Astonishing Christmas records

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Several records can be connected to the holiday of Christmas and origo.hu decided to highlight some of the most interesting ones. Do you know when the coldest and hottest winters were in Hungary? When we had the most snow? Also, we shouldn’t forget about international records, like the oldest, tallest or the most expensive Christmas trees in history.

The hottest Christmas

Let’s start with a Hungarian record. This record was broken on the day after Christmas in 2013: the temperature was above +10° Celsius in Pápa. If you’d like to spend the holidays in a truly warm place, then you should go to Botswana, where 40° Celsius is totally normal at this time of the year.

The coldest Christmas

Christmas Eve was the coldest in 1963, when the temperature dropped to -26° Celsius in the southwestern part of Hungary. However, this is relatively nothing compared to Ojmjakon, a Siberian settlement, where the temperature can reach -71.2° Celsius.

The snowiest Christmas

No matter how hurtful it is, it is a fact that white Christmas is very rare in Hungary. Between 1957 and 2016 it only snowed 18 times. The snowiest Christmas was in 1970, when there was an average of 8 centimetre blanket of snow in the country. Europe’s mild weather is not suitable for snowy fields, even though there’s sometimes 5-8 metres of snow falling in Scandinavia above 1000 metres. Also, the ski-runs of Italy couldn’t be approached in 2008 due to the heavy snow.

The most expensive Christmas tree

The Swiss Piaget jewellery house mounted the world’s most expensive Christmas tree in 2002. Naturally, it wasn’t the tree that cost so much, but the 83 pieces of jewellery worth 16 million dollars that they decorated the tree with. They made it into the book of Guinness Records.

The oldest Christmas tree

According to official documents, a woman named Janet Parker is the owner of the world’s oldest Christmas tree. The tiny, 30 centimetres tall tree was bought by one of her ancestors in 1886, meaning that it is 130 years old.

The tallest floating Christmas tree

Janet Parker’s tree could’ve also run for the world’s smallest Christmas tree title, but there’s probably an even smaller somewhere in the world. What’s for sure is that tallest floating Christmas tree was 85 metres tall and was set afloat in Rio de Janeiro. Well, it was a fake tree actually.

The tallest living tree

All big cities like to mount Christmas trees on their main square, every year. This was what the citizens of Seattle did in 1950, when they mounted a more than 67 metres tall tree in front of their mall.

The most Christmas lights

According to the book of Guinness Records, the tree decorated with the most Christmas lights stood in front of the Basilica of Cologne in 2006. 150 thousand lights were lit up at once.

+1 The most unique Christmas tree

Of course this is a totally subjective category, but there’s a Hungarian architectural and design company, Hello Wood, which dazzles us with the most special Christmas trees made from wooden elements every year. Their works of art have been listed on international rankings as well. This year, they mounted a unique Christmas tree in front of Müpa (Palace of Arts), but you can also check out some of their other works in the mini photo gallery below.