Christmas isn’t Christmas without the gang from Charles M. Schulz’s much-loved comic strip, Peanuts, making a very welcome appearance. While most people will generally play the 1965 classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas – and for good reason; it’s a sublime piece of festive joy – it’s 1992 successor, It’s Christmastime Continue Reading
Book review: This Winter (A Heartstopper novella) by Alice Oseman
It’s a rare thing these days to have anything become a water cooler hit. For one thing, we are far less likely, in the wake of the pandemic, to be in an office these days, much less one with a water cooler, but for quite another, we are living digitally Continue Reading
On 2nd day of Christmas … I listened to Snow Waltz by Lindsey Stirling
Christmas is supposed to be a thousand good and wonderfully light-as-air, joyously uplifting things. And while it often is – all that tree trimming, laughing with friends and brightness of decoration can only make you feel like a million festive bucks – there are at times when the actuality may Continue Reading
Movie review: #Christmas on Mistletoe Farm
Appearances, opines the mysterious “they” who seems to be everywhere and opinionated about it all, can be deceiving. Sometimes a little, or in the case of Christmas on Mistletoe Farm, the tinsel-draped train wreck that ran over Santa and his elves and likely took a few unfortunate Christmas trees with Continue Reading
On 1st day of Christmas … I decorated my tree with 10 ornaments – the Berenstain Bears, Gandalf (LOTR), Encanto, Moomins, Peter Pan, Flounder (The Little Mermaid), Fraggle Rock + more
I love Christmas and I LOVE decorating my tree. Given where my interests lie, it makes perfect sense that the tree is all pop culture and nothing but pop culture, and that even though I tell myself I’ll only buy a few new ornaments each year, that I often end Continue Reading
Book review: Holiday Romance by Catherine Walsh
Is there anything more wonderful than falling in love at Christmas? The twinkling of festive lights on the streets, trees decked in all manner of baubles and tinsely garb and the general sense of being in a luminously light place once-or-twice removed from the manic hubbub of everyday life – Continue Reading
Breaking fourth walls with glee: Thoughts on She-Hulk – Attorney at Law review (ep. 5-9)
Aiming to be meta and actually delivering on it in a way that doesn’t feel twee or force is a magical balancing act that few TV series pull off convincingly well. Breaking fourth walls and addressing the audience or melding the fictional with the semi-factual doesn’t always work, with narrative Continue Reading
The festive short and the short of it: Duck the Halls – a Mickey Mouse Christmas Special
SNAPSHOTInstead of going South with his family and other duck friends, Donald stays behind with Mickey and the rest of his non-bird/duck friends to spend his first ever Christmas. During his stay, however, Donald soon starts to get sick from the cold weather while trying to enjoy the snow and Continue Reading
How hard do you believe? Big questions roll from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
SNAPSHOTA fifth movie in the Indiana Jones franchise, continuing the story after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Starring Harrison Ford as adventurer Indiana Jones and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena. The full cast also features Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Kretschmann, Boyd Holbrook, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Toby Jones, Continue Reading
It’s the Little Things … ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus knits with Sir Ian McKellen again for Christmas
Ever since ABBA released Voyage, their first album in 39 years last year, and with it the daintily beautiful and highly emotive loveliness that is “Little Things”, Christmas has felt a whole lot more Swedishly festive than it used to do. That delightful feeling of ABBA in the heart of Continue Reading