Nothing about 2020 has been normal, and Christmas will be no exception.
There will be more emphasis on bubbles than baubles and you won鈥檛 be able to hug everyone you鈥檇 like to. For once, keeping the turkey from going dry will be the least of your worries - it鈥檚 your hands you have to worry about after washing them so much! However, it might give you some comfort to know that it鈥檚 not the first time in history that the festive season has been less than normal.
We look back on five times throughout history that Christmas was a bit different.
1021: A Christmas when no one could stop dancing
When you think of midnight mass on Christmas Eve in a normal year, you might think of quiet prayers and hymns. Disturbing that with a lot of reckless dancing would likely be frowned upon.
And that鈥檚 exactly what the priest of the German town of K枚lbigk thought. On Christmas Eve in 1021, 18 people gathered around his local church and danced with reckless abandon, disturbing the peace. Outraged, he laid a curse on them, condemning them to dance for a year without rest. And so they did - the dancers couldn鈥檛 control their limbs again until the next Christmas Eve.
While this is probably an over exaggerated version of events, some people believe it may be an interpretation of what was a very real problem across mainland Europe at the time - one of many dancing plagues. Sometimes called 鈥榙ance mania鈥, there have been several recorded accounts of this happening in Europe. For example in 1374, it swept across western Germany, the Low Countries, and north-eastern France.
No one鈥檚 quite sure why it happened, but there are a few theories. One is that they had eaten ergot, a mould that grew on stalks of rye grain and can cause hallucinations, spasms, and tremors. However this is probably unlikely, as not everyone would react to a psychoactive substance in the same way.
Another theory is that the people afflicted by it were driven to despair because of things like drought and poverty, and went into a sort of trance like state. This, however, wouldn鈥檛 explain why so many people reacted in the same way by dancing, either.
1644: The year Christmas was cancelled
It鈥檚 a somewhat commonly held belief that Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland (1653-58), cancelled Christmas. But it鈥檚 not quite true.
An Act of Parliament made Christmas illegal in England from 1644 until the Restoration started in 1660 - but that wasn't Oliver Cromwell's doing. During his reign as Lord Protector however, he was instrumental in bringing in lots of strict rules that enforced this law. This included keeping all shops open on Christmas Day, mandating the seizure of food suspected of being prepared for Christmas celebrations, and in general encouraging the public not to treat Christmas Day as anything particularly special.
The reason for this was that the puritan movement - that Cromwell was a vocal part of - saw Christmas as a wasteful and even sinful celebration, as it encouraged hedonism instead of quiet contemplation and prayer. Cromwell didn't directly ban Christmas himself, but it鈥檚 widely accepted that his outspoken criticism of the festival had a huge impact on how it was viewed by those in power at the time.
As you might imagine though, the law wasn鈥檛 popular in the slightest, and many pro-Christmas riots took place during this time. In 1660, the law was repealed, and turkey was back on the menu once more.
1914: A Christmas footie fixture like no other
The world has seen many a war-torn Christmas. One of the most famous though was World War One - not for the devastation that continued over the festive season, but for the 24-hour reconciliation on Christmas Day instead.
We鈥檙e talking of course about the now somewhat mythical football match between German and British troops fighting in the trenches in 1914. The war had only started that summer, and late on Christmas Eve, some British soldiers heard German troops singing carols from the other side of the field they were fighting on. They began to shout to each other and a truce was agreed the next day for Christmas, where the two opposing sides not only had a kickabout, but also shared food and exchanged gifts.
While incredibly heartwarming, the truce was not observed everywhere and some of the higher ranking officers on both sides thought it may make the soldiers less willing to fight if it ever happened again. Efforts were made by both sides to stop it taking place in the years that followed, but they weren鈥檛 always listened to.
It wasn鈥檛 just at Christmas that the occasional truce was observed - in what was known as the 'live and let live system', occasionally both sides would agree to temporarily lay down their arms to, for example, give each other the opportunity to tend to their wounded and mend their trenches.
1980: A Christmas (well, Boxing Day) that was out of this world
Christmas may be trying this year, but at least the people of Suffolk won鈥檛 have to worry about being abducted by aliens鈥 hopefully.
On 26 December 1980, a group of US Air Force personnel who were stationed at RAF Woodbridge reported mysterious lights coming from in and around the forest, which they proceeded to investigate. In 1983, a memo by the deputy base commander was released by the US government describing it as an encounter with an apparent UFO.
Since then, theories and conspiracies have multiplied exponentially. Some believe aliens really did pay the county of Suffolk a visit, or that it was a secret military aircraft making an unscheduled landing, whilst others think it may have merely been a misinterpretation of natural lights or the beam of Orfordness Lighthouse. Or just some pranksters messing around.
For some, it is a mythical event with the same status as a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. So much so that a whole industry has been made out of it, and a new documentary called Codename Rendlesham was released earlier this year.
1991: A Christmas when a country collapsed
We expect speeches from politicians all over the globe on Christmas Day, but among the most momentous was Mikhail Gorbachev鈥檚 in 1991.
His address to the nation on 25 December saw the end of the Soviet Union (USSR). By the end of its 69 year life, the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world; it covered nearly one sixth of the planet, was made up of a population of 290 million people and over 100 nationalities lived within its borders.
It was founded as a result of the Socialist Revolution, which resulted in the end of the Tsar's reign, and was supposed to bring people together as equals. However, it eventually became more totalitarian than the state it had replaced - by the time the dictator Joseph Stalin inherited it in 1924, the Communist Party that ran the USSR controlled every element of political and social life, and any going against the status quo could mean jail time, or worse.
After Stalin鈥檚 death in 1953, many of the more brutal policies were dropped, but it remained a threat to the rest of the world because of its huge military capacity, among other things. There were many complex and interlocking reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed, so a long time before Gorbachev resigned, the USSR's end, and the independence of the nations that fell within its borders, was felt to be inevitable. He was on good terms with Western leaders, but the end of Gorbachev's presidency gave hope to the West that days like the Cold War were far behind them. The day he resigned was the last day the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin.
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