There are five islands called Christmas Islands in the world, distributed over three oceans and as many continents. Two of them are in the vicinity of the Australian island of Tasmania.
The Fort of Christmas
First place called Navidad, the small settlement that Christopher Columbus left in the territory of present-day Haiti on December 25, 1492, two months after seeing the American continent for the first time, and shortly before returning to Spain to report their discoveries. It was the first European construction on the American continent, but it did not last long; when Columbus returned less than a year later, he found that the fort had been destroyed and its 39 residents were dead.
Christmas Island
It is an Australian Territory 500 kilometers south of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. With just over 1,500 residents, the islanders have been surviving basically from the exploitation of guano; An attempt was made to open a casino, without much success, and the construction of a space base on the island was approved, with no mere intention to date. It has its own geographic domain.
Kiritimati
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean is this Christmas island. It is known as Kiritimati, it belongs to the Republic of Kiribati, and is also called Island Christmas or Christmas Island. Kiritimati is nothing more than the pronunciation of Christmas in the local language, Gilbertés. The name of the country, Kiribati, is pronounced locally as kiribas ; the letters ti are pronounced like an ese, a letter that does not exist in the Gilbertés alphabet. The island of Kirismas owes its name to Captain James Cook, who first arrived there on December 24, 1777.
The 5,500 residents of the island live in cities called Paris, London or Poland. The names are due to a French priest who resided on the island, and decided that his home was Paris, and what was on the other side of a narrow canal was London. The name Poland comes from a Polish explorer who passed through and helped the natives improve their irrigation systems for palm trees.
Christmas island
It is located in Canada, specifically in the province of Nova Scotia. The Canadian Christmas Island is not actually an island, but a village on the shore of a lake on Cape Breton Island. It owes its name to the nickname of a native of the place, called by his contemporaries, precisely, Christmas. Similar to what happens in another Canadian town called Love, it is common for the local post office to receive Christmas greetings from half the world to be forwarded with the quintessential Christmas stamp.