• There are some Christmas traditions in the UK that might confuse people from the US.
• Every Christmas, families gather to watch pantomimes or meet their school friends at the pub.
• They also eat Yorkshire puddings, mince pies, Christmas pudding, and Christmas cake.

Christmas in the United Kingdom differs slightly from celebrations in America and elsewhere around the world.

People who celebrate Christmas in the UK have slightly different traditions than those who live in the US. From what is traditionally served at a Christmas Day feast to festive activities and childhood traditions, families across the pond have their own unique and quirky ways of celebrating the holidays.

Here are 18 British Christmas traditions that might surprise you.

Pantomimes, or "pantos," are plays performed around Christmastime in the UK.

Pantos are humorous, slapstick entertainment for the whole family, often featuring men dressed in drag. They are sometimes based on a famous fairy tale or story, like "Cinderella," "Peter Pan," or "The Wizard of Oz." 

Pantomimes rely on specific tropes. For example, there's often a villain who will sneak up on the protagonist intermittently throughout the play. It's then the role of the audience to scream, "He's behind you!" to the main character while he or she struggles to figure out what's going on.

Yorkshire puddings are perfect with gravy, but people outside the UK may have never heard of them.

A traditional British roast dinner wouldn't be complete without Yorkshire puddings filled with Bisto or homemade gravy. Yorkshire puddings — not to be confused with sweet puddings — are made of eggs, flour, and milk or water.

After they're cooked in hot oil in the oven, they end up with a distinct hole in the middle. They closely resemble what Americans know as popovers.

While Yorkshire puddings are commonplace at Sunday dinners throughout the year, they're also eaten at Christmastime, though some argue they have no place on a Christmas plate.

Santa Claus is referred to as "Father Christmas."

While some do refer to old Saint Nick as Santa Claus in the UK, it is widely accepted that Father Christmas is his more traditionally British name.

"Santa Claus" is seen as an Americanism, and The Telegraph reported that even the British National Trust said that "Santa Claus should be known as 'Father Christmas' in stately homes and historic buildings because the name is more British."

British children hang Christmas stockings at the ends of their bed.

In America, Christmas stockings are hung by the fireplace with care. However, some British children hang their stockings at the ends of their beds for Father Christmas to fill up while they're sleeping. 

Christmas Eve is a time for school-friend reunions.

Thanksgiving weekend is seen as an opportunity in the United States for students to reunite with friends from high school or middle school. In the UK, it's a tradition for school friends to come together on Christmas Eve, often at the local bar or pub.

Christmas pudding is a traditional British dessert popular during the holiday season.

A Christmas pudding is a dense fruit cake often made weeks or even months in advance. This time allows the dried fruit to soak up alcohol that's regularly poured onto the cake in the weeks before it's consumed.

On Christmas, the cake is set alight and then topped with a sauce of brandy butter or rum butter, cream, lemon cream, ice cream, custard, or sweetened béchamel. It is also sometimes sprinkled with caster or powdered sugar.

For many years, Queen Elizabeth II even gifted each member of her staff a Christmas pudding from Tesco.

Another dessert of choice is Christmas cake, a rich fruit cake covered with marzipan and icing.

While fruit cake is certainly a polarizing dessert wherever you are, Brits seem to make it a little better with thick, sweet white icing. Oftentimes, Christmas cake also comes topped with festive holly decorations. 

Mince pies are pastries filled with dried fruits and spices that are eaten at Christmas.

The BBC reported that the first-known mince-pie recipe dates back to an 1830s-era English cookbook. By the mid-17th century, people reportedly began associating the small pies with Christmas.

At the time, they were traditionally filled with pork or other kinds of meat, sage, and other spices. Nowadays, the pies are filled with dried fruits and sugar powder.

British Christmas desserts are often enjoyed with brandy butter.

The perfect accompaniment to Christmas pudding and mince pies, brandy butter consists of butter and sugar beaten together before brandy is added. Rum butter is an alternative.

The result is still butter-like in consistency, and it's served cold alongside desserts. Americans might know it as "hard sauce."

Brits say "Happy Christmas" instead of "Merry Christmas."

You might remember a scene from the first "Harry Potter" movie in which Ron says, "Happy Christmas, Harry!" While this may sound strange to an American, saying "Happy Christmas" is commonplace in the UK, as opposed to "Merry Christmas." 

