A Very Merry Tag

By -
I've been running around doing Christmasy stuff (and having a cold, fooey), so I might as well write a post too!  Lois at You, Me, and a Cup of Tea found this fun tag, and I thought I'd play along.

Does it snow where you live around Christmas?

Ha ha, nope.  We got a light dusting 15 years ago.  I live in the central valley of California and we don't get snow, but on the other hand I live quite near the foothills of the mountains, and they do.  So it's not very far to drive.

Do you get a real tree or a fake tree?

We used to always get real trees from Grandpa's Christmas Tree Farm (that is, my parents' back acre, which has a planting of pine trees).  They were always huge and sprawly things and it was pretty awesome, but the back acre has run out of trees that look halfway acceptable in a living room -- it's more like Hansel and Gretel's forest now -- and a few years ago the clever siphon arrangement we had slipped and we had a flood, so now we have gone fake.  This is our third year as a fake Christmas tree family.

What is your favorite Christmas movie?

Confession: I am super-bad at liking Christmas movies.  When I was a kid, we barely watched them and so I didn't develop any fondness for the Rudolph movie or anything.  Some of them I didn't see until I was an adult, and I still haven't seen Elf.  I do love Hogfather, and the Muppet Christmas Carol, and I'm a Nutcracker fiend but really picky about it.

Where in the world would you like to spend Christmas the most? 

I can think of a lot of great places to spend Christmas!  If I was in the UK, I could go to Stonehenge on Midwinter Day and stay in a country house (and shiver in the cold and damp).   If I was in Germany, I could go to a Christkindlmarkt!  If I was in Denmark, I could have stars in the windows and lots of snow, maybe, and familiar carols and watch Nissebanden i Grønland.  Wait!  Nissebanden i Grønland is my favorite Christmas movie!  But it isn't a movie at all, it's a 24-episode series--a TV Advent calendar, about the elves who travel to Greenland to help Santa (Santa lives in Greenland, you know), but he's missing!  So they have to produce Christmas themselves.  (To see the intro-song part of the video, skip to 00:42.)


Of course I'd have to take my family along. 

Which fictional/literary character would you most like to spend Christmas with?

Um.  Let's see, it should be somebody who really knows how to have fun, and who likes the same music I do.  Or we could just go with Kermit the Frog.  Oo, or maybe the Doctor, he's a lot of fun at a party!

What is your favorite Christmas song? 

Oh, I have so many favorites!  I much prefer older carols and hymns.  A few favorites are The Wexford Carol, In the Bleak Mid-Winter,  and The Holly and the Ivy.

What is your favorite Christmas Book/Story  (besides, ya know, THE story)? 

My favorite is The Children of Green Knowe, by L. M. Boston.  It's particularly special this year since I got to visit! I can imagine it much better now.

Which do you prefer: multicolored lights or white lights?

Multicolored lights all the way!

What time period/decade would you most like to spend Christmas in? 

Assuming I'm protected from plague and other ills, I would like to take a page from Spenser's book and see a masque at the Tudor court's Christmas feast.  Don't forget the woodwoses!

Which period drama has the best Christmas scene/episode? 

Goodness, I don't really watch enough TV to know! 


Comments

  1. heatherDecember 21, 2016 at 2:46 AM

    Something horrible always happens to the Doctor at Christmas.

    ReplyDelete
  2. KailanaDecember 21, 2016 at 5:33 AM

    I have the cold that will not go away. Over a month now. I even went to the doctor because I couldn't stop coughing. The colds suck this year. lol We get enough snow for most people. lol Of course, we got snow the week before Christmas and now it has rained and there is hardly any left!

    ReplyDelete
  3. LoryDecember 21, 2016 at 6:26 AM

    There's a Hogfather movie? I still haven't read the book, but I'm on a Discworld kick right now so I might actually read it over Christmas.

    My favorite Christmas movie is It's a Wonderful Life.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanDecember 21, 2016 at 8:57 AM

    The Hogfather movie is great! Susan is played by Michelle Dockery and she is perfect. But you should definitely read the book first, it's wonderful.

    I'm still quite coldy this morning. Blech. I hope you get better soon, Kailana!

    And, Heather, you make an excellent point. I hadn't thought about that, but in fact I don't want my Christmas tree to try to murder me....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more