"Is it illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day?"

With Christmas on the way, Give as you Live Online has looked into some of the funniest things people search for on Google during the festive period. From rotating Christmas tree stands to gifts for a picky mother-in-law, we’ve uncovered some real crackers (excuse the pun)!

Year after year, we struggle with the MIL...

When it comes to gift buying, there are thousands of searches of things like "what to get Dad", but what about those even more difficult family members? "What to get a picky mother-in-law for Christmas" appeared multiple times!

It seems plenty of us are also struggling for secret Santa with lots of profession-based searches such as: "what to get a tech guy for Christmas".

We're impatient...

In December 2018 over 3,000 people searched for 'is it Christmas yet' and 'how many seconds until Christmas'. Some of us even took it back to basics entirely - there were over 33,000 searches for 'when is Christmas'.

We LOVE Christmas...

In December 2018, 2,900 people searched 'How to get to sleep on Christmas Eve', proving the excitement never really goes away.

But, mostly, we're just hungry...

Over TWELVE THOUSAND of us searched for 'Is McDonald's open on Christmas Day' last year. Worryingly, over 6,600 people searched for 'Christmas dinner in a can'.

And as for those pesky mince pie rumours...

It has been claimed that eating the snack is illegal in England if done so on Christmas Day.

The tradition comes from the time of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, when mince pies were banned at Christmas, along with other tasty treats.

Cromwell wanted to tackle gluttony in England.

He also argued that Christmas contained too many superstitions of the Roman Catholic Church, which he hated.

The Christmas bans in 1657 didn’t go down well, causing outrage known as the Plum Pudding Riots in Canterbury in 1658.

Cromwell ended up having to send 3,000 soldiers from The Westgate Towers to break down the city gates and enforce the ban.

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