Christmas comes at the beginning of winter, so our festivities often incorporate fireplaces, comfy sweaters, hot cocoa, and sleigh rides with jingle bells. No to mention fatty winter food, evergreen trees, snowflakes, and plenty of other winter iconography.

But Christmas isn't cold for everyone. Head south of the equator, where Santa makes his rounds a few scant days after the summer solstice, and the imagery of the festive season starts to gets a little confused. This is particularly evident in Australia, where British and American cultural influences collide with the inescapable realities of the weather, resulting in a lot of sweaty people in Santa hats lolling about on Bondi Beach.

Australians still love Father Christmas in his fur-trimmed coat (which he can take off), but he doesn’t have reindeer, which only live in the arctic. See some wonderful images of Christmas in Australia from the past and present at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: State Library of Queensland)

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Toho Studios has released the first teaser trailer for Godzilla: Resurgence. Too bad it doesn’t show him! No doubt there will be more coming in the next few months.

The upcoming Godzilla: Resurgence will be the first Godzilla film by Toho since 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars. That movie wasn’t final enough. What started as a science fiction allegory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has become an unstoppable cinematic force.

The 29th Godzilla film will be in theaters in July of 2016. -via Den of Geek

Have you ever wondered why we ended up with the livestock animals we have? Someone, somewere, selected which creatures we were going to raise for our own purposes.

1. CHICKENS

Nearly 10,000 years ago, roosters and hens were creatures to be feared. Wild junglefowl prowled the bamboo forests of Southeast Asia, and the birds were anything but chicken. They fought pythons, attacked wildcats and nested in canopies high above the ground. Then, around 5000 BCE, bored humans started nabbing the birds and brought them to villages for entertainment. The aves weren’t for eating, but instead for cockfighting and fortune-telling. (Cambodia’s Khmer people still use chickens as oracles today.) Over time, selective breeding fattened the birds and made them complacent, while a gene mutation caused them to start laying eggs all year long.

2. COWS

Every single one of the 1.5 billion cows on the planet descended from a small herd domesticated in Iran 10,500 years ago. Those 80 Iranian cows were no ordinary livestock: They were aurochs, giant now-extinct cattle that ruled the continent for 2 million years. At nearly 7 feet tall, aurochs dwarfed today’s dairy cows. And they were incredibly aggressive. Every attempt to tame them failed until nomadic societies in the Levant settled down and somehow managed to get the beasts to help till the land. The last aurochs went extinct in the 1620s, but scientists from the Third Reich tried unsuccessfully to bring them back in the 1930s. (This was before people had learned the lessons of Jurassic Park 1–3).

3. HORSES

First off, this video is SFW, unless your workplace can’t handle the word “condom,” then you need to put your headphones on. The Slow Mo Guys, Gavin and Daniel, fill up a condom with a water hose. They hold a lot more water than you’d think. Then they drop it on Daniel’s head.

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I’d never seen this stunt before. The condom inverts itself under the pressure and envelops the head. It’s really weird to see in real time, but in slow motion it all makes sense. Well, no, it really doesn’t make sense that people would do this, but how it happens becomes clear. -via Viral Viral Videos  

As they did in 2013, Beutler Ink commissioned an illustration that sums up the memorable events of the past year. This year, the artist is Luke McGarry. There are 143 news items, pop culture icons, notable people, memes, and themes in this one picture. Can you identify them all?

Click twice at the post about it to greatly enlarge the picture. If you get stumped, scroll down at the same link for a map and a list. Oh, you can also buy a print.  -via reddit

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The Chinese trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens has a bit of new footage, and something the American trailers are sorely lacking in: dialogue. -via Digg

Snow globes are one of those totally useless things that still fascinate us, from the kitschy plastic souvenirs tourists pick up to baby jar crafts our kids made to the expensive collector’s globes with music boxes inside. How did anyone come up with this odd idea in the first place? One story tells us it was sort of an accident, born out of the quest to make Edison’s light bulbs brighter.

Back in 1900, Erwin Perzy I was working in Vienna as a fine instruments mechanic when a surgeon came to him with a problem. Although the surgeon had electric light bulbs installed in his operating theater, the newly invented product didn't cast great light. He wanted to know if Perzy could improve on the dim bulbs and make them brighter. So he got to work. As Perzy hunted for inspiration, he noticed that shoemakers had stumbled into an interesting trick: By filling glass globes with water and placing them in front of candles, they created tiny spotlights in their shops.

Spoiler: it didn’t work, but what he came up with was pretty, and Perzy eventually patented his snow globe. The kicker is that he wasn’t the first to build one! Many technical and cultural innovations followed over the next hundred years, which you can read about at mental_floss.

(Image credit: Noël Zia Lee)

This remix of the Republican debate on Fox News is genius. What they say makes no sense. I mean, it’s edited to the point that what they say here has little to no connection with what the candidates said at the debate. The genius is in the editing that made a political show into a real rap song set to the tune of “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem.

