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
Christmas 2022
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
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
Movie review: #Christmas with You
Who knew there was so much love in the offing at Christmas? Well, clearly lots of people because with the total of new Christmas films this years reaching a whopping 170, pretty much all of them rom-com oriented, it’s very clear that in the words of Love Actually‘s theme song, Continue Reading
#Christmas book review: Just Like Magic by Sarah Hogle
Christmas is supposed to be rose, cosy and oh-so-festively nice. Well, that’s the luminously lovely PR anyway; the truth is, it doesn’t always live to the pitch, no matter how hard we try and we arrive at the festive season feeling ill-prepared, all-at-sea and unsure if we have what it Continue Reading