rationalskepticism.org

Santa Claus is relentlessly trying to enter our European households (mostly via our mailboxes rather than chimneys), but Father Christmas, Baby Jesus, Grandfather Frost, and other traditional gift-bringers have managed to fend him off so far.

Each country (or region) has its own traditional Christmas gift-bringer. Some of them are quite nice, such as the British Father Christmas, others are outright weird, such as the Catalan “defecating log”, but all of them are equally interesting. The following map shows the gift-bringers’ names with translations, coloured by relatedness of the concepts themselves (i.e. not by etymological relatedness of the names).

A popular Christmas prank was to place this Yule goat in a neighbour's house without them noticing; the family successfully pranked had to get rid of it in the same way.

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Another interesting one is the Catalan Tió de Nadal, or Christmas Log.
A smiley face is drawn on the end of a log, which has to be fed and covered from the cold at the start of the Christmas celebrations.
The log is then ordered by the family to defecate, then they pray to it so it will bless the house with gifts.
They also sing a special song to the log, which goes like this:
"S[hit], log,
log of Christmas,
don't s[hit] herrings,
they are too salty,
s[hit] nougats (turrón)
they are much better!"