Here are the answers to our monster Christmas arts quiz of 12 dozen questions on the year past, as seen by theartsdesk writers. There are clues in all the questions in the main quiz page. If you don't want to know the answers just yet till you've grappled with them, close this page now.

Any day now most of us will be hunkering down and for the most part drawing a curtain about the world outside. Before that happens, we’d like to tell you about theartsdesk’s plans for Christmas and the New Year.

Readers in America might be perplexed. Stateside, A Christmas Carole hits the streets as A Holiday Carole. Play spot the difference by comparing the images above and below. It’s not the only disconnect on offer. King is Jewish, so a Christmas-themed album seems offbeat – especially as it features “Chanukah Prayer”. Then there’s the minor matter that one of pop’s greatest songwriters doesn’t contribute any songs to the album.

To just about everyone, the name will mean absolutely nothing. "I'm a jobbing actor," he says, and for most of the year it is true. He does little bits of telly, the odd tiny film role, a certain amount of provincial theatre. Every Christmas, though, Berwick Kaler strides forward into the spotlight of the ravishing, intimate York Theatre Royal and bids welcome to a fanatical army of devotees. The majority are local, but some cross continents, cross oceans, to see him transmogrify each year into the longest-serving pantomime dame in the business.

This is an unexpectedly wonderful album. A five-star rating might seem a bit much but then judging music in the same way as sport or exams is a bit crap anyway. So let’s say 5/5 compared to other Christmas albums and, yes, this is at the very summit. Ever. Then again, it’ll be useless from 2 January until next December.

Making a Christmas album is like writing haikus or cooking soufflé - it follows a precise formula, absolutely requiring key elements that are incredibly hard to quantify correctly and, most especially, make even faintly original.

You know what to expect from an audience with Dame Edna Everage. The London-loving Merry Widow of Moonie Ponds can be trusted to hurl her gladdies, patronise the paups in the cheap seats, dish out tough love to a lesser suburban housewife and lead a paean to her "niceness". But this is not a panto which simply grovels at the feet of her colonial highness.

Whether it's via the Disc of the Day column or our eclectic mix of overnight live reviews, on theartsdesk we try to traverse as much of the world of New Music as we possibly can. As Christmas swings around we consider it our duty to help guide readers through the thicket of music DVDs. They can be a tricky proposition: with live concert films it's notoriously hard to retain the sense of occasion while also somehow rising above it, while documentaries are often either exercises in fan-only arcana or ego-fuelled attempts to build a personality cult.

Over the year we have reviewed many a new film and television drama in theartsdesk's Disc of the Day slot. As our series of DVD recommendations comes round to the movies, we have chosen to concentrate not on individual titles but box sets. For completists we suggest everything from Harry Potter to Ken Loach, The Avengers to Tarkovsky. If you want more Chaplin or Eisenstein in your life, here, too, is a good place to start. These collections and collations are a worthwhile investment for serious and playful fans of film and drama alike.

Here’s a mindboggling statistic. By my calculation, some 330,000 seats are going to be offered for sale in London and Birmingham for just one ballet this Christmas - that’s live seats, not counting the three (yes, three) cinema screenings of foreign Nutcrackers being beamed into the UK on a lot of holiday dates. So the dance industry reckon to sell up to half a million Nutcracker seats mostly in London in a bit over a month?

Christmas albums are often a time to forget about the other 11 months of the year and get stuck into some festive silliness. Not for Kate Rusby. On this, her second volume of carols inspired by the South Yorkshire tradition, she’s still doggedly plying her trade, recasting some well-known and other unfamiliar Christmas melodies as simple hearth-side folk songs. The result may not be the sort of thing Jim Royle would open presents to, but it’s sure Christmassy in a soft, poignant and delicately beautiful way.