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1. Manolo Blahnik and Bill Nye will celebrate their birthdays on Thanksgiving this year, while Denzel Washington, Annie Lennox, Dido, Helena Christensen and Little Richard will blow out their birthday candles on Christmas. Sir Ben Kingsley, Val Kilmer, Gong Li and Nicholas Sparks, who share a Dec. 31 birthday, will be one year older as they ring in the new year.
2. If you received all of the gifts in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas," you would receive 364 presents. According to PNC Financial Services, in 2007, these 364 gifts would cost you a hefty $78,100.10 - a 3.1 percent increase from 2006's total of $75,122.03.
3. Ladies, more diamonds are sold around Christmas than any other time of the year.
4. In Mexico, wearing red underwear on New Year's Eve is said to bring new love in the coming year.
5. The Dutch use shoes, not stockings. Traditionally they set out, not hang, wooden shoes the night before Christmas.
6. Santa's reindeer are named Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen. Oh, and of course Rudolph. It turns out, though, that Donner and Blixen have undergone slight name changes since 1823, when "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" was first published. Maybe they just didn't like "Dunder" and "Blixem."
7. Thinking of a holiday business venture? Approximately $2,255,750,000 are generated by photographs with Santa in shopping malls across the U.S.
8. Twenty percent of Americans finish their Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. Twenty-eight percent of Americans re-gift.
9. Some priests in Australia advise you to say "happy Christmas," not "merry Christmas," because "merry" connotes getting drunk.
10. A study has shown that Jan. 8 is the busiest day of the year for divorce lawyers; up to 1 in 5 couples will enquire about divorce after the pressures of Christmas. Studies show that fewer than 40 percent of divorcees are happier after ending their marriage.
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