Christmas crackers are cardboard tubes wrapped in brightly colored paper and twisted at each end that two people pull for a fun surprise.

Christmas crackers are often pulled at the start of the meal, and the paper hats found inside are worn throughout the meal. Also inside each cracker is a "banger," which makes a loud pop when the cracker is pulled, a joke, and a small prize.

The jokes are usually cheesy and festive. For example: "Why did Santa's helper go to the doctor? Because he had low elf esteem!" 

However, be sure not to pack them if you're traveling to or from the UK on an airplane — they're not permitted to go through TSA in carry-on luggage.

"Top of the Pops" is a television special featuring performances of the year's most popular songs.

On Christmas, the BBC usually runs a holiday special of the since-retired show "Top of the Pops," which features performances from the year's most popular musicians.

The program ran weekly from 1964 until 2006, when it was canceled. People were so upset that the BBC decided to keep the Christmas special, which airs late in the morning on December 25.

Millions of people watch the King's annual televised Christmas Day speech every year.

Every year, families gather to watch the royal Christmas address, informally known as the Queen's or King's speech.

The Telegraph reported that the first Christmas address was 251 words long, but Queen Elizabeth II later came to average 656 words in each speech. It is often one of the most-watched television programs on Christmas Day in the UK.

Christmas commercials are as talked-about as Super Bowl commercials are in the United States.

While Super Bowl commercials are highly scrutinized in the US, Brits pay just as close attention to Christmas commercials.

Not only is the John Lewis ad, or "advert," a Christmas tradition, but almost every supermarket and clothing brand tries to get in on the buzz with a talked-about Christmas commercial.

Brits also anticipate which song will become the annual "Christmas No. 1" single.

The British "Christmas No. 1" has been a tradition for over half a century. Starting in 1952, the top song on the British singles chart has been a coveted spot every Christmas. Christmas No. 1 alums include The Beatles, Queen, Ed Sheeran, and more.

While some Christmas No. 1s have indeed been Christmas songs — "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid II in 1989, for example — they don't have to be.

School nativity plays are a popular tradition in UK primary schools.

While religious elementary schools in the United States may put on nativity plays, they are arguably much more popular and part of the culture in Britain.

In the popular British Christmas movie "Love Actually," the characters even attend a Christmas nativity play.

Brits take advantage of after-Christmas sales on Boxing Day.

Boxing Day is typically called British Black Friday, but there are some differences between the holidays. Boxing Day, which is a public holiday in the UK, falls the day after Christmas and has a rich cultural history in Great Britain.

Originating in the mid-1600s, the day was traditionally a day off for servants. On this day, servants would receive a "Christmas Box," or gift, from their master. The servants would then return home on Boxing Day to give "Christmas Boxes" to their families.

In the UK, it can be bad luck to keep your decorations up for more than 12 days after Christmas.

Another difference between US and UK Christmas customs comes after all of the festivities have ended. 

In the UK, it's tradition to take down your tree and decorations 12 days after Christmas — known as Twelfth Night — to avoid bad luck in the new year.

In the Anglican tradition, Twelfth Night, or Epiphany Eve, is the day before Epiphany, which celebrates the coming of the Magi to baby Jesus and marks the end of the 12 days of Christmas. 

• My wife and I got married earlier this year, and planning the wedding was stressful.
• Leading up to the holiday season, I felt pressure to make our first Christmas together special.
• After talking to her, I realized that just creating memories together was enough.

After a stressful year of planning our perfect September wedding, I wasn't prepared to face additional pressure now that the holidays are approaching. This wasn't an ordinary Christmas filled with relaxation, eggnog, and just a sprinkle of family drama; this was the Christmas that would mark our first milestone as a married couple and set the tone for years to come.

During our first year planning the holidays as a married couple, we learned that navigating the season as a twosome is more stressful than we thought. Whose side of the family will we see? What traditions do we want to create or partake in? There were so many choices to make, and people pulling us in different directions, even with good intentions. Since we'd only get one shot at our first Christmas as a married couple, I worried that if we didn't create the perfect holiday, we would ruin this special moment.

