10 fun food facts about Christmas
- December 23 is the busiest grocery store day of the year.
- A Sugar Plum is basically a fruitcake ball. It’s made with any dried fruit chopped fine and mixed with nuts, aromatic spices and honey. Then it’s shaped into a golf-ball sized orb and rolled in sugar.
- Santa Claus’s origins come from a real person, St. Nikolas of Myra. Among other things, he’s the patron saint of butchery.
- Apples were the first known Christmas tree decorations.
- Thirty-eight percent of us gifted with fruitcakes give them to someone else, possibly making them the most popular “re-gifted” item ever.
- Candy canes are shaped like a shepherd’s crook. Until about 1900, candy canes were pure white.
- Twenty-two million people in the United States have turkey for Christmas dinner.
- Animal Crackers made their debut in 1902 at Christmas. The string on the box was created so the box could be hung on a Christmas tree.
- A study by Food Network UK found that it takes 47 years for us to cook Christmas dinner without any mistakes. The study found 1/3 of us never get it right.
- Despite an abundance of naughty treats, the average person only gains less than a pound during the holiday stretch beginning with Thanksgiving and ending at the new year, according to a study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Thanks for these interesting facts & Merry Christmas! By the way, how many people who give their fruitcake presents to others do it during the year they received them?