Happy Christmas
The broadcast of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is available on the web at from BBC Radio 3. [At 8AM CST live, and on demand later in the day.]
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.
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 nth degree – Thanksgiving on steroids.
The BBC has the background on Father Christmas.
5 comments
and a happy Christmas to you too!
Merry Christmas, Bryan! I planned one of my trips to England the week before Christmas, just because. Absolutely loved it. One of the last dinners there, I had a family table next to ours and there were some very merry people! Crackers were popping and they entertained us for the evening. Lol.
Thank you, Hipparchia.
I loved it, Juanita, even though the Irish Republican Army were blowing things up at the time. The Brits knew how to “Stay Calm and Carry On” while throwing a great party.
I assume you are having a white Christmas after all of the snow in the area.
Pretty much all the snow has melted except in the odd spot that gets no sun. But we got about 16″ here. Along the Blue Ridge Parkway they were reporting upwards of 20″ which is fairly high for our area.
But yeah, it was a beautiful snow. Not so much fun when it came time to shovel though…I broke my snow shovel in it and had to resort to using a standard shovel. Whew!
I was posting on another thread this morning and missed you.
I hate it when you get more than a foot of snow and it ‘cleans up the neighborhood’, and then have turn it into grey slush in no time.
Yuck, shoveling is bad enough with the right tools, but trying to do it with a garden shovel is as bad as scraping your windshield with an ID card – it will do it, but it’s a lot more work.