Jesus likely wasn’t born on December 25—but these people most definitely were.
ByJill Harness|Dec 2, 2025, 5:04 PM EST
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Historians now largely agree that Jesus wasn’t actually born on December 25, but that doesn’t mean no one of historical significance was born that day. Here are the stories of eight famous people born on Christmas Day.
- Isaac Newton
- Clara Barton
- Muhammad Ali Jinnah
- Robert Ripley
- Jimmy Buffett
- Annie Lennox
- Shane MacGowan
Isaac Newton
Yes, Mr. Gravity himself was born on Christmas Day in 1642. This was under the Julian calendar, so the anniversary of his birthday is now considered to be on January 4. Interestingly, Newton was one of the first people to suggest that Christmas Day was not actually the anniversary of Jesus’s birth, but a date selected to correspond with the Roman celebration of the winter solstice.
Clara Barton
Before founding the American Red Cross, this teacher-turned-nurse was born in a Massachusetts farmhouse in the evening of December 25, 1821. The youngest of five children, she was raised by everyone in her family, once noting, “I had no playmates, but in effect six fathers and mothers. They were a family of schoolteachers” In time that education paid off, allowing Barton to start the first free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey, before moving on to her life-changing role as a Civil War nurse.
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Muhammad Ali Jinnah
While roughly 95 percent of Pakistan’s residents may be Muslim, it doesn’t change the fact that the Islamic founder of the country was born on Christmas Day 1876.
Robert Ripley
In 1918, just six days before his 28th birthday, the hero of odd-ball fact-lovers around the world published his first cartoon in The New York Globe. The cartoon, called “Champs and Chumps,” featured a selection of random sports facts and launched his career in the weird and the creation of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!
Jimmy Buffett
Plenty of music artists record holiday albums, but most of them aren’t singing about their birthdays at the same time. But in 1999, Parrotheads everywhere got a taste of the Christmas spirit when Buffett released his Christmas Island album just in time for his 53rd birthday.
Annie Lennox
Just in time for her 34th birthday, Lennox took her first step into the Christmas album arena when she covered Al Green’s “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” for the 1988 Scrooged soundtrack. She released her first full Christmas album, A Christmas Cornucopia, in 2010.
Shane MacGowan
The Pogues released “Fairytale of New York,” a song depicting a drunk man’s tales of holidays past as he spends Christmas Eve in a police drunk tank, just in time for their lead singer’s 30th birthday in 1987.
A version of this story originally ran in 2010; it has been updated for 2025.
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10 Real-Life Historical Figures in HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age’
The show features a number of people who really did live during the Gilded Age.
ByPaul Anthony Jones|Nov 7, 2026, 6:00 PM EST
Created by Oscar-winning Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes, HBO’s lavish historical drama series The Gilded Age brings high-society living in late 19th-century New York vividly to life. The show chiefly focuses on the tension and interplay between two colorful New York families—the well-established old money of the van Rhijn family, and the ambitious, up-and-coming new money of the Russell family—as they strive to make it to the top of Manhattan’s social ladder. In a time of considerable social and technological change, the battle between the stately and dignified old money of the van Rhijns and the flashier, rougher-around-the-edges new money of the Russells becomes all the more apparent.
The two families at the center of all the drama are fictional, but have real-life parallels in genuine New York dynasties the Vanderbilts (whose immense railroad empire made them one of the wealthiest nouveaux riches in 19th century America) and any one of the city’s Dutch-descended old-money elite, including the Schuylers (the family of New York senator Philip Schuyler, father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton). Around them, however, the series includes a cast of genuine turn-of-the-last-centuries socialites, businessmen, politicians and other public figures.
- Mrs. Astor
- Carrie Astor
- Clara Barton
- The Duke of Buckingham
- Mary Dickerson
- Mamie Fish
- T. Thomas Fortune
- Ward McAllister
- John Singer Sargent
- Booker T. Washington
Mrs. Astor
Mrs. Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, known as the “Mrs. Astor,” was very much the queen and self-styled arbiter of old-money high-society New York in the late 1800s. The wife of businessman and sporting impresario William Backhouse Astor, Jr., Mrs. Astor led the so-called “Four Hundred”—an exclusive and tightly controlled group of high-society elites (supposedly so named because that was the capacity of her ballroom). She oversaw the group as a means of defending the established society scene in New York against the monied arrivistes and industrialists who had recently made their wealth in the rapidly changing landscape of the time. She is played by actress and Broadway legend Donna Murphy in The Gilded Age.
