Christmas time is here, by golly
Hey, LJ. I've been neglecting you dreadfully of late. But Christmas is a time of traditions, and so here we are.
I'm up north, at the parents' house. Christmas is rather compressed this year, mostly down to ChrisC and I sticking around in London to see Grace Petrie on Sunday, and a friend maliciously having his birthday on the wrong day and necessitating our early return to London. So we've only just landed in Darlington this evening (in time to decorate the Christmas tree, but too late to help carry the butcher's order home).
Christmas has, more than usual, snuck up on me this year. Which has led to some rather last-minute shopping, last-minute wrapping, etc. Fortunately I am not alone in this. My dad is also doing last-minute wrapping and somehow he has ended up with the roll of extremely glittery wrapping paper which everyone else has been avoiding for the last however-many years. There is a faint and distant sound of wailing as he realises just how everywhere the glitter has gone. [Update: followed later by an equally faint and distant sound of vacuuming.]
It has also, of late, been repellently damp in London. Nothing compared to the horrible flooding parts of the country has seen in recent months, but just a sort of ongoing miserableness that has felt extremely un-festive. I had been intending to begin manufacturing my own Cheer by judicious choice of Christmassy re-reading (starting with The Dark Is Rising, which I read for the first time when lathany gave me it a couple of years ago) but never actually managed to find any spare time.
Cheer has definitely been located, though. After last year's amazing Puzzlevent Calendar, Daniel Peake is offering a slightly scaled-down Twelve Days of Puzzlemas this year which I highly recommend to anyone who likes puzzles. The Christmas episode of Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown provides their annual shamblolic singalong-cum-quiz version of a highly massacred The Twelve Days of Christmas (start at 1h 13m if you don't want to wade through the whole thing). An all-day gig in a pub on Saturday provided a bunch of Christmas fun from the bands, and intra-band sets from DJ Kitschmas produced hilarity and terror in equal measure. Everyone should experience the hellish festive mashup that is Don't Stop Christmas Now at least once. The last afternoon at work was definitely enlivened by a friend's online-only too-rude-for-radio Christmas programme (I had headphones. You need headphones.)
Plus I've done the usual things of listening to ChrisC's extremely niche Christmas compilations while galloping up the M1, eating pre-Christmas pizza at our local Neopolitan pizzeria, and tracking down holly with berries on it so my mum can use it to decorate the house. (This year the overly fancy florist near our tube station had fabulously-glossy, beautifully-symmetrical, perfectly-trimmed sprays of holly. I was too scared to ask the price, but fortunately they also had the offcuts tied up into bundles at three quid a go.)
Tomorrow, I shall peel lots of vegetables. And somehow work round the error in the butcher's order and attempt to make pigs in blankets from sausage meat rather than whole sausages. And possibly deal with the inevitable glittersplosion from that wretched wrapping paper.
But for now, Dad is fetching me a(nother) beer and all is well with the world. If you're celebrating Christmas, have a good'un.
I'm up north, at the parents' house. Christmas is rather compressed this year, mostly down to ChrisC and I sticking around in London to see Grace Petrie on Sunday, and a friend maliciously having his birthday on the wrong day and necessitating our early return to London. So we've only just landed in Darlington this evening (in time to decorate the Christmas tree, but too late to help carry the butcher's order home).
Christmas has, more than usual, snuck up on me this year. Which has led to some rather last-minute shopping, last-minute wrapping, etc. Fortunately I am not alone in this. My dad is also doing last-minute wrapping and somehow he has ended up with the roll of extremely glittery wrapping paper which everyone else has been avoiding for the last however-many years. There is a faint and distant sound of wailing as he realises just how everywhere the glitter has gone. [Update: followed later by an equally faint and distant sound of vacuuming.]
It has also, of late, been repellently damp in London. Nothing compared to the horrible flooding parts of the country has seen in recent months, but just a sort of ongoing miserableness that has felt extremely un-festive. I had been intending to begin manufacturing my own Cheer by judicious choice of Christmassy re-reading (starting with The Dark Is Rising, which I read for the first time when lathany gave me it a couple of years ago) but never actually managed to find any spare time.
Cheer has definitely been located, though. After last year's amazing Puzzlevent Calendar, Daniel Peake is offering a slightly scaled-down Twelve Days of Puzzlemas this year which I highly recommend to anyone who likes puzzles. The Christmas episode of Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown provides their annual shamblolic singalong-cum-quiz version of a highly massacred The Twelve Days of Christmas (start at 1h 13m if you don't want to wade through the whole thing). An all-day gig in a pub on Saturday provided a bunch of Christmas fun from the bands, and intra-band sets from DJ Kitschmas produced hilarity and terror in equal measure. Everyone should experience the hellish festive mashup that is Don't Stop Christmas Now at least once. The last afternoon at work was definitely enlivened by a friend's online-only too-rude-for-radio Christmas programme (I had headphones. You need headphones.)
Plus I've done the usual things of listening to ChrisC's extremely niche Christmas compilations while galloping up the M1, eating pre-Christmas pizza at our local Neopolitan pizzeria, and tracking down holly with berries on it so my mum can use it to decorate the house. (This year the overly fancy florist near our tube station had fabulously-glossy, beautifully-symmetrical, perfectly-trimmed sprays of holly. I was too scared to ask the price, but fortunately they also had the offcuts tied up into bundles at three quid a go.)
Tomorrow, I shall peel lots of vegetables. And somehow work round the error in the butcher's order and attempt to make pigs in blankets from sausage meat rather than whole sausages. And possibly deal with the inevitable glittersplosion from that wretched wrapping paper.
But for now, Dad is fetching me a(nother) beer and all is well with the world. If you're celebrating Christmas, have a good'un.