Society and history

Christmas elf

Christmas elf: Santa's small toy-making helper, a 19th-century American figure built from the Scandinavian nisse/tomte house-spirit, Moore's 1823 "jolly old elf" poem, and Thomas Nast's 1866 workshop drawings.

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve, also known as Nochebuena, is the evening and, in many traditions, the whole day before Christmas, observed on 24 December with fasting, Midnight Mass, and festive meals.

Christmas Eve truce of 1944

Christmas Eve truce of 1944, or "Truce in the Forest": an informal one-night ceasefire in which American and German soldiers shared dinner in the Vincken cottage in the Hürtgen Forest during the Battle of the Bulge, known only from Fritz Vincken's 1973 Reader's Digest account.

Christmas pickle

Christmas pickle (Weihnachtsgurke): an American custom of hiding a green glass pickle ornament in the Christmas tree, first finder wins a gift or luck. Marketed as an old German tradition, it is essentially unknown in Germany and likely a late-1800s Woolworth-era ornament sales story.

Christmas traditions

Christmas traditions are the religious observances and household customs surrounding the Nativity of Jesus, kept on December 25 by Western churches and January 7 by Eastern churches.

Christmas truce

The Christmas truce was a series of unofficial ceasefires around Christmas 1914 on the Western Front, where about 100,000 British, German, French, and Belgian soldiers sang carols, exchanged gifts, buried the dead, and played informal football.

Oct 22, 2026

Christmas Uprising

The Christmas Uprising (Božićni ustanak, also Božićna pobuna) was a January 1919 armed rebellion by supporters of deposed King Nikola against Montenegro's union with Serbia.

Christoffel Wiese

Christoffel Wiese, known publicly as Christo Wiese, is a South African retail billionaire who built Pepkor, chaired Shoprite for 29 years, and lost billions in the 2017 Steinhoff scandal.

Christogram

A Christogram (ΙϹΧϹ) is a letter or combination of letters used as a symbol of Jesus Christ, in forms such as the Chi-Rho, staurogram, IC XC, and IHS.

Christology

Christology is the branch of Christian theology that asks who Jesus Christ is, both divine and human, and what his saving work is; its classical answers were fixed at councils between 325 and 787.

Christoph Anton Migazzi

Christoph Anton Migazzi (1714–1803) was a Trento-born diplomat and churchman who served as Prince-Archbishop of Vienna from 1757 until his death and as a cardinal from 1761.

Christoph Blocher

Christoph Blocher is a Swiss industrialist, lawyer, and politician who bought EMS-Chemie in 1983, built it into a global polymers maker, and served on the Federal Council from 2004 to 2007.

Christoph de Vries

Christoph de Vries (born 1974) is a German CDU politician serving as Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior since 2025, and a Bundestag member since 2017.

Christoph Ernst Luthardt

Christoph Ernst Luthardt (1823–1902) was a German Lutheran theologian, professor of systematic theology at Leipzig from 1856 and the leading spokesman of confessional Lutheranism in Germany.

Christoph Heinrich Otte

Christoph Heinrich Otte (1808–1890) was a German Lutheran pastor and Christian archaeologist who served Fröhden near Jüterbog for 44 years, writing Glockenkunde (1858) and a handbook of medieval church art.

Christoph Huber

Christoph Huber, born in 1944, is an Austrian physician-scientist who co-founded BioNTech with Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, chaired hematology and oncology at Mainz, and served on BioNTech's supervisory board until 2023.

Christoph Janz

Christoph Janz is a German venture capitalist who cofounded the early-stage firm Point Nine with Pawel Chudzinski in 2011, known for early SaaS investments in Zendesk, Loom, and Clio.

Christoph Leitl

Christoph Leitl, born 1949 in Linz, is an Austrian entrepreneur and ÖVP politician who served as president of Austria's federal economic chamber, the Wirtschaftskammer Österreich, from 2000 to 2018.

Christoph Matthaeus Pfaff

Christoph Matthaeus Pfaff (1686–1760) was a Lutheran theologian and chancellor of the universities of Tübingen and Gießen, known for advocating union between Lutheran and Reformed churches.

Sep 21, 2026

Christoph P. E. Zollikofer

Christoph P. E. Zollikofer is a Swiss anthropologist at the University of Zurich known for computer-assisted reconstruction of fossil hominin skulls, including Sahelanthropus and Dmanisi fossils.

Christoph Pezel

Christoph Pezel (1539–1604) was a German Protestant theologian and Melanchthon's pupil who led the Crypto-Calvinist controversy in Saxony, was expelled in 1576, and founded the Reformed church of Bremen.

Christoph Schappeler

Christoph Schappeler (c. 1472–1551) was a Reformed preacher from St. Gallen who held the preaching post at St. Martin in Memmingen from 1513 and led the city into the Reformation.

Christoph Schönborn

Christoph Schönborn is an Austrian Dominican cardinal who served as Archbishop of Vienna from 1995 until retiring in 2025 and was editorial secretary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Christoph Schuh

Christoph Schuh, born 1964, is a German venture capital investor and Investment Partner at Lakestar since 2017, focusing on growth-stage travel, mobility, and logistics investments.

Christoph von Utenheim

Christoph von Utenheim (c. 1450–1527) was the last resident Bishop of Basel, elected in 1502, who issued reform statutes in 1503 and patronized Erasmus and the Basel humanists.

Christoph Wiederkehr

Christoph Wiederkehr is an Austrian politician of NEOS serving as Federal Minister for Education, after being Vienna's City Councilor for Education and building up NEOS in Vienna.

Christophe Antoine Gerle

Christophe Antoine Gerle, called Dom Gerle, was a French Carthusian prior who became a clergy deputy to the Estates-General of 1789 and an early supporter of the Revolution.

Christophe Bancel

Christophe Bancel is a French life-science executive who co-founded TISSIUM, a Paris-based medical technology company developing light-activated polymers for tissue repair, and has been its chief executive since 2013.

Christophe Blanchet

Christophe Blanchet, born in 1973 in Caen, is a French politician of Les Démocrates, deputy for Calvados's 4th constituency since 2017 and Vice-President of the National Assembly.