Last week, in my A Trivial Holiday post, I shared seven mid-winter holiday themed trivia questions, courtesy of Ken Jenning‘s weekly Tuesday Trivia e-mail service.

And now, the answers you’ve all been waiting for:

1. How many tiny reindeer pull Santa’s sleigh, in the poem that begins “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”? Eight tiny reindeer–Rudolph was a later addition.

2. What sitcom featured a character with the very festive full name of “Christmas Noelle Snow”? Chrissy Snow, Suzanne Somers’s character on Three’s Company, was saddled with that wintry nightmare of a name, for which at least three different explanations were given on the show.

3. Which of the three traditional gifts brought by the three wise men has the highest market value today? Frankincense and myrrh, being nothing but tree sap with vaguely aromatic/medicinal properties, retail for just a few dollars an ounce. Gold is about a hundred times more valuable.

4. Rod Carew was a Minnesota Twin, but who are the only *real* twins name-checked in Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song”? Ann Landers and her sister Dear Abby. (Harrison Ford’s a quarter Jewish–not too shabby!)

5. Most commercial Advent calendars begin on what date? The actual dates of Advent move around, since the period officially begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, but the eponymous calendars typically just start on December 1.

6. “Christmas disease” is another name for the ‘B’ type of what disease, most famously suffered by Alexei Romanov? Hemophilia B was named for Stephen Christmas, the first patient in which it was identified.

7. What unusual distinction is held by these countries in this order, and no others? Spain, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia. These are the (modern-day) sources of the four “ethnic” dances in the second act of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker: a Spanish dance, an Arabian dance, a Chinese dance, and a Russian dance. When I first came up with this question, I thought there were a few more countries on this list, but it turns out the list just SEEMED longer when I took my four-ear-old daughter to The Nutcracker a couple weeks ago.

If you’d like to see this week’s questions, submit a comment replying to this post and I’ll see what I can do.

Merry Christmas (on the 4th day of Christmas)