(courtesy IMDb) SNAPSHOTThe Emmy-winning franchise returns after more than a decade, following Christmas elves Lanny and Wayne as their holiday mission unfolds with many merry mishaps. The fourth installment [sic] continues the holiday adventures of an elite team that prepares homes worldwide for Santa’s arrival. (courtesy Disney+ media) After a Continue Reading
Christmas 2025
Festive book review: Keeping a Christmas Promise by Jo Thomas
(courtesy Penguin Books) When you love dearly dies, suddenly everything about them becomes vitally and inviolably important. That hit home very hard to me in the wake of the passing of my dad (2016) and then my mum (2019); suddenly I need to watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation every year, Continue Reading
On 1st day of Christmas … I decorated my tree with 10 new pop culture ornaments incl. Elio, Up, The Muppet Christmas Carol … and more!
(via Shutterstock) When I bought my first Christmas tree as an adult way back in 1992, I bought some pop culture ornaments but I mostly stuck to the sorts of ornaments and baubles I remembered from childhood. But as time went on, I increasingly bought more and more pop culture Continue Reading
More than a single snowflake … Thoughts on The First Snow of Fraggle Rock
(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTThe Fraggles eagerly await the first snow of the season and all the traditions it brings, but when only a single snowflake arrives and Gobo can’t write the yearly holiday song everyone is expecting, the season is thrown off course. For the first time ever, Gobo journeys Continue Reading
The festive short and the short of it: You’ve got a friend in the A Disney Holiday Short: Best Christmas Ever
(courtesy Disney+) SNAPSHOTWhen Santa mistakes the doodle on a girl’s list for a holiday wish, she wakes up on Christmas morning to find an unusual new friend under the tree. Directed by Taika Waititi and featuring the voice of John Goodman, the short follows the heartwarming story of the friendship Continue Reading
Festive book review: Good Spirits (Ghosted, 1) by B.K. Borison
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Ever since Charles Dickens published his novella A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas aka A Christmas Carol in 1843, it has been adapted repeatedly (almost immediately as a play in 1844), its universally relevant truth of finding redemption in the Continue Reading
Festive movie review: Champagne Problems
(courtesy IMP Awards) In a world where hype and PR all too often turn out to have more substance than the thing they’re promoting, it’s always a pleasant, if low-key, delight when something turns out to be better than the vehicle used to promote it. Champagne Problems is one such Continue Reading
Songs, songs and more songs Christmas songs #1: Sara Evans, Anaïs Reno, Lady A, Thelma & James, Mia McIntosh, Ingrid Michaelson + more … also Christmas releases by Eurovision artists!
(via Shutterstock) While Christmas albums from a wide variety of artists are hardly out of style, what is most remarkable in this year of our festive lord 2025 is how many Christmas singles have made their way out into an tinsel-draped, eggnog-addled world. Maybe there were always a lot of Continue Reading
Festive book review: Grace and Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon by Matthew Norman
(courtesy Amazon) Life’s “Great and Terrible Sadnesses” have a way of wiping absolutely everything before them and even reducing a season full of love and good cheer like Christmas to a dull, depressive footnote in a long line of unremarkably barren calendar moments. That’s certainly been the experience of Grace Continue Reading
Festive movie review: Jingle Bell Heist
(courtesy IMP Awards) Is grand larceny the path to true love? Not typically, no, but this is Christmas and when the festive season comes calling, it seems that anything and everything is possible. Which is just as well for Jingle Bell Heist, a festive London-set romcom which asks what might Continue Reading