Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/December 24

This is a list of selected December 24 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← December 23	December 25 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  A radio
• 
  Reginald Fessenden
• 
  KKK rituals
• 
  Ariane 1 replica
• 
  Earthrise as seen by the crew of Apollo 8
• Silent Night
• 
  Christmas Island (Kiritimati)
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  Christmas truce
• 
  British and German troops during the Christmas truce
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  The advertisement that spurred the creation of NORAD Tracks Santa

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Christmas Eve (Gregorian calendar)	unreferenced section
1294 – Boniface VIII began his papacy, replacing St. Celestine V, who had declared that it was permissible for a Pope to resign, and then promptly did so.	refimprove section
1777 – An expedition led by English explorer James Cook reached Christmas Island, the largest coral atoll in the world.	refimprove
1968 – Astronaut William Anders of the NASA Apollo 8 mission, the first manned voyage to orbit the Moon, took the famous photograph known as "Earthrise", showing the Earth rising above the lunar surface.	unreferenced section
1974 – Cyclone Tracy struck Darwin, Australia, eventually destroying more than 70% of the city.	refimprove section
1979 – Ariane 1, the first launch vehicle to be developed by the European Space Agency, had its first launch.	no orbital elements, unreferenced section
1980 – Witnesses reported the first of several sightings of unexplained lights in the sky near RAF Woodbridge, in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England, an incident called "Britain's Roswell".	multiple issues
Jeff Sessions |b|1946	outdated

Eligible

• 1814 – The United Kingdom and the United States signed a peace treaty in Ghent, present-day Belgium, ending the War of 1812.
• 1818 – "Silent Night", a Christmas carol by Josef Mohr and Franz Gruber, was first performed in a church in Austria.
• 1865 – Six Confederate veterans of the American Civil War founded a social club they named the Ku Klux Klan, which later became a white supremacist group.
• 1871 – Aida, one of Giuseppe Verdi's most popular operas, made its debut in Cairo, Egypt.
• 1913 – Seventy-three people were crushed to death in a stampede after someone falsely yelled "fire" at a crowded Christmas party in Calumet, Michigan, U.S.
• 1914 – British and German soldiers interrupted World War I to celebrate Christmas, beginning the Christmas truce.
• 1953 – On New Zealand's North Island, at Tangiwai, a railway bridge was damaged by a lahar and collapsed beneath a passenger train, killing 151 people.
• 1955 – According to legend, the NORAD Tracks Santa program began after children began calling the Continental Air Defense Command Center to inquire about Santa Claus's whereabouts due to a misprinted phone number in an advertisement.
• 1973 – The U.S. Congress granted home rule to Washington, D.C., allowing the residents to elect their own mayor and a city council.
• 1979 – The Soviet government deployed troops in Afghanistan, starting the Soviet–Afghan War.
• 2008 – The Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group, began attacks on several villages in the north of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing hundreds and committing numerous atrocities.
• Born/died: | Gongsun Shu |d|36| Yang Bin |d|950| Leonaert Bramer |b|1596| William Warburton |b|1698| Adam Mickiewicz |b|1798| Cosima Wagner |b|1837| Johnny Gruelle |b|1880| Pernilla Wahlgren |b|1967| Maria Koepcke |d|1971

Notes

• Apollo 8 appears on December 21, so Earthrise should not appear in the same year
• Christmas Island appears on December 25, so Kiritimati (aka Christmas Island, the 1777 blurb) should not appear in the same year

December 24

Du Fu

• 759 – The Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu (pictured) departed for Chengdu, where he lived for the next five years and composed poems about life in his thatched cottage.
• 1826 – More than a third of U.S. Military Academy cadets in West Point, New York, rioted after consuming eggnog with whiskey during a Christmas party.
• 1846 – The Sultanate of Brunei ceded the island of Labuan to the British Empire.
• 1964 – The Viet Cong bombed the Brinks Hotel in Saigon, killing two U.S. Army officers and raising fears of an escalation of the Vietnam War.
• 1976 – The horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown based on the 1946 Texarkana Moonlight Murders is theatrically released.
• 1999 – Jihadists linked to al-Qaeda hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 to force the release of Islamist figures held in prison in India.

• Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik (d. 738)
• Walter Bower (d. 1449)
• Anthony Fauci (b. 1940)

More anniversaries:

• December 23
• December 24
• December 25