In this pictoral display, we follow the adventures of a typical house cat at Christmas, reenacted by many cats from Creative Commons licensed Flickr photos you probably haven't seen before.

What is this? Out of the blue, the humans bring a tree in the house!

(Image credit: Flickr user Jennifer Lamb)

This tree is the perfect place to hide!

(Image credit: Flickr user Algiers Photography)

And they got out all these cat toys to hang on it!

(Image credit: Flickr user LOST X SPACE)

Hey, keep your hands off. That’s MY ornament!

(Image credit: Flickr user Jennifer Lamb)

In Poynter’s annual roundup of the funniest, weirdest, and most egregious errors and corrections, the top prize went to an incident in which a satirical website was quoted as real. That happens more often than you’d think. That’s just one type of error, and 2014 was full of them. One of the runners-up was from The Washington Post:

An earlier version of this story erroneously said that Joaquín Guzmán was found in bed with his secretary. He was found with his wife. This version has been corrected.

Oops. The tragedy is that corrections are tiny sentences in a box on an inner page, while the original article was probably front and center. Here's another, less tragic, correction:

This post originally quoted photographer Tom Sanders as saying it takes him five years to get on the dance floor. It takes him five beers.

There are also test pages that were published, stories that turned out to be completely untrue, and plenty of small but embarrassing errors that snuck into newspapers, news sites, and blogs. Oh yeah, and some serious journalism goofs, too. Read them all at Poynter. -via Metafilter

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British television personality Adam Buxton had a conversation with his 5-year-old daughter about Leia Organa’s slave costume in the movie Return of the Jedi. It’s both refreshing and enlightening to hear the fashion opinion of a child who has no understanding of sexism, or even sexiness, much less objectification and bondage. But this little girl is not quite a blank slate. She’s very well spoken and open to learning new things. It was animated is by The Brothers McLeod for the TV special Adam Buxton's Shed Of Christmas. -via reddit

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Parenting can be a lot of fun when you’re not stressed out about daycare and bills and what Timmy just ate. Here, a husky mom discovers that when herpuppies learn to get around, she suddenly has a whole slew of playmates! “Look, kids, I can jump on the couch and you can’t!” She’ll be surprised in a few more days when they do it themselves. -via reddit

We often think that the image of Santa Claus as we know him came from Thomas Nast’s illustrations or the description in Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Some people will tell you that Santa achieved his modern form thanks to the Coca Cola ads of the 1930s. Those theories are all partially right, but the vision we have of Santa started long before that. A book illustration had Father Christmas wearing a coat and hat trimmed with white fur as far back as 1686! Of course, he’s gone through many incarnations on the way to his modern look. Public Domain Review has a slew of pictures of Kris Kringle through his history, along with explanations of the evolution of the jolly old elf’s look. The magazine cover above is from 1902. -via Digg

Remember when you were growing up, on Christmas Eve you could hear radio reports of how U.S. military radar picked up a mysterious object flying away from the North Pole? Those reports, called NORAD Tracks Santa, began in 1955, when a Sears store in Colorado Springs invited kids to call Santa Claus, and a typo in the phone number led children to a high-security line at the Continental Air Defense Command. Colonel Harry Shoup was the man who answered the hotline. StoryCorps recently talked to Shoup’s three children about how that first phone call.

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

"And Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," her sister says. "So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy and, 'May I talk to your mother?' And the mother got on and said, 'You haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.' Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus."

The phone calls were only the beginning. Read (or listen) to the story of what Shoup did on Christmas Eve that same year that started the tradition and led him to be called “Santa Colonel” for the rest of his life, at NPR. -Thanks, Daniel Kim!

(Images credit: NORAD)

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This is a silly yet strangely charming Christmas ad for cookies, which are called biscuits in the UK. It features cute and somewhat uncanny baby animals singing a song I like but can’t place my finger on. There’s a surprise baby animal you would never expect to see… you’ll have to watch for that one yourself. -via Metafilter

Look at the detail on this model USS Enterprise made of gingerbread! It’s mounted on a tractor beam made of candy canes hovering over a rocky terrain of cookies and mints. The starship was made by, and on display at, Blackmarket Bakery in California. See it from all angles in an imgur gallery of enlargeable pictures. Set phasers to yum! -via Boing Boing

If this meets up with the gingerbread Borg cube, things could get interesting.

