Unless you’ve been living in a hole (or in denial) the last few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that it’s Christmas Day on Sunday. So as one last push to get you into the festive spirit, we thought we’d share with you some interesting Christmas facts you can amaze your family and friends with this weekend.

 • Drinking mulled wine at Christmas originates from Germany during the Medieval period. However, records show that a spiced wine was drunk all the back in 5000BC by ancient Greeks who believed it had healing properties.

• Coca Cola did not invent the red Santa Claus; up until the 1930s he had already been depicted as red, green, short, tall, fat, slim. However, Coca Cola has literally shaped the image of the jolly figure we all know today.

• One – perhaps rather bored – American scientist has calculated that Santa Claus would have to visit 822 homes a second at 650 miles per hour to deliver all his presents on Christmas Eve. That’s why he uses magic, der!

• The ‘X’ in Xmas is not irreligious; it is actually the abbreviated Greek symbol for ‘Christ’.

• Every Christmas since 1947, Norway has provided Trafalgar Square’s Christmas tree to thank us for our support during the Second World War.

• The world’s largest ever snowman was built in Maine, USA in 1999 and stood at a whopping 113ft tall!

So from all of us at Beerintheevening.com we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We hope you all had a great double bank holiday – not long until the final bank holiday for this half of the year!

We have updated the stats for April and have now published our Most Viewed pubs of the month. There are amazingly, seven new entries into the top 20! Has the toll of the bank holidays and the good weather shifted where people drink in London? It looks like it. Covent Garden is becoming much more popular than it already was on our site. It could be due to more tourists in town and less people at work. Either way, next month we should be well into the summer season and hopefully start seeing some country pubs in our Top 20!

NOTE: Although the pub ‘The John Snow’ has moved right to number 1, this was mainly because of the pub having massive media attention as we covered by this post.

Hello! For those of you that didn’t take advantage of booking these three days off this week and taking a nice eleven day holiday, you might have noticed we have made some fairly radical changes to the beerintheevening.com website. Later this year we’ll be launching new look profile pages and a brand new review system for all the pubs. We’re doing this in stages though instead of one massive change overnight, this is due to the fact BITE is so big – there is a lot to change!

So, in this first major change we’ve totally removed the lefthand menu on every page and you’ll now find the most accessed links at the bottom of every page in a nice clear to read format (just like the bottom of this blog posting). You’ll also find that the pub pages now load a lot quicker since we removed the menu and also some extra adverts that were just cluttering up the pages.

The top of every page will be changing to our new look over the fortnight with a new menu system allowing you quick access to My BITE, Pub Search and so on. After that we have a couple of new features to launch and then the new profile pages will go live, along with our booking system hopefully in mid-July. Followed by a host of new features in the Autumn.

As always, we welcome any comments on these changes. If you are on holiday though currently, enjoy the sunshine and try and find a nice country pub with a good beer garden!

It’s finally here! The BITE Event Listings – we’ve had so many requests for this feature! All our Premium Pubs can now list any of the following on our site as part of their subscription:

• Beer Festivals
• Pub BBQs
• Live Music events
• Quiz Nights
• Karaoke Nights
• Wine Tasting evenings
• Live Sport events
• Poker Nights
• Charity Events
• …plus any others they want to list!

For existing Premium Pubs, they just need to go to the client control panel and select ‘submit event’ – the event will then be listed on our events page at https://events.beerintheevening.com.

If you are not a Premium Pub, head over here for more info on joining Beer in the Evening!