I felt pressure to make our first Christmas together special

We live in New York City, and when we decided that visiting my family in Texas was too far this year (weddings are expensive!), we offered to host my wife's family, who were only a few-hour drive away. Foregoing travel would mitigate some of the holiday stress. However, marrying into a big family like I did, I was still worried our celebration as a newlywed couple would get lost in the holiday chaos. This is without any fault to my amazing new family; it simply can't be helped.

Many of their family traditions are also different from my own. For example, they like to celebrate on Christmas Day, while I love the magic of a sparkling Christmas Eve. I can still bring traditions to their family, like decorating gingerbread houses, which I've done every year. Part of the original excitement toward the holiday was thinking about all the family traditions we would create together.

It took me a long time to voice my concerns to my wife, worried I was overthinking it or wanting too much attention to still be on us. After all, we got married four months ago. However, my fears ended up being unfounded because, like the loving wife she is, Taryn listened and asked me what would make our holiday feel special. The truth was, I didn't know. Though I had all these expectations that this Christmas was supposed to feel different, I had no idea how to make that happen.

I had to get real with myself and understand that, just like when planning a wedding, putting too much pressure on yourself is the fastest way to steal the joy out of the process. Letting go of the idea of making things perfect allows me to focus on what truly matters: creating memories with my wife.

My wife and I decided to focus on creating memories together

So how do you go about making a newlywed Christmas as memorable as possible? We started with Christmas cards. Since we had a small wedding, not everyone in our life got to celebrate with us. Sending out Christmas cards we made together to those who are important to us helped us share our love — and our wedding photos. Speaking of wedding photos, there's no better Christmas gift for our family than a photo album to remember the special day.

We got an ornament with our wedding date on it for the tree, started planning out a festive dinner for our family, and, most importantly, we decided to prioritize spending time together. Little things like these helped me reclaim the excitement of our first Christmas. I realized I didn't have to put pressure on myself — or my wife — to do big things each day to have a special holiday season. We could do simple things, like share quiet moments or cook new holiday dishes as a couple.

I'm most excited to wake up on Christmas and have a private gift exchange (and not just because I love presents). Seeing Taryn open her gift will bring me irreplaceable joy, which I'm excited to share with her as a married couple. We made our mission simple: pick out a new winter scarf we think the other will love.

Our Christmas as newlyweds won't be the only one we spend together, no matter how special it feels. Romanticizing our first holiday was great in theory until it became a pressure cooker for perfection — decidedly unromantic. But in the process of reframing my mindset, I found that there was still magic and romance for the taking.

"Rockin' around the Christmas tree
At the Christmas party hop" – Brenda Lee

It’s a yuletide tradition on Capitol Hill. 

An annual custom of rockin’ around a congressional Christmas tree, festooned with hundreds of legislative ornaments, Advent appropriations and mistletoe modifications.

A political Polar Express chugs through the halls of Congress nearly every December. It’s always the last piece of legislation huffing out of the congressional station.

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"All aboard!" hollers the conductor.

Get your Noel needs loaded into the baggage car of this train, or it’s going to be left behind.

So, lawmakers decorated their "Christmas tree" in the only way they know how.

That resulted a few days ago in the colossal 1,547-page interim spending bill to avoid a government shutdown.

The sheer scope of the bill was breathtaking.

You want a hippopotamus for Christmas? You surely would have gotten it with this plan.

It wasn’t long until House Republicans pulverized the legislation.

"It's another cram down," fumed Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, the morning after congressional leaders released the bill. "Here's what you get. ‘Do this or shut the government down.’ So, it's very disappointing."

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., didn’t gift wrap his criticism.

"It's a total dumpster fire. I think it's garbage," decreed Burlison. "It's shameful that people celebrate DOGE coming, and yet we're going to vote for another billion dollars to be added to the deficit. It's ironic."

Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., mocked his colleagues for talking out of both sides of their mouths when it came to spending.

"We keep on saying we want to take the deficit and the debt seriously. But we keep on voting to increase it. You can't have it both ways," he said. "This is irresponsible."

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, lamented this was business as usual.

"I mean, the swamp is going to swamp, right?" proffered Roy.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said the following in the fall:

"We have broken the Christmas omni. I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition. There won’t be a Christmas omnibus," Johnson declared Sept. 24. "We won’t do any ‘buses.’"

