The rule everything here follows
No claim reaches the screen without a source. Not a general bibliography at the bottom — a source attached to the specific sentence it supports, visible on the page, with the date it was retrieved. If you scroll a country page you will see a citation under every single item. That is not decoration and it is not thoroughness for its own sake: it is so you can check us, and so that when we are wrong you can see exactly where the error entered.
The rule is enforced by the software rather than by good intentions. The program that builds this site refuses to build a page containing a claim with no source, or with a source that names no publisher, or no retrieval date. A half-filled citation that would satisfy a glance is treated as no citation at all, because that is the form the failure actually takes.
What we do about things everyone repeats
Christmas attracts a particular kind of misinformation: the charming fact. A story that is too good to check, repeated until it is everywhere, sourced to nothing. Every country page here has a section for these, and there are 3 so far.
Two things about how they are handled. First, the verdict is never a tick or a cross. A claim can be contradicted by a reliable source, or unsupported — widely repeated with nothing behind it in either direction — or oversimplified, or genuinely contested among people who have studied it. Collapsing those into true and false would mean claiming a certainty the evidence usually does not carry.
Second, a correction here always says what is the case. A debunk with nothing in its place leaves you knowing less than when you arrived, and that is the characteristic failure of the format. If we take something away we replace it.
How a country gets researched
Slowly, and in the local language wherever the material exists. A record is not considered fully researched until somebody has searched in the language of the country rather than only in English — and the search terms used are stored with the record, including when the search found nothing better. "Looked in Japanese and found nothing" and "never looked" are different states, and a dataset that cannot tell them apart will quietly drift toward whatever is easiest to find in English.
Records carry their own depth. An outline is honest about being an outline. Nothing is filled in to make the site look further along than it is, and a country where Christmas is not meaningfully kept is recorded as an answer rather than as a gap — it is not missing from a Christmas atlas, it is a place where the question has a different answer.
Where it has got to
One country — Japan — is published, researched in depth. It holds 16 sourced claims. The countdown covers 3 different dates.
That is a small number and it is supposed to be. The alternative — an outline for every country on earth, generated in an afternoon — would produce a complete-looking map with nothing behind it, and would put a cheerful greeting on countries where Christmas is not kept at all. This grows one properly researched country at a time, and the map arrives when there is something on it worth looking at.
If we have got something wrong
Tell us, and point at the claim. Every item on the site carries the source it came from, so a correction can be specific: this sentence, that source, here is what it actually says. Corrections that turn out to be right are made to the record itself, which means they propagate everywhere that record is used.