The idea of a family recording a Christmas album, especially across multiple generations, is an enticing one since the season is, like many religious festivals, a communal one. This delightful idea finds perfectly warm and cosy form in the Estefan Family Christmas, the second Christmas album from the seven-time Grammy Continue Reading
Book review: What Would Mary Berry Do? by Claire Sandy
Mary Berry is one of the undisputed doyennes of British food cooking, writing and presenting, an amazingly talented person who has achieved a considerable amount in her 87 years on earth. But is she role model material? You get the feeling that Mary herself would demur any suggestion that you Continue Reading
On 4th day of Christmas … I watched Spirited (movie review)
Who among us is brave enough to take on yet another adaption of the perennial Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol? Why, yes, Sean Anders I see you raising your hand, emboldened by a clever, witty, wildly original script you co-wrote with John Morris and bolstered by the presence of Continue Reading
Just not festively into it anymore … Thoughts on TV series Over Christmas (ÜberWeihnachten)
In theory, if you believe all the songs and movies and books and lore draped in fire-lit scenes and flickeringly colourful lights, Christmas is supposed to be nothing but idyllic fun, a warm glow of stepped-from-the-everyday contented happiness that follows you from eggnog-sipping to present opening, from carolling out in Continue Reading
On 3rd day of Christmas … I watched retro special It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown
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