I love historical or folkloric Christmas facts, as I am a person who loves Christmas, as illustrated by us making holiday stories most years. We did sketch one out for this year, but I'm afraid time was a bit too short for both of us to complete it. We'll prep it for next year or release it as a small Patreon reward. I also have a folkloric holiday zine I want to draw too. Christmas content for 2025...

Some of my favorite tidbits are - of course - bird related. In a past Namesake story, we included the fun fact that the gifts in the 12 days of Christmas are oops all birds. This includes the golden rings - those are meant to be ring-necked pheasants. Another bird fact is a Quebecois one, where on Holidays we eat toutières, which are fake pigeon pies, who used to be real pigeon pies, until we gobbled up all the ding-dang passenger pigeons. Festive.

A fun Christmas bird fact is that a lot of vintage Christmas cards and decorations featured two red cardinals. Cardinals are angry little boys who defend their territory, so two red Cardinals together got memed on the internet as the gay Christmas cards. They are both boys and they love each other. Since the meme got popular, I did see more cards featuring a female and male cardinal, but the gay cardinals live forever in my gay heart. My mom had a little figurine with two red cardinals. I love them.

For anybody lucky enough to learn this for the first time (I envy you), The Mari Lwyd is folk custom from South Wales where a wispy horse-skull puppet knocks on people's doors demanding booze or a rap battle. Please look them up. They are glorious.

-Isa