CHRISTMAS QUIZ : So You Know All About Yuletide Traditions?

Here it is Christmas again, that “rolling time of the year,” as Charles Dickens called it, “a season of hospitality, merriment and openheartedness, of feasting and revelry,”

‘Tis the season for summoning up memories of Christmases past, for retelling time-honored stories around the fire, and renewing cherished religious rituals.

And, like Mr. Pickwick and his friends at Dingley Dell, a chance to become a child again and “beguile the time with forfeits, blind man’s buff, snap dragons” and other favorite parlor games after the bones of the noble bird have been removed from the groaning board.

But just how wide is your knowledge of this favorite feast?

Here are 20 questions to test your holiday IQ. This Christmas quiz can be played as a live after-dinner game show, perhaps with your guests arranged into teams to supply group answers.

Come then, everyone, rake up the fire, fill your goblets with Smoking Bishop or mulled cider and let us begin:

The Questions:

1. Who alone among the four Gospel writers told the story of The Three Wise Men?

2. What navigational aid guided the The Three Wise Men to Bethlehem?

3. What instrument accompanied the first singing of the carol “Silent Night?”

4. “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please to . . . “ complete the quatrain.

5. Who wrote “White Christmas”?

6. Which singing cowboy popularized “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?

7. Name the boy and girl featured in “The Nutcracker.”

8. What was Scrooge’s wish for Christmas well-wishers?

9. Whose name was on the weed-overgrown tombstone in the desolate churchyard where the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come led Scrooge?

10. In Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” what gifts did Buddy and his favorite cousin exchange each Christmas morning?

11. What was True Love’s gift on the fifth day of Christmas?

12. What gifts did the young couple exchange in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”?

13. In a word, what was the American general’s reply to the German panzer kommandant demanding the surrender of Bastogne that bleak Christmastide 50 years ago?

14. What was the peculiar thing about the Christmas goose Sherlock Holmes investigated in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”?

15. What possible connection can there be between Christmas and the three gold balls hanging outside a pawnshop?

16. Which competing department stores altered their marketing methods because of the “Miracle on 34th Street”?

17. How many ships came sailing in “On Christmas Day in the Morning”?

18. Queen Victoria is credited with popularizing which Christmas custom?

19. Who assured Virginia that indeed there was a Santa Claus?

20. When Santa whistled up his team in Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” what names did he shout out?

The Answers:

1. Matthew.

2. “The star which they saw in the east went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.”--Matthew 3:9.

3. The guitar. Mice, you may recall, gnawed holes in the bellows of the church organ.

4. “Put a penny in the old man’s hat.”

5. Words and music by Irving Berlin.

6. Gene Autry.

7. Fritz and Clara in Tchaikovsky’s ballet; Fritz and Maria in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original tale, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.”

8. “If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

9. Ebenezer Scrooge.

10. They gave each other homemade kites.

11. Five gold rings.

12. Della sold her luxuriant brown hair to a wig maker to buy a platinum fob chain for the gold watch Jim sold to buy her a set of tortoise-shell combs for her shorn locks.

13. “Nuts.”

14. In the words of the great detective himself: “It laid an egg after it was dead, the bonniest, brightest little blue egg that ever was seen.” The egg, of course, was that valuable gem, the blue carbuncle, hidden in the crop of the goose.

15. Three gold balls are the emblem of St. Nicholas. In addition to bringing gifts to good little girls and boys, Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, pawnbrokers and newlyweds. The gold balls symbolize the bags of gold the good bishop tossed through the windows of three impoverished virgins who were facing a life of prostitution for want of a wedding dowry.

16. Macy’s and Gimbels.

17. Three.

18. Coaxed by her husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, the queen adopted the German custom of decorating a fir tree at Christmas and helped make it a British tradition. With the advent of the penny post early in her reign, she also encouraged the sending of Christmas cards.

19. Editor Frank Church, of the New York Sun.

20. “Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!”

Scoring:

Here is how our Christmas game show is scored. Award one point for each correct answer: and assess your Yuletide aptitude according to this scale:

20--A perfect score merits you and your team members an honorary D.T.T degree, Doctor of Tinsel Trivia.

l6-19--Pin your own stars atop the tree, accompanied by spirited huzzas and an occasional “bah, humbug” from your less-gifted opponents.

11-l5--You rate an extra dollop of brandy sauce on your plum pudding for an above-average performance.

6-10--Let nothing you dismay; perhaps you excel at charades, pin the tail on the donkey or some other holiday parlor game.

1-5--Better luck with Easter egg hunt.

0--Santa’s team never got off the ground. If available and not in conflict with local ecological codes, a lump of coal should be inserted in the stockings you hung by the chimney with care.