December Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of December 2026. Each date has its occasion, a line on what the day is about and a free puzzle to go with it, so you can plan the month's puzzles ahead or pick a theme for any day you like. Every puzzle prints in easy, medium or hard, or plays online against a friend.
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Word Search of the Month
December, Day by Day
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Ford's Moving Assembly Line
The assembly line came from a slaughterhouse. Ford's engineers had watched Chicago meatpackers pull carcasses past men on an overhead rail, each making one cut, and reversed it.
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National Mutt Day
Mixed-breed dogs live longer on average than pedigrees, and the gap is not small. The reason is that a closed gene pool concentrates whatever is already in it.
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The First Text Message
The first text message ever sent said "Merry Christmas". It was typed on a computer, because the phone it went to could not send one.
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National Cookie Day
The word is Dutch. *Koekje* means little cake, and it reached English through New Amsterdam — which is why Americans say cookie and the British, who got the same object from elsewhere, say biscuit.
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Walt Disney's Birthday
Disney was fired from a newspaper early on for lacking imagination and having no good ideas. He kept the detail in circulation himself for the rest of his life.
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St Nicholas Day
Nicholas was a fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey, and the gift-giving comes from one story: he threw bags of gold through a poor man's window at night so his daughters could marry.
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The Blue Marble
The most reproduced photograph in history was taken by an astronaut who is not certain which of the three of them took it. All were using the same camera and none kept a record.
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National Brownie Day
The brownie was probably a failed cake. The most repeated origin has a cook at the Palmer House in Chicago leaving out the baking powder, and being told to serve it anyway.
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National Llama Day
Llamas spit at each other, not usually at people. It is how they settle arguments about food and rank, and a human on the receiving end has generally been mistaken for another llama.
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Nobel Prize Day
There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and the economics one is not a Nobel either. A Swedish bank added it in 1968 and attached his name to it.
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International Mountain Day
Mountains supply fresh water to about half the world's population, and almost none of those people live on one.
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National Poinsettia Day
Poinsettias are not poisonous. A child would have to eat something like five hundred leaves to reach the level tested as harmful, and the plant tastes appalling.
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National Day of the Horse
Horses sleep standing up but cannot reach deep sleep that way. A herd takes turns lying down, with the others keeping watch.
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Roast Chestnuts Day
The American chestnut is functionally extinct. Four billion trees — a quarter of the hardwood forest in the eastern United States — were killed by an imported fungus within about fifty years.
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Lemon Cupcake Day
Lemons do not exist in the wild. They are a hybrid of a bitter orange and a citron, which makes them a human invention several thousand years old.
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The Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a protest against a tax cut. The Tea Act made legal tea cheaper than the smuggled kind, which was exactly the problem.
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National Maple Syrup Day
It takes about forty litres of sap to make one of syrup. The sap is barely sweet — around two per cent sugar — and everything else is boiled off.
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Arabic Language Day
The numerals this sentence would use for counting are called Arabic, and Arabic speakers call them Indian. Both are right — they came from India through the Arab world to Europe.
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A Christmas Carol Published
Dickens wrote it in six weeks because he needed the money, published it himself, and made almost nothing — he had insisted on gilt edges and coloured plates and priced it too low.
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Go Caroling Day
Carols were banned in England for a generation. The Puritan parliament suppressed Christmas entirely in the 1640s, and the songs survived in the countryside by being sung where nobody official was listening.
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The December Solstice
The shortest day is not the day of the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset. Those fall a week or two either side of it, and the reason is that the Earth's orbit is not a circle.
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The First Electric Christmas Lights
Before electric lights, people put lit candles on a dry conifer indoors. Buckets of sand and water stood by the tree, and insurers refused to cover the practice.
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'Twas the Night Before Christmas
Almost everything people picture about Santa comes from one anonymous poem printed in a small New York newspaper on December 23, 1823.
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National Eggnog Day
Cadets at West Point rioted over eggnog in 1826. Whiskey was smuggled in for Christmas Eve, the party got out of hand, and twenty were court-martialled.
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Christmas
Boston banned Christmas for twenty-two years. The Puritans fined anyone caught keeping it, and it did not become a federal holiday until 1870.
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Candy Cane Day
The hook is usually explained as a shepherd's crook or a letter J. The likeliest account is far duller: a choirmaster bent straight sugar sticks so children could hang them on a tree.
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National Fruitcake Day
A fruitcake baked in 1878 is still in a family's possession in Michigan and has been tasted several times. The verdict, reportedly, is that it is fine.
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Card Playing Day
The four suits and the court cards have survived five hundred years and several continents essentially unchanged, which almost nothing else in games has managed.
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National Pepper Pot Day
Pepper pot is a Philadelphia soup with a story attached to Valley Forge — a cook supposedly making something out of tripe and peppercorns to feed a starving army.
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National Bacon Day
The smell is a chemical reaction with a name. Heat drives the Maillard reaction between the amino acids and sugars, and bacon produces an unusually large number of the resulting compounds — around 150 volatiles.
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New Year's Eve
The ball in Times Square exists because fireworks were banned. A newspaper had been setting them off from its roof, the city stopped it, and somebody suggested dropping something instead.
Other Months
Looking for today's puzzle? The word search of the day has the full story behind today's occasion and the week ahead. Or browse all word search puzzles.