We've seen how customs get switched from one holiday to another over time. In the past, Thanksgiving had trick-or-treaters and Christmas was a time for ghost stories. In the 15th century, the church found the festivities on St. Nicholas Day a bit too rowdy for the Advent season, so they were moved to the New Year holiday. Since December 31st is the feast day of Saint Sylvester, the masked and costumed people who roam from house to house became Silvesterklaus.  

The Silvesterklaus custom is still performed in parts of Switzerland, twice a year, on December 31st and again on January 13th. Why choose between the date on the Gregorian calendar and the date on the Julian calendar when you can do both?



Silvesterklaus, with their elaborate headdresses and enormous bells, come in three flavors: beautiful (human masks and traditional dress), pretty-ugly (human masks with plant costumes), and ugly. They travel in groups of six men, ringing their bells and yodeling in low voices to wish everyone a happy New Year. Tourists can catch Silvesterklaus in the  Appenzell Ausserrhoden region. The custom has been launched in the past few years in New Glarus, Wisconsin, too. You can see the Silvesterklaus there on Saturday, January 11, 2025.

If you had really good genealogy records, your family tree could theoretically be huge, with infinite fractal branches. That doesn't happen because the population of the world doesn't get bigger in the past. But even if it were true, you don't carry genetic information from all your distant ancestors. You always inherit 50% from each parent, but you could carry as little as 0% from one grandparent and as much as 50% from another. Those are extremes, and there's an exception for a genetic male, who always gets the Y chromosome from his father's father. But whatever percentage you get from each grandparent, that slice gets smaller with each subsequent generation. The upshot is that after a few generations, you will have no genetic link at all to some of your forbearers. Which is good, because they may have been more closely related to their spouse than is comfortable to think about. This video from MinuteEarth is barely over three minutes; the rest is an ad.

The Guinness Book of World Records was founded in 1954 in order to settle pub arguments. It's now a huge organization that keeps up with the biggest, fastest, oldest, and most outrageous extremes of all kinds. There are more records than ever, and they can be very specific, so earning one isn't as impossible as it used to be. But it's not all "achievements." There are also records that no one wants to be associated with.

You wouldn't want to be the record holder for the world's most fraudulent election, or the highest recorded blood alcohol level, or the biggest ever loss of personal wealth. There are records that are so dangerous that Guinness won't accept attempts to break them, like the biggest meal ever eaten. The record holder for that one wasn't even trying for the world record, and died because of it anyway. Read the details of five truly regrettable world records at Cracked.

Once upon a time, there were two space programs that did great things because of their Cold War rivalry. Now we have many nations with government-funded space programs, plus private enterprises in the space travel business, and these programs work in partnership with each other to expand our missions to explore (and exploit) inner and outer space. If everything goes as planned, the year 2025 will be a banner year for space exploration.

NASA has several unmanned missions to deliver scientific instruments to the moon. They are also launching infrared detectors to see further into space than ever before. The ESA will explore low earth orbit. Japan is sending probes to the moon, while China will explore asteroids. And several programs are sending probes out into the solar system to explore everything from Mercury to the moons of Jupiter. Read up on what to expect in space exploration next year at the Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: NASA/Firefly Aerospace)

Rays, whether they are manta rays, sting rays, or mobulas, swim in a different way from any other swimming creature because they are shaped like pancakes with faces. What's weird is that parts of their faces are on top, and the rest is on the bottom. But you already knew that, and this video is from Ze Frank, so we also learn about their body teeth, their arrowhead with a stutter, their creepyholes, their waterfall of teeth, and their ampullae of lorenzini. You'll have to watch the video to find out what those are. Different kinds of rays have various weird ways of eating, and some even have superpowers like eletrocution or eating with their fins. He doesn't even get to the flying mobulas. This particular True Facts video is rather clean compared to others in the series, but it's still pretty funny in places. There's a 70-second ad at 5:05.

