(via Shutterstock) Ever since I was a kid and bullying made the real world a scary and dangerous place to be, I have found books to be the ultimate comfort, the one escape I can count on to make everything seem a whole lot more magical and good again. Even Continue Reading
Stream, stream my televisual dream: Top 25 TV / streaming shows of the year
(via Shutterstock) It’s weird watching TV these days. There’s so much great content around that getting to it all, or honestly, just some of it because realistically that’s all you can manage, that you pretty much have to schedule time to watch what you want. Easy enough I guess if Continue Reading
Merry pop culture Christmas to all … and to all a good streaming-reading-listening night!
(courtesy Pinterest (c) Charles M. Schulz) Merry pop culture Christmas everyone! I have had a ball as always this year writing about all kinds of books, movies, TV/streaming shows, graphic novels/comics and songs, and while it’s been tough to keep writing in my spare time when my day job as Continue Reading
Retro festive movie review: White Christmas
(courtesy IMP Awards) Returning to a much-loved Christmas classic many years after it was last watched is an interesting exercise. Our minds are fiendishly clever things but one of the interesting dynamics they employ is to appropriate snatches of a plot in your memory so you remember certain things that Continue Reading
Festive book review: All is Bright by RaeAnne Thayne
Christmas miracles are the stock in trade of the season. They pop as regularly as stocking stuffers and garlands of ivy and baubles, and while they might be vanishingly rare in the festive desert known as the rest of the year, they are thick on the decorative ground when Christmas Continue Reading
Happiness is a The Snoopy Show Christmas episode: “Happiness is Holiday Traditions” / “Window Wonderland” / “Spike’s Old-Fashioned Christmas”
(courtesy AppleTV+) If ever any pop culture property had a hold on what a Christmas tradition is, it’s Peanuts. The iconic and much-loved comic strip by Charles M. Schulz has become almost as well known for its exquisitely well-drawn and joyously nuanced television specials such as A Charlie Brown Christmas, Continue Reading
Imagine how love makes us real: Festive thoughts on The Velveteen Rabbit
(courtesy IMP Awards) I have read so many books in my life that remembering ones that particularly struck me, even as a child, isn’t easy. But one of the twenty or so books that has stuck to my head and my heart like storytelling super glue is the moving 1922 Continue Reading
On 12th day of Christmas … I listened to Songs for Christmas by Christina Perri
(courtesy Apple Music) Have you ever sat back and watched a Christmas special, especially a British one with its earthy humanity and whimsical sense of joy and felt like someone was giving you a great, big soul-reviving hug? If you have, and here’s to everyone being so beautifully treated, you Continue Reading
The short and the festive short of it: The Real Santa aka Father Christmas
(courtesy YouTube) Oh my heart! What a lovely story and yes, it might be an ad for Netto Marken-Discount in Hannover, Germany but it has so much originality and warmth and loveliness that you want to watch it again and again. Focusing on the idea that “It’s a gift to Continue Reading
On 11th day of Christmas … I read The Christmas Carrolls – A Fantastically Festive Family by Mel Taylor-Bessent
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) What is there to be said about the wondrously fun and glittering festive fun that is the familially festive joyfest that is The Christmas Carrolls: A Fantastically Festive Family by Mel Taylor-Bessent? Why you could call it “‘festabulous” or “Christmasriffic”, “merrynifiscent” or perhaps even “bauble-illiant”. Continue Reading