Christmas Quizmas

Stephen Fry introduces the annual quiz in today's issue of The Telegraph.

We at QI take Christmas seriously. Not only is it the research elves’ favourite time of year, spent searching the attic for baubles of newly-discovered information to drape on the wobbly conifer of knowledge, but it’s also a festival entirely founded on ignorance...

A QI Christmas is full of surprises.

Was the General Synod of the Church of England being serious in 2004 when it suggested that one of the three Wise Men might have been a woman?

Will sleigh bells in the snow sound the same after the discovery that St Nicholas, the real Father Christmas, was Turkish and the patron saint of judges, thieves, pawnbrokers, bakers, sea travellers and murderers?

What were the scholars of Merton College, Oxford, doing providing a fully-grown bull for the college steward “to knock down with his own hands” each Christmas?

And isn’t it oddly comforting to know that Henry II gave land to a man called Roland “le Fartere” on condition that he perform at the royal Christmas banquet with “a leap, a whistle and a fart”?

Read the entire quiz here.