Living up to its name (and history), Italy, Russia and the United States are represented aboard the International Space Station during the 2014 holiday season. NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio has been there. He spent the 2013 holidays on ISS, and his Christmas week was particularly busy due to a cooling system malfunction that required two spacewalks on his part.

Mastracchio was a crew member of Expedition 38/Expedition 39 and launched to the space station on Nov. 6, 2013. On Dec. 12, 2013, the ammonia pump module that keeps internal and external instruments cool failed, and NASA scheduled three spacewalks to replace the module -- the first of which was completed on Dec. 22, 2013.

“This is an 800-pound pump that pumps ammonia, which is highly dangerous, toxic gas, so we had to be really careful with this stuff -- even with a space suit,” Mastracchio said in an interview with International Business Times. Mastracchio and NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins removed the faulty ammonia pump module on Dec. 22, 2013, and installed a new module on Christmas Eve.

"I’ve done several spacewalks -- it was my seventh and eighth spacewalk -- so there was no problem preparing for the spacewalk. The more difficult part was dealing with these ammonia lines -- the fact that we could get sprayed with ammonia, which we ended up doing -- so there are a lot of safety precautions we had to take," Mastracchio said of his mindset ahead of the spacewalks.

The Christmas Eve repair job was completed in 7 hours, 30 minutes and was routine except for the ammonia leak. Mastracchio and Hopkins had to undergo ammonia decontamination procedures afterward, but the leak also created something unexpected.

"We actually had an ammonia snowstorm in space during the spacewalk. It reminded me of my days back up in the northeast, looking at the snow. It definitely was quite the experience," Mastracchio said.

Christmas Tree
Commander Gerald Carr, Pilot William Pogue and Scientist Edward Gibson made a Christmas tree using cans aboard the Skylab in 1973. NASA

Mastracchio's Christmas Eve spacewalk continued the legacy of memorable moments in space that began with Apollo 8 in 1968. Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to the moon. Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders were the first to leave Earth's orbit, enter the moon's orbit and return safely back to the planet.

Apollo 8
A Christmas Eve Earthrise taken by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders on Dec. 24, 1968. NASA

NASA scheduled a broadcast from space for Christmas Eve, but the crew received no instructions on what to show or read. "We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice," Borman said. The astronauts chose to read the first 10 verses of Genesis while broadcasting images of the moon.

Expedition 39 ended on May 13, 2014, and Mastracchio returned to Earth.

Expedition 42 will spend the 2014 holidays aboard the space station. NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore is serving as commander, and the crew will likely get together for dinner to celebrate Christmas.

"Whenever there’s a holiday on the U.S. side, or if it was a crew member’s birthday or anything like that or on the weekends, we’d get together. All six of us -- including the three Russians, two Americans and Koichi, my Japanese crew mate -- we’d get together once or twice a week and have dinner together and also on special occasions such as Christmas or Russian holiday," Mastracchio said during an earlier interview with IBTimes.