History of the Day for:
December 25
- 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 fine (five shillings) 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 men played a baseball game at Hilton Head, S.C., before a crowd estimated at 40,000. This game is credited with popularizing the game 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: 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.
- 2003: The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe, released from the Mars Express Spacecraft on December 19, disappears shortly before its scheduled landing.
- 2004: Cassini orbiter releases Huygens probe which successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005.