Carrie Astor
The youngest and arguably best known of Mrs. Astor’s four daughters, Carrie Astor went on to follow in her mother’s footsteps, and became one of the late 19th century’s most noted socialites and party hostesses. Labeled by the press as “the beauty of the house of Astor,” Carrie caused controversy when she fell for Tennessee-born banker Marshall Orme Wilson, whose family her mother deemed to be nouveau riche. Nonetheless, the marriage went ahead, and the couple later lived in a lavish mansion on East 64th Street. She is played by Canadian actress Amy Forsyth.
Clara Barton
Clara Barton was the Civil War nurse whose wartime experiences led to her founding the American Red Cross in 1881. Barton appeared in an early episode of the first season of The Gilded Age, played by Linda Emond, when the van Rhijns take an interest in supporting her newly founded charity.
The Duke of Buckingham
In The Gilded Age, the 5th Duke of Buckingham, Hector Vere (played by Ben Lamb), is a handsome and charming young British aristocrat who arrives in New York hoping to secure a marriage to improve his family’s increasingly fraught financial situation. Although his title is certainly a genuine one in the British aristocracy, Hector Vere himself, however, is fictional. In reality, the actual Duke of Buckingham at the time of The Gilded Age was the lavishly named Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, who was a sixty-something statesman, politician, and former soldier.
Mary Dickerson
Pioneering businesswoman Mary H. Dickerson appears in Season 3 of The Gilded Age, played by Christiana Clark. Dickerson was the first Black woman to open a shop on Newport, Rhode Island’s famous Bellevue Avenue. Her dress-making establishment catered to many of the high-society women who summered in Newport.
Mamie Fish
Played by acclaimed character actress Ashlie Atkinson in The Gilded Age, Mamie Fish was the quick-witted and sharp-tongued good-time-girl of nouveau riche New York. The wife of railroad tycoon Stuyvesant Fish, she was known for doing or saying anything for fun, no matter how cutting or risqué, and very much became the antidote to the stuffy and stately balls of old-money Manhattan when she arrived on the society party scene in the 1890s.
T. Thomas Fortune
The son of slave parents, T. Thomas Fortune arrived in New York in the early 1880s having already made a name for himself as a journalist writing for a groundbreaking Black newspaper in Washington, DC. He continued his work in New York, eventually serving as managing editor of the New York Age for 20 years, during which time he was a major voice in advancing African American causes in post-Civil War America. He is played by Sullivan Jones in The Gilded Age.
Ward McAllister
American lawyer and socialite Ward McAllister, played by Nathan Lane in The Gilded Age, was the close friend of Mrs. Astor who aided in her compilation and management of New York’s glittering “Four Hundred” list. In fact, according to some versions of the tale at least, it was McAllister who came up with the list’s name when he explained in an 1888 interview with the New York Tribune that, “There are only about four hundred people in fashionable New York Society … If you go outside that number, you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.” The Four Hundred list went on to be published in public for the first time in The New York Times in 1892.
John Singer Sargent
Played by actor Bobby Steggert, the artist John Singer Sargent pops up in season 3 of The Gilded Age, when Russell family matriarch Bertha commissions him to paint a portrait of her daughter, Gladys. Although born in Florence, Sargent was the son of an American surgeon and divided his time between America and Europe. Having made his debut exhibition in Paris in the 1870s, he soon became one of the most sought-after portrait artists of the day on both sides of the Atlantic.
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington, played by actor Michael Braugher, escaped crippling poverty to get himself an education in Virginia in the 1870s, before dedicating his life to educating and expanding the opportunities of Black children in post-Civil War America. He is introduced in Season 2 of The Gilded Age, when Peggy, Agnes van Rhijn’s secretary, stays with him in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he established a renowned institute for Black higher education.
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