So, yours truly pressed Johnson about his promise after frustrated Republicans upbraided him during a House GOP Conference meeting.

"You said back in September there would be no more Christmas omnibuses. You were not doing anymore ‘buses,’" I asked. "But how is this not yet another Christmas tree at the holidays?"

"Well, it's not a Christmas tree. It's not an omnibus," responded Johnson.

Johnson is technically right. In appropriations parlance, it’s not a true omnibus — even though outside observers and many lawmakers themselves might colloquially refer to the massive bill as an "omnibus." An omnibus is where Congress gift wraps all 12 individual spending measures into one package. A "minibus" is where a handful of bills are bundled together.

Even so, I reminded Johnson of the opprobrium directed at this legislation.

"They called this cram down. They said it was garbage. Those are your own members calling it that," I noted.

"Well, they haven't even seen it yet," said Johnson, even though the bill materialized the night before. "I’ve got a couple of friends who will say that about any end-of-year funding measure. This is not an omnibus, OK? This is a small CR (continuing resolution) that we've had to add things to that were out of our control."

The legislation was stocked with a hefty price tag to cover the entire cost of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. A radioactive pay raise for lawmakers. Health care provisions. Language about concert ticket prices. Emergency aid for farmers. And $110 billion to help cover devastation from Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

"It was intended to be, and it was until recent days, a very simple, very clean CR stopgap funding measure to get us into next year when we have a unified government," said Johnson. "But a couple of intervening things have occurred. We had, as we say, acts of God. We had these massive hurricanes."

But then Elon Musk torched the bill. President-elect Trump demanded an immediate debt ceiling increase. Debt limit deals are one of the most complex and contentious issues in Congress. They require weeks if not months of painstaking negotiations.

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This wasn’t as simple as presenting Santa at the mall a wish list of items for Christmas morning.

The bill began bleeding support just hours before the House planned a vote.

But to paraphrase Charles Dickens’ opening line in "A Christmas Carol" about Jacob Marley, "That bill was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that."

Democrats were flabbergasted at outside last-minute ultimatums. Especially since Johnson attended the Army-Navy football game last week with Trump. How could they not have discussed the contours of this bill?

"It was blown up by Elon Musk, who apparently has become the fourth branch of government," Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., scoffed about the bill. "So, who is our leader, (House Minority Leader) Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., supposed to negotiate with? Is it Mike Johnson? Is he the speaker of the House? Or is it Donald Trump? Or is it Elon Musk. Or is it somebody else?"

Johnson and company then prepped a svelte 116-page bill to fund the government. But bipartisan lawmakers roasted that measure faster than chestnuts by an open fire.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., mocked Republicans for insisting that they adhere to their internal "three-day rule." That allows lawmakers to ponder bills for three days before a vote. Yet Republicans were now racing the new bill to the floor faster than shoppers rushing home with their treasures.

"Have you printed it? How many pages is it? What happened to the 72-hour rule?" mocked Moskowitz.

The bill plummeted to an embarrassing defeat on the House floor. It only scored 174 yeas, punctuated by an eye-popping 38 Republican nays.

"The Democrats just voted to shut down the government," Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, the vice president-elect, claimed. "They've asked for a shutdown, and I think that's exactly what they're going to get."

By Friday, there was a third bill. And despite grousing, lawmakers finally passed the legislation. There was no need to go to "Plan Z," popularized in "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie." The House approved the bill in the early evening. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., hit the Senate floor late Friday night.

"Democrats and Republicans have just reached an agreement that will allow us to pass the CR tonight before the midnight deadline," said Schumer.

Critics of the third bill might characterize the entire process as a "railroad." But it was an actual railroad that prevented the Senate from passing the bill on time. An unnamed Republican senator placed a hold on nominees to Amtrak's board. But once senators resolved that problem, the Senate finally aligned with the House to prevent the shutdown around 12:45 a.m. ET Saturday, 45 minutes after the midnight deadline.

The slenderized bill included disaster aid and emergency assistance for farmers. But when it came to appropriations, the legislation simply renewed all current funding at present levels. It was definitely not a "Christmas tree." It just kept the government running through March 14. So no holiday crisis.

Merry Christmas.

But beware the Ides of March.