A Christmas quiz

The First Christmas Card (from Wikipedia)

Multifunctional quiz:

There are five sets of questions, each based on a different aspect of Christmas. Use the dropdown selector on the left to select a set.

• Christmas time
• Christmas food and drink
• Santa Claus
• The Christmas story
• Decorations

This quiz can be taken interactively online, or teachers can print it out for use in the classroom (see notes for teachers below).

There are four ways to do the quiz. If you're feeling confident, try the text entry version first. If that's too difficult, try the multiple choice or anagrams.

• Text entry - the most difficult - enter the word from memory
• Multiple choice - choose from up to four words
• Anagrams - a bit harder - each word is shown as an anagram
• Show all words - all the words are shown in a box at the top

Christmas collocations quiz - vocab game

This game has eight quizzes related to Christmas.

• General Christmas
• Christmas decorations
• Chritmas verbs
• Food and drink
• Christmas carols
• The Twelve Days of Christmas
• Winter activities
• Wintry idioms

More Christmas cracker jokes - Matching quizzes

Image from Wikipedia

Christmas cracker jokes are written almost to a formula, and make great use of corny puns. We like to groan at how awful they are, but they are a quintessential part of a British Christmas. Some are on Christmas themes, many are not. I found most of the jokes here in several places on the Internet, so I don't think I'm treading on anybody's copyright toes.

It's behind you: the very British tradition of pantomime

Do a panto quiz

At Christmas time, theatres all over Britain put on pantomime, a uniquely British form of theatrical entertaiment, aimed at children and adults alike, and commonly referred to as panto. After a bit of a bad patch, panto is again as popular as ever, if not even more so.

Panto is based on traditional fairy stories, such as Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Aladdin, Puss in Boots and Dick Whittington, and generally uses a standard set of conventions.

Learn about these conventions by doing a gapfill quiz; read a little about the revival of panto; find links to the best panto on YouTube, so you can get a bit of the flavour of it for yourself.

Lots of sex please, we're British. But perhaps we should just disguise it a little.

Annotated discussion and quiz related to various types of (mostly slightly naughty) humour.

I would like to do a post in the next couple of days about pantomime, commonly called panto, a quintessentially British theatrical tradition which takes place at Christmas time. Panto is often described as including risqué double entendre and innuendo, which are specific types of humour. Before we look at pantomime itself, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the different types of humour we might expect to meet in traditional pantomime.

During Queen Victoria’s reign, sex became somewhat of a taboo subject among ‘polite’ society. This attitude lasted well into the twentieth century, summed up in the title of the 1971 London musical, ‘No sex please, we’re British’. This prudishness didn’t however, stop ‘impolite society’ having a good laugh at sex, mainly in Music Hall, a type of popular variety theatre which mixed comedy, song and dance, and acts such as magicians and acrobats.

Perhaps for this reason, there has been a long tradition in British comedy of alluding to sex in indirect ways, such as double entendre and innuendo. So now let’s look at some of the terms involved:

Christmas cracker joke matching quiz

What lies in a pram and wobbles?

A jelly-baby ?

Why did the tomato blush?

Because it saw the salad dressing ?

How do you hire a horse?

Stand it on four bricks ?

Christmas cracker jokes are notoriously bad, relying heavily on awful puns (word play). Mouse over the ? above for explanations.

Two Christmas cracker quizzes

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Two gapfill quizzes on the subject of Christmas crackers