Famous People Who Died On Christmas

The holidays are, as the lyric goes, "the most wonderful time of the year." It's a time when many people celebrate various religious and secular holidays, look forward to new beginnings, and spend time with family and friends. Plus, one way or another, a lot of people get presents and eat a ton of food, so what's not to love?

All that cheer can be hard to miss out on, and no one wants to ruin anyone else's holiday. But time waits for no man ... to eat a fourth helping of honey glazed ham. Death doesn't take Christmas off, which means that sadly, for some families, Christmas will be a day when they lose a loved one, and every Christmas after that will be tinged with the sadness of knowing it's the anniversary of their death.

And since death is the great equalizer, even the rich, famous, and/or powerful can find themselves meeting their maker at a rather inconvenient time. Here are famous people who died on Christmas Day.

The Godfather of Soul James Brown managed to make almost as many headlines in death as he did in life. That's because things that happened – or didn't happen – right before and after he died on Christmas Day in 2006 were a bit odd. There might be perfectly reasonable explanations for everything, but without knowing them, people started asking questions. Even a decade after he died, the doctor who actually signed Brown's death certificate thought something was weird. Dr. Marvin Crawford told CNN, "He changed too fast. He was a patient I would never have predicted would have coded ... But he died that night, and I did raise that question: What went wrong in that room?"

On the surface, it doesn't seem weird that the 73-year-old Brown would die while in the hospital, considering he had prostate cancer and diabetes. Plus, once he was admitted, Dr. Crawford diagnosed a recent small heart attack and "early congestive heart failure." But under treatment, Crawford says Brown started to really improve. So him suddenly dying when things were looking up was definitely unexpected to this medical expert.

And yet, no autopsy was performed. Brown's daughter is mum on why, telling an interviewer, "I had my own personal reasons for not doing an autopsy. I don't want to talk about that." Later she reiterated to CNN, "I don't need an autopsy. That was the day that God chose to take him." Perhaps God wanted James Brown to perform at Jesus' birthday party.

Eartha Kitt might have been compared to a cat by the press originally because of her last name, but it was an image she played into. Her obituary in the New York Times reported that she'd started her long career in the 1940s as a dancer, before tackling Broadway, Hollywood, and the music industry. She succeeded at building a great body of work in all of them.

But by the time she was 81, Kitt was suffering from advanced colon cancer. She died at her home on Christmas Day in 2008, with her daughter Kitt Shapiro by her side.

While that seems like the best death one could hope for, colon cancer is not a fun way to go, and when Shapiro gave an interview to Mommy Noire in 2013, she made her mother's death sound horrible. "I was with her when she died. She left this world literally screaming at the top of her lungs." Shapiro seemed to mean this as a good, or at least a characteristic thing, and she continued, "Up until the last two days, she was still moving around. The doctor told us she will leave very quickly and her body will just start to shut down. But when she left, she left the world with a bang, she left it how she lived it. She screamed her way out of here, literally. I truly believe her survival instincts were so part of her DNA that she was not going to go quietly or willingly."

There were innumerable horrific things done to Black people during their fight for civil rights, but even with how long that list is, blowing up a house with the owners inside on Christmas Day in 1952 – which was also their 25th wedding anniversary – has to be notable for its layers of evil.

While both Harry T. and Harriette Moore would die because of the blast, Harriette held on until January 3, meaning she doesn't technically qualify for this list. But make no mistake, while Harry died on Christmas Day, Harriette was really murdered that day as well. The two were targets for their work for the Florida chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., which they'd founded. The Zinn Education Project says Harry was "the most hated Black man in Florida." But Harry knew what he was doing. He told his mother, who was visiting him the Christmas he died, not to be concerned for his safety: "Every advancement comes by way of sacrifice. What I am doing is for the benefit of my race."

After the terrorist attack that killed Harry, Langston Hughes wrote the "Ballad of Harry T. Moore, " which included the lines "And this he says, our Harry Moore / As from the grave he cries: / No bomb can kill the dreams I hold, / For freedom never dies!"

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In 1924, a Japanese university polled 3,500 of the country's factory workers, asking them "Who do you think is the greatest figure in history?" The book "Enigma of the Emperors: Sacred Subservience in Japanese History" records that the winner of the poll was Japan's then-emperor, Yoshihito, who destroyed the competition, beating out even the Buddha 739 votes to 188.

Yoshihito had a stroke in 1925, and a year later his condition was even worse. When the Japanese people were told their beloved emperor was gravely ill with pneumonia, the country stopped completely. Some people completed suicide, while most just prayed for his recovery. "Enigma of the Emperors" calls this "emotional attachment" the people felt for the emperor to be "extraordinary," especially considering, as Facing History and Ourselves explains, Yoshihito had been mentally unstable since contracting meningitis as a kid. He became emperor in 1912, but by 1919 he was too unwell to perform any official duties, and two years later he stopped going out in public completely.