If you want to try something new for Christmas dinner, you might try something very old. However, you’ll need to have a particularly carnivorous guest list.

The first known suggested menu for Christmas dinner was from 1660 book The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May. May was a chef to the nobility, so let’s assume this menu is supposed to feed a lot of people. It’s a list of 39 dishes, in which 35 or so of them are meat. Then there’s salad, quince pie, and custard. There's also something called “Made dish in puff paste,” whatever that is (probably meat). Otherwise it’s a flock of geese, chickens, swans, ducks, turkeys, pheasants, and other birds, plus venison, mutton, rabbit, pork, beef, and fish -and a few other animals. Read the list, with some information about some of the more obscure recipes, at mental_floss. In case you were wondering, there are partridges on the menu, and pears, although not in the same dish.

We are always looking for weird news stories to pass along to you. It’s an easy shortcut to check British news sites for that sort of thing -yet you have to sift through the many local stories that leave you with a feeling of “That’s it?” because no matter how small a British paper or it’s accompanying website is, they go with stories that would be passed over as "not news" in the U.S. The website UsVsTh3m looked at extremely mundane stories that make the papers, with a few truly bizarre stories thrown in to keep us looking -just like it happens when I surf the net. I still have to wonder if these headlines are really posted on sidewalk signs, or if there’s a British news sign generator somewhere. -via b3ta

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We hear plenty about the remaining radioactivity near the failed Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, but what about other places? Dereck Muller of Veritasium takes us on a tour of other historically radioactive sites such as Fukushima, Hiroshima, Marie Curie’s office, the Trinity test site, a uranium mine, and the basement of Pripyat’s hospital. The amount of radiation is presented in bananas as a visualization device to keep track of which place is more dangerous. -via Viral Viral Videos

A “literal LOL” happens when a bake shop clerk writes down instructions for a custom cake, and then the decorator takes them a bit too literally -as in writing the instructions on the cake in icing. Jenn Yates at Cake Wrecks went through her archives and has posted a two-part list of the best instances that have appeared at Cake Wrecks. See them in part one and part two.

And if you’re a 12-year-old boy at heart, you might also want to check out Cake Wrecks' Top 12 Unintentionally Erotic Cakes.

New 6ft long #calvinandhobbes #melting snowmen for my porch. Been real lazy lately with #painting stuff, so this week Im gonna try to step up my game and be real productive starting with the last snowmen piece Im in the process of finishing right now which is literally going to be the biggest thing Ive ever made and has the potential to seriously injure or kill someone if it fell on them. So I guess Im staying stay tuned cause someone may die. #billwaterson #sinners #repent #fuckwinter #imcold

A photo posted by Sean Daigle (@unfortunateface) on Dec 12, 2014 at 4:17pm PST

"Why does this #snowman have an ice cream scoop in his back?" "Its a sordid story". #calvinandhobbes #snowmen #snowgoons #billwaterson #snowcone

A photo posted by Sean Daigle (@unfortunateface) on Nov 11, 2014 at 4:00pm PST

Here’s a way to have some really cool snowmen even if you don’t have snow! Etsy artist Sean Daigle spent Thanksgiving alone, but kept busy by building a wooden cutout lawn ornament that recreates one of the famous snowman scenes from calvin & Hobbes. Then he made another, and another, until there were seven pieces in all. See more pictures at Daigle’s Instagram page.

Some more #lifesize #calvinandhobbes #snowmen paintings for my front yard. Now its just a waiting game for my neighbors to start complaining. #travisheights #billwaterson #austin #christmasdecorations

A photo posted by Sean Daigle (@unfortunateface) on Nov 11, 2014 at 2:36pm PST

Incidentally, if you're driving around Austin, Texas, it won't be too hard to figure out which house is Daigle's. -via The Daily Dot

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Well, maybe the greatest human Jenga move ever. It’s hard to beat the video of a cat playing Jenga. Still, this young lady deserved 15 minutes of fame for this gutsy move that paid off. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

Killhouse was asked to design a Christmas card for his office. They nixed his first idea, despite the fact that it goes above and beyond to be all-inclusive and offend no one. He said,

This is the second, cleaned up, version so anyone can use it if they want to, so my hard effort doesn't go to waste.

They had me draw a Santa hat beside some cookies and a glass of milk instead. It was pretty boring.

I’m sure that your clients will enjoy a card with a Santa hat and cookies… while the internet enjoys the Bumble and his nonsensical holiday greeting.