From the First Christmas to War, Truces and The ShobashobaneTragedy: The Extraordinary History of December 25

Did you know?

Father Christmas, or Saint Nicholas, was a real character. He was a fourth-century bishop. Every year his bones, in a tomb in Bari in Italy, are said to secrete a liquid.

On this day in history, December 25

1 The first Christmas

352 Christmas is first celebrated.

1492 Christopher Columbus’ flagship, Santa María, runs aground off Hispaniola (Haiti). The crew are left to found a colony while Columbus returns to Spain. On his return he finds no trace of them.

1487 Bartolomeu Dias enters a wide bay (Luderitz Bay) after sailing for three weeks along the arid coast of south-west Africa.

1647 English Puritans under Oliver Cromwell, who overthrew Anglican King Charles I ban Christmas celebration. After chopping off the King’s head, one of their first acts was to decree that instead of feasting and making merry, Christmas should instead be a time of “fasting and humiliation” when people should account for their sins.

1819 Struggle icon Nxele Makana drowns while escaping from Robben Island

1899 A Boer shell fired at Ladysmith carries a plum pudding for the besieged inhabitants.

1914 Second day of the Christmas Truce on the Western front. In the week leading up to Christmas Day, many French, German and British soldiers cross trenches to exchange seasonal greetings. There are joint burial ceremonies, prisoner swaps, carol singing and soccer games, although hostilities continue in some sectors. The truce is not unique to Christmas and reflects a mood of ‘live and let live’, where opposing infantry would fraternise in moments of humanity amidst one of the most violent conflicts of human history.

1939 US department store Montgomery Ward introduces Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer.

1942 Soviet artillery and tanks bombard the German armies at Stalingrad.

1979 Soviet forces invade Afghanistan to prop up the communist government.

1991 USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev quits.

1995 A bloody feud between IFP and ANC supporters comes to a head with a massacre at Shobashobane, on the KZN South Coast. Nineteen people are savagely killed, hundreds more are injured and 87 houses are gutted. Top local and national government officials spend Christmas Day consoling survivors. One of them, an emotional police chief Bheki Cele, tells the press: ‘What I saw was beyond belief ... the killers were parading in the area with the private parts of a victim, saying this was their trophy,’ Another had been chopped to pieces, ‘as if someone was preparing to braai meat’.

2021 The revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope (named after the first director of Nasa – the National Aeronautical and Space Administration), is launched from French Guiana, South America.

2024 Azerbaijani airliner crashes near Kazakhstani city of Aktau, killing 38 people, mistakenly shot down by Russian air defences.

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