We know in our heads that the New Year is just a date on the calendar, the first date, actually, and holds no astronomical or religious significance. But we still have many superstitions around that date, most involving food. We know that hog jowl, collard greens, and black-eyed peas bring good luck in the new year, but did you know there are also superstitions about foods that will bring bad luck?

There's an entire list of foods that portend a bad year if eaten on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, and many of them are meat. You shouldn't eat crab or lobster because these creatures move in odd ways. A lobster can walk backwards, and a crab scuttles sideways. Eating them could mean that you can't move forward in the next year. The same justification holds for beef and chicken because of the way those animals move. So you might want to go meatless or stick to pork for the holiday. There are also food superstitions around the color or the state of certain foods, varying by nation. Read up on eight foods to avoid for a prosperous 2025 at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Matt Johnson)

Science fiction addressed our feelings about robots long before we actually had humanoid robots. The word itself came from the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in which mechanical men are exploited for their labor until they rebel. A similar theme lurks under the surface in the 1927 film Metropolis. Both stories made the treatment of robots an analogy for the treatment of laborers because we are bound to sympathize with a robot who looks like a human. But it's not a human, so businesses were keen to appeal to the exploitive side of humanity by offering labor-saving robots to ease our personal burdens. This motive was personified by a robot named Eric that was introduced to audiences in 1928.

Eric wasn't a true robot as we think of them today. His movements were remote-controlled and his voice was pre-recorded, but he seemed human enough to spark sympathy from people he met. For 1928, he was a miracle of a mechanical man. Almost 100 years later, we still haven't perfected humanoid robots, and we haven't truly sorted out our feelings about them either. The working robots we have, from oversized factory arms to Roombas, don't look anything like a person. Read about Eric the Robot and some early ideas about robot labor at Popular Science. -via Damn Interesting

I can so relate to this. You love your family, and you love it when they come visit. At the same time, spending weeks getting the house cleaned and the pantry stocked only to see the house wrecked and the refrigerator emptied in no time when they all get there... well, it makes you realized how tiring all this merriment can be. Your normal schedule is thrown off, you tense up hoping to make it through, and everyone is trying their best not to offend each other. You notice everyone's weird behavior while they are noticing yours, too, yet everyone is pretending it's all okay. But that's just the downside. Years from now, you'll only remember the best parts of the visit, and that will give you the strength to do it all over again. These common facets of a family holiday get together are perfectly illustrated by Foil Arms and Hog.

After some disappointments over the last few years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a good year in 2024-  100% of their movies were record-breaking hits! That fact is a little easier to swallow when you realize that Marvel only released one movie this year, and it was Deadpool & Wolverine. Still, you can't argue with success.

But Marvel's good year involved a lot more than what you see on the big screen, or what you saw on your television screen. The news going on behind the scenes made it clear that Marvel has changed its focus and may be in for big changes in the future. First, the 2024 movie release schedule shows that Marvel is willing to step back and consider their path, and the one film they had this year shows they are also perfectly willing to venture into new territory with an R-rated film. Other news spoke to the future: Robert Downey Jr. returning to Marvel as Dr. Doom, the Russo Brothers coming back to Marvel to do two Avengers films, and the upcoming Spider-Man and Fantastic Four projects. Read about what Marvel has done this year to inspire confidence among their fans, and what it all may lead to in the coming years, at Gizmodo.

Does Santa Claus exist in the video game universe? You betcha- even in Super MarioWorld! But this pixelated Santa in his skivvies turns out to be a grumpy old man who'd just as soon someone else take the title of Santa Claus for a while. That duty falls to Mario, who is only interested in what new powers this arrangement brings him. One is that he can transform koopa troopas into koopa reindeer! It's all in service of bringing gifts to good little boys and girls, and video game characters, too. The problem comes when Mario focuses only on the video game characters, meaning he doesn't quite live up to the standards we set for Santa Claus. What else wold you expect? Dorkly shows us in this video what chaos follows when Mario tries to play Santa. The plot may remind you of The Santa Clause, but luckily here, the old man doesn't have to die for someone else to take his place.