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Mike Beasley edited this with care, crafting the sound bites into a passable musical cadence that even rhymes, under the loose definition of rhyme used in songs. Whatever your politics, you have to admire the finished product. -via Viral Viral Videos  

The quiz merely asks you to identify which US state a TV show is set. I went into it thinking it would be easy, because the thumbnail image had The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and The Walking Dead. But this is Buzzfeed, and I was thwarted by the fact that most of the shows are fairly recent. Many I have never seen, and there were a couple I hadn’t even heard of. But lucky (or intuitive) guesses got me through several levels. Of course, I did better the second time around, when I got 19 right. My results still said I need to watch more TV. Try it yourself and let us know how you did.

Everywhere you look on the internet, you see something about Star Wars. That’s to be expected, with the first movie in ten years coming out next week. But how much is too much? If you are an avid fan, you might be concerned that the non-stop promotion will blunt your enjoyment of The Force Awakens. That’s not all Disney’s fault, as the fandom is providing a huge number of the articles and videos you see. You also might be afraid of spoilers, no matter how small, because part of the joy of a new episode is being surprised. And if you’re not a Star Wars fan, you might just be sick of it all. There is help available.

The Daily Dot spells out four different ways you can block Star Wars from your computer, from automatic censorship to specific keyword filters. Then there are three ways to calm your mind by learning to enjoy the hype. And lastly, there’s advice for people who can’t get enough Star Wars, with five tips for immersing yourself even further in the franchise during the final week before The Force Awakens. Read it all right here.

(Image credit: Max Fleishman)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

We are all used to watching our favorite TV series and catching their "Christmas episode."
Not every series did one, but many did, and many still carry on the tradition. The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Simpsons, even Gilligan's Island, all had their classic (or semi-classic) Christmas shows.

I guess it is hard to choose the single strangest Christmas episode. But how does a TV show do a Christmas special if it's set in the days before Christ?

In 1995, a new TV series with a very strong female hero took to the airwaves. It was a spin-off from the series Hercules: the Legendary Journeys. The series was to run for six seasons, through 2001.

Xena: Warrior Princess starred a gorgeous dark-haired New Zealand actress named Lucy Lawless. Xena's friend and co-heroine in the show was Gabrielle, an Amazon queen, played by Renee O’Connor. The "Xena" character was originally evil, but she turned good and valiantly did combat with evil forces. Xena and Gabrielle's adventures fighting the forces of evil proved an inspiration to women and young girls around the world.

For men and young boys, Xena and Gabrielle were inspirational too. As a man, believe me, these two inspired me greatly. They inspired me to take many a cold shower! Gabrielle only wore seven different outfits during the entire run of the series, including those two warrior bikini outfits. And Xena had that sexy, scowling face and those collagen-filled lips and...  Ahem... okay, let's get my mind back down to business.

The “Before Christ" dilemma was one that Xena: Warrior Princess had to face at holiday time in 1996. This was, of course, a problem most TV series did not have to deal with.

YouTube released its annual look back at the past year in video form. It’s not a compilation of clips; rather, it’s an elaborate production number that uses the themes and memes of 2015’s biggest videos.

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Many of the original filmmakers and video subjects were recruited to appear in this-0 you’ll see them in the credits. And since YouTube celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2015, there are some callbacks to much older classics.  

Want to be Santa Claus? It takes more than a beard. Noerr Programs runs a Santa University every summer at its headquarters in Arvada, Colorado.

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These guys are for real. They truly embody the spirit of Christmas. -via Digg

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What song is the catchiest of all? What causes us to get “chills” when we hear certain kinds of music? If intelligence is correlated with rhythm, does that means drummers are smarter than the average person? Find out as John Green gives us the latest research results in this latest episode of the mental_floss List Show. There are a surprisingly number of benefits of listening to pleasant music (although “pleasant” is quite subjective). All the more reason to crank it up!

We’ve seen plenty of abandoned places around the world, many of them beautiful but sad in their decay. The virtual world also has abandoned places. Even when the worlds of video games aren’t connected to each other, they share many features of the real world, including cool and creepy places for urban explorers to check out, like Markarth’s abandoned house in Skyrim. THere’s something very dark going on in there.

At a glance, the house is completely abandoned…. save for the food on of the tables and, moments later, the locked doors and the voice that commands you to kill your priest companion. You have no choice, and will find yourself following the voice, goading you deeper and deeper into the house which, as the priest suspected, was being used for the worship of Molag Bal.

Those with even a passing familiarity with the Elder Scrolls series will recognize the name of the Daedric Prince with titles like the Harvester of Souls, the Prince of Rage, and the God of Schemes. Ruler of Coldharbor, he’s the creator of the first vampire and continues to collect the souls of his victims, and spread misery, war and rage throughout the mortal realm. Head into the house in Markarth and follow the tunnels to the crypt beneath it, and you’ll be a part of his plans.

That’s just one of the ten abandoned places in video games that you can read about at Urban Ghosts. Article contains some game spoilers.

(Image credit: UESP)