1643 - Christmas Island founded and named by Captain William Mynors of the East India Ship Company vessel, the Royal Mary.
1776 - George Washington and his army cross the Delaware River to attack the Kingdom of Great Britain's Hessian mercenaries in Trenton, New Jersey.
1818 - The first performance of "Silent Night" takes place in the church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria.
1837 - Battle of Lake Okeechobee: United States forces defeat Seminole Native Americans.
1868 - U.S. President Andrew Johnson grants unconditional pardon to all Civil War Confederate soldiers.
1914 - World War I: Known as the Christmas truce, German and British troops on the Western Front temporarily cease fire.
1932 - A magnitude 7.6 earthquake in Gansu, China kills ~70,000 people.
1941 - Admiral Chester W Nimitz arrives at Pearl Harbor to assume command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
1941 - World War II: Battle of Hong Kong ends, beginning the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong.
1947 - The Constitution of the Republic of China goes into effect.
1950 - The Stone of Scone, traditional coronation stone of British monarchs, is taken from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalist students. It later turns up in Scotland on April 11, 1951.
1963 - Turkish Cypriot Bayrak Radio begins transmitting in Cyprus after Turkish Cypriots were forcibly excluded from Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation.
1965 - The Yemeni Nasserite Unionist People's Organisation is founded in Taiz
1968 - Apollo program: Apollo 8 performs the very first successful Trans Earth Injection (TEI) maneuver, sending the crew and spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth from Lunar orbit.
1968 - 42 Dalits are burned alive in Kilavenmani village, Tamil Nadu, India, a retaliation for a campaign for higher wages by Dalit labourers.
1973 - The ARPANET crashes when a programming bug causes all ARPANET traffic to be routed through the server at Harvard University, causing the server to freeze.
1974 - Marshall Fields drives a vehicle through the gates of the White House, resulting in a four-hour standoff.
1977 - Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin meets in Egypt with President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.
1979 - The Soviet Union airlifts forces into Afghanistan to begin its costly occupation.
1989 - Nicolae Ceauşescu, former communist dictator of Romania, and his wife Elena are condemned to death and executed under a wide range of charges.
1990 - The first successful trial run of the system which would become the World Wide Web.
1991 - Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as president of the Soviet Union (the union itself is dissolved the next day). Ukraine's referendum is finalized and Ukraine officially leaves the Soviet Union.
2003 - The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe which was released from the Mars Express Spacecraft on December 19, disappears shortly before its scheduled landing.
2004 - Cassini orbiter releases Huygens probe which successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005.