Yoshihito (who is posthumously known as Taishō) died on Christmas Day in 1926, aged 47. One writer recorded how the details of his final weeks ruined the mystic of the emperor: "The newspapers told us that the emperor suffered from uremic poisoning and that his august countenance had turned muddy purple ... our sovereign is revered as a god, and to tell us that he has died a victim of uremic poisoning shatters the poetry ... Why must these facts about appetite and defecation be made public as the royal death approaches?"

The 19th century Brazilian author Raúl Pompéia suffered far too much in his short life. Encyclopedia.com records that he was raised by exacting parents who expected a lot of him. He was eventually sent to boarding school, but this was out of the frying pan and into the fire, since both teachers and students at the school made his life hell, through "neglect and abuse." Adulthood was no better, with Pompéia suffering from rumors about his sexuality (being gay in heavily Catholic Brazil in the 1800s would have been extremely difficult), engaging in a feud that almost ended in a duel, and being reviled for his political beliefs.

While Pompéia is said to have been a nice guy, this terrible treatment from those around him led to serious depression, his brain filled with morbid thoughts and existential crises. He took all this and channeled it, and his life experiences, into his only book, "The Athenaeum." This single work had a huge effect on the literary world, influencing greats including Sartre. Encyclopedia.com calls "The Athenaeum" a "realist-naturalist, existentialist masterpiece."

But Pompéia's life kept getting worse, with friends turning on him, as well as losing his job. In the introduction to a translation of "The Athenaeum," Cesar Braga-Pinto writes that Raúl Pompéia died by suicide on Christmas Day in 1895 at 1pm, which he'd previously written was "the hour of death."

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While only a very small fraction of Japan's residents are Christian, the Christmas holiday has still managed to make its way into their culture. Christmas is seen as a holiday for friends, and the BBC reports that since the 1970s it's been heavily associated with KFC, with many families partaking in the fast food as part of their much smaller but still notable Christmas celebrations.

So while it might not have been as shocking as it would be if it happened in the U.S., it was still considered a bit uncool when the Japanese government executed four men on Christmas Day in 2006. Especially because of why they did it. The Japan Times explains that the country hadn't executed any criminals in over a year, and, as one unnamed source from the Justice Ministry explained, "We absolutely wanted to avoid ending the year with zero executions." But one Christian anti-death penalty activist was not happy of the choice of day. "It was such an insensitive act," Makoto Suzuki told the Times of London. "Christmas is the day to reaffirm humanity."

One of the men who were executed that day was Hiroaki Hidaka, a notorious serial killer. He'd been on death row since 2000, when he was convicted of murdering three women and one 16-year-old girl, whom he'd picked up in his taxi before strangling her, robbing her, and dumping her body in the wilderness. Like all of Japan's death row inmates, Hidaka was given no warning that he was about to be executed until right before he was hanged.

When he died on Christmas Day in 1984, the Spanish artist Joan Miro was already a legend. The New York Times called him "an artist of the first rank" who "left an ineffaceable mark upon his century," while the Washington Post said he was "one of the great masters and creators of modern art" and gave him credit for connecting the abstract art movements from early in the 1900s to the mid-20th century, influencing the work of greats like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. By the time of his death, Miro already had works displayed in some of the best museums in the world, including New York's MoMA and the Guggenheim, as well as the Miro Foundation in Barcelona, which only showcased his work.

This was perhaps not surprising, since Joan Miro made it to the ripe old age of 90. In the end, Miro's passing was not dramatic. He'd been having health issues you'd expect of someone in their 10th decade, including "heart and lung ailments," and only two weeks before he'd been in the hospital because of difficulty breathing, and had been confined to his bed since then.

But in his old age, Miro was still thinking about the future. ”It's the young people who interest me, and not the old dodos,” he said. ”If I go on working, it's for the year 2000, and for the people of tomorrow.” (Yes, the year 2000 used to be a time that seemed impossibly far away and exotic, instead of what Gen Z considers basically cavemen days.)

If you don't manage to win a Nobel Prize in your lifetime, surely the next best thing is for someone who did win to write a book about you. So it is with the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia. While he's not a household name outside his own country, the Los Angeles Times reports that the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote a book about how awesome Villaurrutia and his work were. Paz lays the praise on thick, saying Villaurrutia "belongs to the class of poets and of men we need most today: Those who neither affirm nor negate, but who doubt and question themselves." But even Paz has to admit that Villaurrutia has a more niche fan base, which Paz sees as a good thing. "Villaurrutia's glory is secret, like his poetry," he wrote. "I don't regret this and neither would he. He asked for nothing more than the fervent admiration of a few. In modern times poetry is not, nor can it be, more than an underground cult, a ceremony in the catacomb."

What Villaurrutia was especially good at was reflecting on dying. His poetry includes haunting lines like "Death always takes the shape / of our bedroom" and "it may just be possible / to live after having died." His magnum opus is the work "Nostalgia for Death." While he's best known for his poetry, he actually wrote more in other mediums, like plays.

Villaurrutia died on Christmas Day in 1950, aged 47.