December 31: New Year's Eve Customs

10 New Year's Eve/Hogmanay customs from around the world. Happy New Year.

1. Hogmanay is the word for New Year in Scotland. Traditional foods eaten on this day include bannocks, shortbread, black buns, and ankersocks (a type of Gingerbread). In the Highlands, Cheese was believed to have magical properties. A slice of Christmas cheese was preserved - if it had a hole in it, it was known as the Laomacha. Anyone who lost their way at any time during the following year had only to look through the hole to discover where they were. In the Netherlands the traditional New Year's Eve food is oil-dumpling.
2. “Ringing In the New Year" is a popular saying in the modern world. Welcoming the new year by making lots of noise is a tradition dating back to pagan times. A traditional Hogmanay celebration in Scotland would include rattling pots and pans to see the old year off and welcome the new. Today, people ring bells, blow horns, and rattle rattles. In Wales, people believed the Cwn Annwn, or Underworld Hounds run through the air at midnight looking for victims to carry off. Pots and pans were banged to drive them away. In Germany people would make a lot of noise to keep demons and evil spirits away on this night.
3. Going from house to house to visit your neighbours is a big thing on New Year's Eve in many places. In Scotland, it's called First Footing. In Denmark young people go around pounding on their friends' front doors. They throw shards of pottery, collected throughout the year, against the sides of houses. In Greece children go from door to door singing; traditionally, they carry an Apple, an Orange, a paper ship, a paper star and a green rod from a cornel-tree. They tap family members on the back with the rod for luck. The householders give them treats.
4. On New Year's Eve in the Highlands and Islands they struck the walls of houses with clubs; this was believed to keep fairies and evil spirits away. Houses were decorated with Holly to keep the fairies out. It was believed that if a boy were whipped with holly it meant he would live for as many years as the drops of Blood drawn.
5. It was the tradition to keep the Fire, which was usually put out at night, alight all through New Year's night. Only a friend might approach the sacred blaze. Candles would be kept burning in the house. If the fire went out, it boded ill for the coming year. In some places there were fire festivals, such as Swinging the Fireballs in Stonehaven, Scotland. In Northumberland, New Year's Eve saw the Allendale Baal Fire Festival Tar Barrel Burning, when people walk down the street with blazing tar barrels on their heads; some of which are used to light a bonfire.
6. It's probably mentioning a more modern observance here. 31 December is Check the Smoke Alarms Day, when you should make sure your smoke detectors are working properly. Ideally before the Swinging of the Fireballs.
7. December 31 is St Sylvester’s Day when, if young women looked in the mirror at midnight, they'd see a vision of their future husband. Other customs of the day included weather prediction – whether the following year would be a good one or not depended on the direction the wind was blowing in. In the Tyrol, men dressed as Bears and danced in the streets. Any woman whose shoulder was touched by the revellers would be pregnant within the year.
8. John Wesley introduced the December 31 watchnight service to Methodists; other denominations took it up and it is now a regular service at most churches.
9. At the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve, while holding money in one hand, kneel and pray and you will have money for the rest of the year.
10. In other superstitions, wood cut on either of the last two days of the year will not rot or get woodworm; but it is an unlucky day for a child to be born and, along with the 31^st of any month, an unlucky day to plant anything.

Top Ten posts of the year

Everyone's doing their top ten of the year right now, so here are the top ten most viewed Topical Tens posts of 2018:

10. Eckhart Tolle  Quotes (16 Feb)
9. Martin Luther King Jr  (15 Jan)
8. Brussels sprouts (31 Jan)
7. Postage stamps (6 May)
6. Rainbows  (3 April)
5. Pass Gas Day (Farting) (7 Jan)
4. Bedfordshire (28 Nov)
3. