Astonishing Christmas records

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