(Image credit: daQueen1011)

Good stories should be shared with strangers on the internet, because we all need to be reminded of what's good in the world. Imagine getting excited for your baby's first Christmas. Sure, he's too young to understand, but there will be pictures documenting it for the rest of his life. Then something happens and he's in the hospital over the Christmas holiday. The child's nurse understood what a first Christmas photo meant, and she went above and beyond to recruit a Santa Claus to be there when the shutter clicked, watching over the little boy and keeping him safe. I checked OP's comment history, and found the baby is okay a year later.

(Image credit: NotGayRyan)

You know how some people buy a gift for their significant other that's really something they want themselves? It works out when a couple is in tune and has shared interests. A husband and wife got the gifts above for each other. Perfect. You have to wonder what their dog got- probably everything! Read a long list of Christmas posts gleaned from reddit that will bring a smile to your face at Bored Panda.

The question for this episode of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) was, if there were a lake on the moon, what would it be like to swim in it? Well, there is no lake on the moon, but someday there might possibly be a swimming pool. It would have to be sheltered from the elements, or lack of, just like astronauts have to wear helmets. Safely inside a secured moon base, a pool would be a lot of fun. See, physics works the same on the moon, but the gravity is different from that on earth, leading to the kind of fun Randall Munroe is famous for.  

Alas, real astronauts know better than to get their hopes up about a pool on the moon. The cost of transporting that much water would be, dare I say it, astronomical. Right now, we can't even manage to get our people back home from the ISS.

Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup was the operations officer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in 1955. It was close to Christmas when Shoup received a call on the "red phone," a dedicated line that was to be used if the Soviets were to launch an attack on the US. Back then, Americans expected that to happen any minute. But it was a false alarm of a sort, actually a wrong number. When the news got around to the airmen, they made a joke out of it. But Shoup was a father as well as a straight-laced, by-the-book Air Force officer and knew how to handle children. That one call led to an entire series of events that would change the way we celebrate Christmas.

Shoup later became known as "the Santa Colonel." He died in 2009. Three of Shoup's four children got together to tell the folks at StoryCorps what happened that day in 1955, and what became of it as time went on.

It's not that unusual for artists to dip into the past when designing a gingerbread house, so artist and occasional baker Edward J. Cabral went back to the bloody days of the French Revolution. Behold his Christmas masterpiece: a gingerbread guillotine! Click to the right to see this bad boy from all angles. And it works, too! Well, the blade is probably not all that sharp, but it does move.

The entire gingerbread sculpture is edible, from the glittery rainbow candy platform to the peppermint "heads" in the receiving basket (minus the wrappers). You have to admire the ingenuity and skill that went into this gingerbread device, but at the same time, you have to wonder whether it's meant to be a warm Christmas greeting or a not-so-subtle warning. Miniature depictions of the guillotine were quite fashionable during the French Revolution, from haircuts to earrings, and it was always a warning to aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. Any way you see it, it's an incredible work of gingerbread- just don't lose your head over it. -via Everlasting Blort

The Parker Solar Probe took off from earth in 2018 and has been spending its time bouncing from Venus to the sun and back again, each time getting closer to the sun. On December 24th, it is expected to come within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. Nicki Rayl, NASA’s deputy director of heliophysics, calls that "literally touching the star" because the probe will be in the sun's upper atmosphere. And you didn't know the sun had an atmosphere.

The Parker probe is there just in time to catch the sun at the apex of its eleven-year activity cycle, when the magnetic poles move, sunspots appear, and geomagnetic storms flare out into the solar system. But that's what it was sent for, to collect valuable data about the sun from a vantage point never before possible. The probe will be close enough to experience temperatures of 1700 degrees. How will it survive? Read about the purpose of the Parker Solar Probe and the extreme design that allows it to handle temperatures of up to 2500 degrees, at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)