Stocking Stuffers Multiple Choice Quiz | Thematic Fun

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. In many places, it is traditional to place a mandarin orange in the toe of the stocking. These days, mandarins are available year round, sold in bulk or in plastic or net bags. But when I was a child in the 50s and 60s, they could only be found in Canada in the Christmas season. They came in wooden boxes, each orange carefully wrapped - in what?

Answer: green paper

Boxes of paper-wrapped oranges still show up in Canadian supermarkets in November, but the lovely little wooden crates are a thing of the past - the boxes are cardboard now.

The sweet, easy-to-peel mandarin is one of the basic species of citrus - most other oranges are descended in some way from them.

2. Toys are of course essential in a Christmas stocking, and a kit of these Danish interlocking plastic bricks shows up in millions of households every year. What are they?

Answer: Lego

The basic Lego plastic brick appeared in 1949, based partly on an earlier British toy. It was developed into the Lego system of blocks that we all know now, in the late 50s. If you have a set of blocks from 1958, they'll still interlock with a set bought yesterday.

I don't have any 1950s Legos around, but I do still have a set of wooden interlocking blocks from the 40s that work on the same principles.

3. What would a Christmas stocking be without chocolate? The favourite in our house is a milk chocolate/white chocolate hollow egg, with a toy inside. These treats from an Italian chocolate company can be difficult to find in the US. What are they called?

Answer: Kinder Surprise

There's something about that thin layer of white chocolate hidden under the milk chocolate coating, that is as nice a surprise as any of the toys. The toy, which often involves a little bit of assembly, comes inside a smaller plastic egg-shaped container, which is itself a high quality cat toy, if you have wooden floors!

The Ferraro company developed the Kinder Sorpresa (surprise) in the 1970s in Italy. The toys can be quite collectible.

4. Since many families are looking for something to do together between opening the presents in the morning, and eating Christmas dinner later on, movie passes or tickets are a popular stocking stuffer. And of course, a Christmas movie is a perfect choice. In 1947's "Miracle on 34th Street", who played the little girl, and later went on to a career as an adult actress?

Answer: Natalie Wood

Wood played the little girl who didn't believe in Santa Claus in this holiday favourite. She was a big star in the late fifties and sixties, in such films as "West Side Story", "Splendor in the Grass", and "Gypsy", but was mostly doing TV movies by the time of her death by drowning, in 1981.

5. Books are of course a favourite stocking stuffer, but this traditional book that shows up in many stockings is a little different - it's filled with candy! Which classic hard candy fills the Sweet Storybook?

Answer: Life Savers

Back when I was a kid, the Life Savers Sweet Storybook was a thing of wonder, filled with ten full sized rolls of candy, including such "grown up" flavours as Butter Rum and Wint-O-green. Over the years it has become smaller, but, hey, candy's candy.

Life Savers were invented in 1912, and the classic flavours are essentially unchanged since their beginnings in the early twentieth century.

6. Nuts are a traditional stocking stuffer - at least in households without allergies! A favourite Christmastime activity for me, as a child, was to try to get the lobed and wrinkly nutmeat out of the shell of this member of the Juglans family without breaking it. What large round nut set me such a difficult task?

Answer: Walnut

Researching this question, I see that the walnut is not a true botanical nut, but a seed - I'll freely admit to not quite understanding the difference.

Nuts in the shell have almost disappeared from most modern households, except for at Christmas time. Some see a religious significance to the three-fold nature of nuts - shell, skin and meat. And of course fancy nutcrackers - and the Tchaikovsky ballet based on them - appear every December.

I grew up in a household transitioning from its German traditions to a more North American style, so I didn't have a Christmas stocking as a very young child. Instead, Christkind put nuts and oranges in my shoes.

7. When my children were young, our tradition was for them to open their Christmas stockings in their room, and spend some time eating oranges (and candy!) and playing with their toys before coming down to wake us. It was therefore important that the toys were ones that could be played with quietly, and paper dolls certainly fit that bill. Around when did the first manufactured and commercially available paper dolls appear?

Answer: early 1800s

Some form of paper figures with paper clothing have probably existed about as long as paper has, but the first manufactured doll appears to have been Little Fanny, in England, around 1810. Dolls based on celebrities have always been popular - actresses, dancers, royalty...

I had a paper doll of Samantha Stevens, from the TV show "Bewitched", as a child. I've had visions of the fortune it would be worth now, if I'd kept it, but I see from eBay that most vintage paper dolls are going for dozens of dollars, rather than thousands....

8. What better to stuff in a Christmas stocking than a sock? In the depths of winter, everyone can use a few more cozy foot coverings. What is the Scottish-sounding name for a traditional diamond-patterned sock?

Answer: Argyle

The Argyle pattern, used for socks and other kinds of knitwear, appears to be based on traditional Scottish tartan patterns, probably from some time in the 17th or 18th centuries. Nowadays it can be used with any colours, including some decidedly non-traditional ones.

In the 1920s, due possibly to the Scottish connection, the pattern became associated with golf - even today, a cartoonist wishing to portray a golfer might show him wearing argyle socks.

9. Puzzles - from wire puzzles to Rubik's Cubes to jigsaws - are fun stocking stuffers. What was the original name of Rubik's Cube?

Answer: Magic Cube

Erno Rubik came up with the cube in the late 70s, in Hungary. Once it made it to a German toy fair and was picked up by Ideal Toys, it didn't take long to sweep the world. Ideal wanted a more identifiable name, and Rubik's name soon became known everywhere. At speedcubing competitions, winning times to solve the cube have gotten as low as under five seconds.

I must, sadly, confess that I've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube.

10. Who wouldn't like to see money in their stocking? The connection between coins and Christmas stockings goes back, in story at least, to Saint Nicholas. Actual coin of the realm shows up in some stockings, but there is also a common substitute - gold or silver foil filled with which of these?

Answer: Chocolate

One version of the Saint Nicholas story has him putting bags of coins into stockings laid out to dry. Another has him throwing money down chimneys.

The tradition of giving children chocolate money is not only part of Christmas celebrations - Hanukkah gelt, coins being either real or candy, is common in Jewish households for Hanukkah.

Source: Author agony

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Stocking Stuffers Trivia Quiz

"The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there..." Let's take a look at some stocking stuffers.

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