It’s December 24, which for many people means the most important aspect of the day is that it’s Christmas Eve. That has led to quite a few interesting events over the years. In 1777, for example, it was December 24 when Captain James Cook visited the island and gave it an English name: Christmas Island. He wasn’t the first European to find the island; there was a Spanish expedition in 1537 that “discovered” it — and of course there were already people living there, and had been for at least five centuries. It also received several different names besides Christmas Island, and today it’s known as Kiritimati.

It was also on this day in 1814 that the United States and the United Kingdom signed the “Treaty of Ghent” — so named because the signing ceremony took place in Ghent, which is today in Belgium — that theoretically ended the War of 1812. I say the ending was theoretical because although the pact was signed on December 24, the winter weather made transatlantic travel difficult, and nobody in the US found out about the treaty for weeks. In the interim there was another notable conflict: the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. Andrew Jackson led the US to victory in a war that was, theoretically, over. Then, of course, once the news of the treaty arrived, it had to be ratified by the Senate and signed by the President, James Madison. That took until mid-February in 1815. Still, we can count December 24 as an important end-of-conflict date.

But the War of 1812 was not the only conflict that ended, or at least paused, on December 24. In 1914, on December 24, the Christmas Truce was a ceasefire — completely unofficial and undeclared — along a significant portion of the Western Front in World War I. There were football (soccer) games, exchanges of food and souvenirs like helmets, and even carol singing. The war was only about five months old at that point, and in later years the unrelenting carnage and brutality of a thoroughly mechanized conflict led to so much bitterness that the Christmas Truce wasn’t widely repeated after that.

In fact, though, not every December 24 event involved a cessation of violence. Sometimes it’s been quite the opposite. Take, for example, 1826 at the Military Academy in West Point, New York. The cadets (or at least some of them) had a Christmas Eve party where eggnog was served. A lot of eggnog. Spiked with an equally large amount of whisky that wasn’t supposed to be present on the campus. They’d smuggled it in by simply rowing it across the Hudson River. What happened next is still known as the Eggnog Riot — seventy drunken cadets rampaged around the north barracks, resulting in fistfights, damage to the building, and, possibly worst in the view of the commanders, “disorder.” About a dozen were expelled. But the list of participants is worth a look: it included Jefferson Davis, the future President of the Confederacy (he was not expelled), a future Supreme Court Justice, the future Secretary of State of Texas, the future Governor of Mississippi, and two Confederate Army generals.

December 24 has seen a number of non-military events as well. The opera Aida premiered on this day in 1871. The story takes place in ancient Egypt, and the debut was, appropriately enough, in Cairo. It was an immediate success, and its success has continued. Aida has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York more than 1,100 times, and that doesn’t count all the other venues around the world where it’s been staged since 1871.

As you’d expect, one of the places you can listen to Aida is on the radio. That stems from December 24, too; it was the date in 1906 that Reginald Fessenden, an engineer and inventor, broadcast the world’s first radio program for entertainment from a signaling station in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. At least he probably did. Lee de Forest made a broadcast in February 1907 that was much more widely reported, and for years it was believed that his was the first entertainment broadcast. But in the 1930s more information came out about Fessenden’s Christmas Eve broadcast in 1906 — which took place a couple of months before de Forest’s.

Until 1995, nobody knew who wrote the words or the melody.

Neither de Forest’s nor Fessenden’s programs included a performance of Silent Night, but it would have been particularly appropriate if Fessenden’s had. Not only did his broadcast take place on December 24, but Silent Night itself was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1818. It happened in a village called Oberndorf in what is now Austria. The words were written by Father Joseph Mohr, a priest who had arrived in Oberndorf only the previous year. It was that very December 24 in 1818 that Mohr brought the words to the organist in the next village, Franz Gruber, and asked him to put them to music that could be played on a guitar, because his church’s organ had been damaged. From there, the song was spread, particularly by two troupes of folk singers, the Rainers and the Strassers. The original manuscript was lost for many years, and nobody was sure who had written the song’s melody or words. That didn’t change until 1995, when a manuscript was rediscovered — in Mohr’s handwriting — that established the true authorship of Silent Night.

It was literally a silent night when Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first people to enter lunar orbit on December 24, 1968, on the Apollo 8 mission. They didn’t land on the moon, but they were the first humans to see “Earthrise” from near the moon. They broadcast a television message that Christmas Eve that had the biggest audience of any program up to that point.

Even though there was a groundbreaking broadcast from lunar orbit that year, it was still Christmas Eve, so millions of children were thinking about what gifts might be under the tree in the morning. They might have been hoping for a Raggedy Ann or Andy doll — and they were able to do that not only because it was December 24, but because on a particular December 24 — in 1880, in fact — Johnny Gruelle was born. He grew up to be an artist, author, illustrator, and the creator of Raggedy Ann and Andy. Gruelle created the design for the Raggedy Ann doll in 1915, and soon after wrote and illustrated a series of books about Raggedy Ann and her friends. Raggedy Andy appeared a couple of years later, making it clear that Raggedy Ann is actually Andy’s big sister.

There’s another December 24 birthday that you’ll recognize, particularly if you live in the US. It’s Anthony Fauci, who turns 81 today. He’s been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and Chief Medical Advisor to the President since January of this year. I bet what he’d like for his birthday is for everybody to get vaccinated.