They’re looking to save energy as Russia clamps down on gas flows to the continent. With all this alarming Christmas data on energy, it’s no wonder nations across Europe are urging people to turn off their Christmas lights this winter. That doesn’t even include the rest of December where the average home in the UK uses an extra £50 worth of energy on things like charging toys or settling in for a movie marathon. The UK uses almost £66 million of electricity on Christmas day alone – that’s 402Gwhs of electricity, or to put it another way, enough electricity to light the Eiffel Tower for 50 years! And, according to Uswitch research, in 2020, Christmas lights added £79 million to the UK’s energy bills. Back in 2015, the lights in the US required a massive 6.63 billion kilowatts of power. Of course, some countries really like to bump it up and switch on more than others. But this burst of colour requires a great deal of more energy to be used at a time when we’re all becoming more cost-conscious with the soaring energy prices. It’s hard to imagine Christmas without the twinkling of lights in our homes, restaurants and shops. Christmas Fact #2 - Christmas eats up energy Some countries still have celebrations on 6 January, like Spain, the Philippines and France. The celebration of Christmas spread throughout the Western world over the next several centuries, but many Christians continued to view Epiphany (6 January) and Easter as more important. In that way, it became easier to convince Rome’s subjects to accept Christianity as the empire’s official religion. So why did church officials at the end of the third century settle on 25 December? It’s most likely they wanted the date to coincide with existing pagan festivals honouring Saturn (the Roman god of agriculture) and Mithra (the Persian god of light). For instance, the presence of shepherds and their sheep suggest he was probably born in the spring. The Bible doesn’t mention his exact birthday, and the Nativity story gives conflicting clues. It seems unlikely Jesus was really born on December 25. Christmas Fact #1 - 25 December was probably not Jesus’s birthday
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