Quiz the Season to Be Jolly and Holiday-Smart

Christmas--a time of peace and piety, but also of parties and presents, pageants and poets, and posing questions just for fun around a blazing hearth.

Let us begin our annual Christmas quiz with the poets, who proclaim this the season of love:

“Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, love divine;

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and angels gave the sign.”

Who wrote that lovely quatrain?

If your answer is the 19th century poet Christina Rossetti, award yourself a bonus five points when tallying your final score. Now proceed to tackle the next 20 Questions, either on your own or in a battle of wits and witticisms with your holiday guests.

The Questions

1. Who in Whoville caught the Grinch shoving the Christmas tree and presents “up the chimbley”?

2. In Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” what did Amahl offer the Three Kings?

3. Which of the “Tales of Hoffmann” became a classic Christmas ballet?

4. Did Santa Claus ever win an Academy Award?

5. When and what is Boxing Day?

6. What new gift did True Love send on the fifth day of Christmas?

7. Which former railroad telegrapher became Rudolph’s all-time best-selling balladeer?

8. What timely new space-age toy will Santa’s elves be loading on the sleigh this Christmas Eve?

9. On what date is the Twelfth Day of Christmas?

10. In what form did the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come present itself to Ebenezer Scrooge?

11. Was the Old Testament Ebenezer, like Scrooge, a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner”?

12. Who was the most famous Scrooge of the airwaves?

13. St. Luke’s gospel tells us, “Mary brought forth her firstborn and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes.” What are swaddling clothes?

14. What is the all-time best-selling Christmas recording?

15. How many days has Hanukkah?

16. How many candles are in the Hanukkah candelabrum?

17. President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 began the custom of giving Christmas gifts to the White House domestic staff. What did each receive?

18. Each Christmas season during his presidency Franklin Roosevelt wound up in hot water with the Washington, D.C., Fire Department. Why?

19. Every Christmas the White House chef creates a gingerbread house for the First Family. What was used to pave the driveway of the delicacy baked for President Ronald Reagan?

20. In which two oceans would you find a Christmas Island?

The Answers

1. “Little Cindy-Lou Who, who was not more than 2,” that’s who.

2. His crutch.

3. “The Nutcracker,” with Tchaikovsky’s enchanting score.

4. Yes, in 1947, Edmund Gwenn’s Santa in “Miracle on 34th Street.”

5. The first weekday after Christmas. The name arose from the custom in British stately homes and offices of giving “Christmas boxes”--gifts or cash--to the help.

6. Five golden rings.

7. Singing cowboy Gene Autry.

8. Miniature enameled figures, like toy soldiers, depicting astronaut John Glenn alongside his Friendship 7 capsule in 1962, payload specialist Glenn boarding the Discovery shuttle at age 77 for his recent return to space, and a white-haired U.S. Sen. Glenn in a dark business suit. From Mattel.

9. Jan. 6, also known as “Little Christmas,” when by tradition Christians observe the arrival of the Wise Men at Bethlehem. In Shakespeare’s time, it marked the end of the holiday revels, an occasion for house parties, masked balls and theatrical offerings like his romantic comedy “Twelfth Night.”

10. Only an outstretched hand protruding from a black hooded shroud, a hand that eventually dissolved into a bedpost.

11. No way. Ebenezer was not a person but a stone memorial set up by Samuel in gratitude for heavenly help in defeating the Philistines. The Hebrew word means “stone of help.”

12. Lionel Barrymore. His radio version, later a best-selling record, is considered the definitive rendering of the Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol.”

13. “Strips of linen to restrict the movement of a newborn infant,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Elizabethan English the term was “swaddling clouts.”

14. Bing Crosby’s recording of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”

15. The Jewish festival, also spelled Chanukah, lasts eight days.

16. Nine.

17. A $5 gold piece.

18. The Roosevelts insisted on burning real candles on the real evergreen tree in the family quarters of the White House.

19. Jellybeans.

20. The Pacific and the Indian.

Scoring

Score one point for each correct answer.

A perfect score of 25, bonus included, ranks you as a master or mistress of the revels. Scores between 20 and 24 put you in the driver’s seat on Santa’s sled run. From 15 to 19 points designates you elf emeritus in Toy Land. Scoring between 10 and 14 entitles you to don a lampshade and frolic like Old Fezziwig, the father of the office Christmas bash. A tally below 10 leaves you in the cold, chanting out of tune with the carolers.