It might not be in the holiday spirit, but we want to know anyway: What's the best present you received this year?
My 9 year old niece gave me a present this year - and made me promise not to open it. All I knew was it was something she'd bought from the local school fair.
In the meantime, we'd forgotten to buy crackers for our Christmas meal (just the two of us) and were wishing we hadn't.
When we opened the present, it was a Christmas decoration to put on our tree and one solitary cracker. So that was the best thing I received this year.
White lights or colored lights? Blinking or non-blinking? Bonus points if you show us a photo of the lights you used to decorate for the holidays.
I'd just settle for ones that work. I've actually settled for ones that don't though.
I'll send you on your festive way with a top Christmas tip courtesy of Take a Break:
To wash that out of your brains, here's a lovely Christmas song from Slow Club. Have a good one, everyone.
What's your favorite holiday memory?
As in the Christmas holidays? For me, three years ago when I finally took the decision not to spend another Christmas with my parents. I chose because they look after two of my nieces - the two born to my crazy oldest sister who I don't wish to ever see again. It's the one day a year we're guaranteed to see her otherwise. Neither of my other sisters goes now for the same reason. It's also lovely to be freed of sitting around doing bugger all after the delightful frenzy of opening presents - often descending into watching the Eastenders schmaltzy Christmas special, not even playing board games. Literally doing nothing but break for huge amounts of food during the day.
Now we measure our christmases not by much - by eating, opening presents, and watching things on TV (including Dr Who!) but we do so on our own terms. Eating filet mignon this year with what's to be a lovely gravy and lots of other things. Enjoying eachother's company and not feeling forced to spend a day doing bugger all on someone else's terms whilst with someone we've got no interest in seeing being there.
My mum takes it surprisingly well. And I do go down very often throughout the year other than this.
Favourite holiday-holiday memory...: Probably anything concerning Cape Town. Walking on 'our' beach (possibly the night the sea was all churned up and stormy and when the baby seal found itself parked on the shore (it lived)). or climbing Table Mountain. or walking around Cape Point (not the time we were harassed by baboons!).
Say what you like, but I'm not picking the canal boat holiday with my mother in law.
What are you hoping to find under the tree this year?
A hunky man. This will only work if I don't get my way to get a real one that drops needles on him.
Next up is Mrs Dolittle's column. As you can probably guess from her pseudonym, Mrs Dolittle talks to the animals. Not for her, however, the time-honoured tradition of talking to an animal by vocalising speech sounds, waiting for it to meow, bark or squeak, and then cooing "oh, he thinks he's people!" No, Mrs Dolittle communicates with animals psychically. She meditates quietly and tunes into what animals are thinking. She goes into a trance to tap into your pet’s thought processes. She brain-rapes them, essentially. Let's not sugarcoat this.
This month, Mrs Dolittle is forcibly inserting her mind into a hen.
Or rather, several hens, starting with Henry who tells Mrs D about how wonderful it is to submit to her partner, the cockerel Bertie (who , Mrs D notes with with stunning insight, 'is rather cocky'). 'The hens accepted that their cockerel was the boss,' she says admiringly.
She moves on to a broody hen, Francine, sitting on a clutch of eggs, who has a 'feeling of relaxed purpose’. Mrs Dolittle asks her if she’s bored and gets the reply ‘Not boring at all. Youngster to hatch, very important.’ So charmed is Mrs D by this ‘wonderful experience’, she tells us she will communicate with her whenever she is stressed.
Through Mrs Dolittle, C:IF is promoting its sly anti-feminist agenda that women should submit to their men and will never be happier than when fulfilling their maternal duties. C:IF wants us barefoot and pregnant and chained to the wall of the barn.
Ignoring this misogyny, I pressed on. There is a lack of chickens in south London so I chose to commune with an animal more commonly found here: a squirrel. Specifically, Ceiling Squirrel, who lives in our loft and likes to scrabble around noisily in the evenings.
Earlier this evening, I sat back on the sofa, closed my eyes, and waited. Sure enough, within minutes there was a tell-tale pattering and thumping overhead. 'Hello?' I thought very hard. 'HELLO?' Nothing. I wondered if Ceiling Squirrel had heard me and was translating my thoughts into Squirrelese and forming a response. This could be slow. This could be like using chat rooms on a dial-up connection in 1995. From up above, nothing but the sound of tiny paws scuttling around. Thump. Bang. Clamber, scramble, tumble, CRASH.
'I wish you would be quiet, Ceiling Squirrel!' I thought loudly.
And suddenly, Ceiling Squirrel came though. 'No, you don't,' he psychically replied, 'because that would mean I was dead. Then you'd have to deal with my stinking rotten corpse. FUCK YOU. I’m going to fuck shit up in here until the end of your tenancy.'
I ended the connection. No-one needs a squirrel cursing directly into their brain. Some people may see this exchange as me projecting my thoughts about our loft-dwelling pest. I assure you, it is not. Ceiling Squirrel spoke to me. There is no real evidence for this, but it is a fact.
CONCLUSIONS
I need to tell the landlord about the You Know
What in the You Know Where. (Shh. He can hear you.)
What's your guilty television pleasure?
My television is innocent until proven otherwise.
I just wrote a paragraph about how rubbish I am at blogging, but it was so rubbish that I deleted it.
You'll thank me when you're older.
What's your guilty television pleasure?
I've just got Freeview, so at the moment it's watching Beauty and the Geek on a Saturday morning. Also Judge Judy. and Sally Jesse Raphael... and more Friends and Scrubs than any normal person can take.
Thankfully, I still have 4OD - channel 4 repeats on the internet - and I am loving Cast Offs at the moment. What a fab series.
Christine Stockall is employed to do rubbish smudgy pencil drawings of people who have appeared to her, and
BACK ON THE FLOOR, BINKY.
Conclusion: not all dreams are messages from the other side. In fact, none of them are.
Tomorrow: Following Mrs Doolittle's advice, I try to psychically commune with an animal.
I choose the man who, in a nearly empty carriage, came and took the seat next to me. I was so enraged by this clear breach of the unwritten rules of carriage seating (everybody knows you always take the position diagonally opposite first. Everybody!) that I had to pretend to get off at Putney just so I could move to another seat.
Now I'm going to have to make myself some toast just to calm myself down.
