- 800: Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III.
- 1223: St. Francis of Assisi assembled one of the first nativity
scenes, in Greccio, Italy.
- 1642: Sir Isaac Newton, British mathematician and the founder of
modern physics, was born.
- 1651: The General Court of Massachusetts passed a law making the
observance of Christmas a penal offense and ordered a 5-shilling
fine for "observing any such day as Christmas."
- 1741: The centigrade temperature scale was devised by Anders
Celsius and incorporated into a Delisle thermometer in Uppsala,
Sweden.
- 1758: Halley's Comet was first sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch.
- 1776: Gen. George Washington led his troops across the Delaware
River to launch a surprise attack on the Hessian quarters at
Trenton, N.J.
- 1818: The song "Silent Night" was performed for the first time at
the St. Nikolaus church in Oberndorff, Austria.
- 1831: Louisiana and Arkansas became the first states to observe
Christmas as a legal holiday.
- 1862: Two teams of Union Army soldiers played a baseball game at
Hilton Head, S.C., before a crowd estimated at 40,000. This game is
credited with popularizing the sport as soldiers went home after the
war and organized teams of their own.
- 1868: President Andrew Johnson granted an unconditional pardon to
all persons involved in the Southern rebellion that resulted in the
Civil War.
- 1899: Humphrey Bogart, star of "Casablanca" and "The Maltese
Falcon," was born.
- 1914: During World War I, the legendary but unofficial "Christmas
Truce" took place. A group of British and German soldiers in the
trenches of the western front stopped firing and met each other in
no-man's land.
- 1918: Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt from October 1970 until his
assassination in October 1981, was born.
- 1926: Emperor Hirohito acceded to the Japanese throne after the
death of his father Yoshihito and remained there until his death in
1989.
- 1938: Director George Cukor announced that Vivien Leigh would play
Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With The Wind."
- 1950: The Coronation Stone, taken from Scone in Scotland by
Edward I in 1296, was stolen from Westminster Abbey in London and
smuggled back to Scotland by a group of Scottish Nationalists.
- 1959: Future Beatles drummer Ringo Starr received his first set of
drums as a Christmas present.
- 1968: At 1:10 am ET, after Apollo 8 circled the moon for 20 hours,
the spacecraft's service propulsion system engine was fired to
achieve the velocity required to "escape" from the lunar orbit.
Shortly afterwards, Jim Lovell told the world "Hello, Houston,
there is a Santa Claus, we're coming home."
- 1977: Charlie Chaplin, silent film star, died.
- 1989: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were
executed by the army after they were tried in secret and found
guilty of genocide.
- 1991: Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev resigned as the eighth
and final leader of a Communist superpower that had already gone
out of existence. The hammer-and-sickle flag over the Kremlin came
down, and Russia's blue-white-and-red flag was raised in its place.
*Happy Birthday*
----------------
- Jimmy Buffett, 52, singer
- Robin Campbell, 44, singer/musician, UB40
- Larry Csonka, 52, NFL running back/TV host
- Rickey Henderson, 40, MLB outfielder
- Noel Hogan, 27, musician, the Cranberries
- Annie Lennox, 44, singer
- Barbara Mandrell, 50, country singer/actress
- Shane McGowan, 41, singer/guitarist, the Pogues
- Dan Pastorini, 49, NFL Quarterback
- Gary Sandy, 53, actor, "WKRP in Cincinnati"
- Sissy Spacek, 49, actress