The chances are that if you haven’t heard of Christmas, then you have been living under the proverbial rock, without deliveries of junk mail or without access to a streaming platform or no nearby mall or singing angels in the sky announcing the saviour’s birth (you know, it happens ALL Continue Reading
Christmas 2019
Ho! Ho! What ho! My 2 fave British sitcom Christmas episodes – Miranda and the Vicar of Dibley
“Hi, my name is Andrew and I am a Christmas tragic.” I utter these words not out of any kind of sense of shame because, well, CHRISTMAS, but because it’s best we get it out and into the open. (Although if you’ve been paying any attention to the blog at Continue Reading
On 9th day of Christmas … I listened to The Holiday Sounds of Josh Rouse
When it comes to summoning up the sounds, and more pertinently for this review, the sounds of Christmas, there is an understandably heavy bias towards evoking the sensibilities of a cold and cosy northern hemisphere Christmas. Thanks most notably to the classic poem A Visit From St. Nicholas by Clement Continue Reading
Festively scary goings-on: The spooky fun of A Scooby-Doo! Christmas (2002)
Do creepy town-scaring ghouls, ghosts and monsters take Christmas off to be with their own demented loved ones? They do not, which frankly is a very good thing for 2002’s A Scooby-Doo! Christmas which sees Scooby (Frank Welker) and Shaggy (Casey Kasem), Velma (Mindy Kohn), Daphne (Grey DeLisle) and Fred Continue Reading
On 8th day of Christmas … I read Across the Void by S. K. Vaughn #BookReview
Nothing captures the imagination like trying to rescue someone in impossible circumstances and it doesn’t get much more impossible than the cold and unforgiving surrounds of outer space. An environment noted for its hostility to life as much as its startling beauty, journeying into space is not for the fainthearted Continue Reading
On 6th day of Christmas … I listened to Idina Menzel’s Christmas: A Season of Love
Recording a Christmas album may often like an invidious proposition. You are wedged, rather uncomfortably as if someone has crushed a whole tray of glass baubles into the cushion of your seat, betweem those who crave the same old same old big band sound that has, for better or worse, Continue Reading
On 5th day of Christmas … I read Olaf’s Night Before Christmas #Frozen
Does Kristoff have trenchant personal hygiene issues? Is Sven moonlighting on Christmas eve as a sleigh-pulling reindeer hailing a strangely jolly bearded man in red through the sky? And, most importantly because enquiring sentient snowman minds want to know, are the stockings hung by the chimney because they’re wet? Are Continue Reading
On 4th day of Christmas … I listened to Lea Michele’s Christmas in the City
If you really want to set the mood for a Christmas album, then kicking off with “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” is pretty the best way to do it. Which is what Glee alum Lea Michele does on her third studio album, and first Christmas album, Christmas Continue Reading
“I have a boyfriend!” The festive stress of finding love on a timetable in Home For Christmas
Families can be wonderful things. They can be warm, nurturing and safe, a haven from the outside world where people can be more than a little unknowing of your true self and inadvertently cruel as a result. But much as Hallmark and Disney might like to promote the idea that Continue Reading
On 3rd day of Christmas … I watched Klaus
In the well-trodden, Santa-saturated, redemption-obsessed world of the Christmas film, there is very little snow-covered ground that hasn’t already been well and truly sleigh ridden over. Nowhere this is likely more true, besides the story of the baby Jesus himself, than in stories which address the origins and activities of Continue Reading