Yule Never Believe It

This year Christmas presents will cost you $96,824. That's the tab you'd face at current prices for all the gifts enumerated in the traditional song 'The Twelve Days Of Christmas'. As well as feeling cherished, your true love might be unexpectedly peeved as they'd likely be looking for a larger place to live - what with needing the space for the 364 items you'd generously showered them with. Dizzied by these numbers we decided to get back to some festive basics with the distinctly non commercial approach of today's Christmas themed quiz. By the way, the costings quoted above were issued this week by an online U.S. based banking firm, which took researching the prices used in their calculations very seriously indeed, even getting the Pennsylvania Ballet Company to confirm the costs of hiring dancing ladies these days. Meanwhile, after checking out the questions in today's Christmas themed quiz and reviewing the answers to yesterday's  brain teaser on railways, have a look at the little gallery of images in our new occasional Also Rans section of the blog which illustrate topics we considered using as the basis for today's quiz.

Christmas Quiz
1 Mistletoe, traditionally used at Christmas as a means of securing a festive kiss, grows on what type of tree?  
2 In Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol', how many ghosts was Scrooge visited by?
3 What was the name of the angel who eventually won his wings for helping James Stewart's character in Frank Capra's Christmas feelgood film masterpiece 'It's A Wonderful Life'?
4 Name any three out of the eight of Santa's reindeers named by Clement Clarke Moore in her iconic poem 'The Night Before Christmas'?   
5 Christmas Island is a territory of which country?
Answers will be published along with tomorrow's quiz questions.

Trains & Railways Quiz Answers
The answers to yesterday's trains and railways themed quiz were:
1 Agatha Christie.
2 Japan.
3 London.
4 Vladivostok.
5 Sodor.

The Also Rans


A quiz on the life and work of Pablo Picasso would have been fun in the wake of the emergence of hundreds of previously unknown works by the Spanish painter. Perhaps the most interesting question is why the retired French electrician Pierre Le Guennec, who claims to have held the collection for some forty years, had't previously sought to cash in on the cache? His assertion that Picasso gave him the assorted  paintings, drawings and lithographs is disbelieved by the Picasso family who have now launched legal action that will unquestionably enrich assorted French lawyers.  

An image of a polar bear drawn in red food dye on the Langjokull glacier in Iceland seeks to draw attention to the UN climate change talks being held in Mexico. Any environmentally themed quiz we might set would have to ask why last year's talks in Copenhagen ended without agreement and why expectation of any real progress this time around are so low? 

And surely it would have been wonderful to mark the death of Leslie Nielsen with a quiz celebrating his great deadpan humour so wonderfully displayed in films like 'Airplane' and 'The Naked Gun' but we suppose that that's not important just now .....