25 december

The gospels give no day and no year. Matthew sets the birth “in the time of King Herod”; Luke ties it to a census “while Quirinius was governor of Syria”, which Josephus dates to 6 CE. Most scholars conclude the two cannot both be right. 25 December is first recorded as the feast in a Roman…

On Christmas Day, in Edward’s abbey, Ealdred of York crowned him. When the congregation acclaimed him in English and French, the Norman guards outside took the shouting for an attack and set fire to the houses around the abbey. Most of the congregation ran out; William was crowned in a half-empty…

When Godfrey died, his brother Baldwin left Edessa to his cousin and came south. He was crowned on Christmas Day in the Church of the Nativity, the first Latin king of Jerusalem.

Santa María runs agroundLa Navidad

The flagship grounded on a reef on Christmas night while a boy held the tiller. Her timbers built La Navidad, where Columbus left 39 men. When he came back a year later, all of them were dead.

Christmas Day in England, 4 January 1643 in Catholic Europe. His father had died three months before, and he was so small, his mother said, that he would have fitted in a quart pot.

The sultan’s messengers caught up with the grand vizier in Belgrade on Christmas Day. He was strangled with a silk cord, the death reserved for high officials.

Johann Georg Palitzsch, a farmer and self-taught astronomer, picked it up with his telescope at Prohlis, near Dresden: the first predicted return of a comet, seventy-six years after Halley saw it.

Seventy-six years between the last unexplained visit and the first predicted one. Halley’s claim could only be tested after he was dead, and by late 1758 astronomers across Europe were searching the sky for it.

The South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company ran the first scheduled steam passenger trains in the United States on Christmas Day. Six months later the Best Friend’s boiler exploded after its fireman, tired of the hiss, held down the safety valve.

Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved Baptist deacon, planned a strike for wages after Christmas; it became the largest rising in the British Caribbean, with some 60,000 people taking part. Fourteen whites were killed. About 200 rebels died in the fighting and more than 300 were executed. The news hurried…

Along stretches of the British line around Ypres, German and British soldiers met in no man’s land, swapped food and souvenirs and buried their dead. Generals on both sides made sure it was not repeated on that scale.

Caught after their flight, the Ceaușescus were tried by an improvised military court in the barracks where they were held, sentenced to death after about an hour, and shot at once. Footage was shown on television. Romania abolished the death penalty days later.

Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president on television in the evening. Minutes later the red flag came down over the Kremlin and the Russian tricolour went up.

Britain’s lander, carried by Mars Express, never called home. In 2015 a NASA orbiter found it intact on the surface, its solar panels only partly unfolded, blocking the antenna.

A 6.5-metre gold-coated mirror in 18 segments, folded to fit an Ariane 5 and opened in space. Built to see the first galaxies, it also turns its infrared eye on the planets, from Mars to Neptune.

Webb launches on Christmas DayJames Webb Space Telescope

An Ariane 5 lifted a 6.5-metre mirror of 18 gold-coated beryllium segments, folded to fit, and a five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court. Within two weeks every fold had opened, and a month after launch it reached its post beyond the Moon.