Happy Christmas

by Bryan

Holly, Robin & Mistletoe

[I am listening to A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge and working on major appliances so here’s my Christmas Eve post.]

The British have some wonderful Christmas customs that have survived the incursion of Christianity, especially the Puritan party poopers. Stealing customs from the Celts, Germans, and Scandinavians, they have created a wonderful holiday that I fondly remember from time spent there, parts of which members of my family have adopted from time in various locations in the Commonwealth.

The bird is a European robin that is featured on British Christmas cards, as it is a Winter bird in England, unlike the fair-weather laggard of the same name in America. It is bracketed by holly and mistletoe. All go back to the druids and solstice celebrations.

If you read the Harry Potter books you will get a taste, but not the full effect of a British Christmas. A full-on Christmas dinner is wretched excess to the n^th degree – Thanksgiving on steroids.

The BBC has the background on Father Christmas.

8 comments

1 Moi { 12.24.08 at 4:58 pm }: Hub is an Anglophile, he also lived there for a while. I’ve always wanted to go over during Christmas, and we would have if I’d found a cheap package.

BTW, I have a couple of Christmas CDs from King’s College that are really good. Not sure if I put any on my radio.blog or not….if not, that is just another of those things I just didn’t get around to this year… (sigh)
2 Bryan { 12.24.08 at 5:34 pm }: I have a nephew who was at the King’s College school when he and his mother stayed in Cambridge while my brother was in Saudi Arabia. He definitely did not sing in the choir during his time there.

I spent a couple of Christmases in Britain when I was flying out of Europe. The London stores are an amazing sight at Christmas, and Christmas dinner is not to be believed.
3 Moi { 12.24.08 at 6:12 pm }: Well, it is definitely going to happen one day.

In the meantime, I did find a couple of recipes for *puddings*……!
4 Bryan { 12.24.08 at 7:54 pm }: Just remember that a British “pudding” is usually some form of dumpling, i.e. a steamed or boiled dough with something added to it. Most of them call for suet [beef fat], but unsalted butter is a pretty good substitute. You really need the sauce to pour over them, but stay with small pieces to start, as they are very rich.
5 Kryten42 { 12.24.08 at 8:15 pm }: Well, It’s Christmas day here. 🙂 My housemate (and landlord) is a lady from Yorkshire, so we have a very traditional English Christmas day here. 🙂 She made the Christmas pudding a couple months ago, so it won’t be the real proper year old pudding but with hot brandy custard will do very nicely, and it still smells damned good! Been drooling for two months! LOL

We’ve had out Xmas breakfast, and are about to have lunch (we’ve spent all morning preparing and cooking! We need a bigger kitchen!) 😉 I had a few minutes, so I thought I’d wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, in whatever form you choose to celebrate. 😀 Just enjoy it with someone you love! That’s the true Christmas Spirit. 😀

Thanks for a really fun and educational year Bryan and all the regulars! I’ve enjoyed it and am so happy to see so many sane and intelligent people in one place. Even if we all have our own unique and peculiar quirks and experiences, I think we share a sincere wish to make the World a better place for all who inhabit this amazing World of ours. We may not know exactly how to accomplish this yet, but at least we care enough and are sane and intelligent enough to understand how important it is not to have the typical self-centered, and narrow myopic view that seems to dominate today. Thou we may not agree on everything (thank God!) given our different backgrounds and life experiences, we could hardly share the same personal views on everything. But I think we do agree on the important things, and we understand compromise. Just because one has a certain belief about something, does not make one right, it may perhaps simply mean that one is correct within one’s own context. And that’s the important point, we each have a unique context, but we also share some commonality, such as this World we must coexist on. 🙂

Let’s see where 2009 takes us. I’m ready to keep on fighting the just causes. I just wish there weren’t so many that needed to be fought! *sigh* “I’m getting too old for this crap!”(tm) Heh… 😉

Thanks again, and I truly wish you all the very best!
6 Bryan { 12.24.08 at 9:44 pm }: A very happy Christmas to all in Oz, and I notice that it is also Christmas in Britain and the children will be up in a couple of hours.

The traditional meal would certainly lay heavy during the mid summer, Kryten, but we all have to make sacrifices for traditions, and there are advantages to being able to use a surfboard instead of a toboggan, on Christmas day. It also reduces the number of bobble hats and the “suicide mittens” [the ones with the string to keep you from losing them that can get wrapped around you next if you don’t pay attention putting on your coat] that you receive as a child.

It looks like we have survived the Hedgemony, but this period will certainly be fertile soil for historians, right up there with the Civil War and the Great Depression – an amazing amalgam of worsts in the history of the country.
7 Kryten42 { 12.25.08 at 1:26 am }: *sigh* I *REALLY* didn’t want to post this, not today. But your last paragraph spurred me. and note to self: “Never, EVER read blogs or news on Christmas day again!” It just makes me angry! 🙁 (And I don’t mean this blog)… Anyway. After I made my post above, one of my gusts was curious about blogs and wanted to see some of the ones I liked. I showed him this one (which he liked) and then went to C&L. And read this:

http://crooksandliars.com/cernig/right-food

Via my Newshoggers colleague Anderson comes this:

By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would “consider it intolerable” that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population. (See Annex III.)

The Bush administration, speaking for the U.S.A., therefore must consider it tolerable that 6 million children die every day – children who could be fed if we weren’t wasting billions on stealth fighters, littoral combat boondoggles and non-effective defense against non-existant ballistic missiles from Iran.
…
Merry Christmas to the World from Dubya and his chums – who are currently geeing up the notion that an increase in defense spending (say, to 4% of GDP) would be a great economic stimulus package! Actually, it wouldn’t – defense spending “drains resources from the productive economy” and costs more jobs in other sectors than it creates.

How much better an economic stimulus – both for America and the world – it would be to mobilize American might for good instead of destruction, Dubya and his fellow travellers remain silent upon.

Yeah. Merry whatever.
8 Bryan { 12.25.08 at 11:54 am }: One disaster after another until January 20, when we find out of Obama is any better. I’m not making any bets on performance based on what has been done since the election.

Expect the worst and you may be pleasantly surprised.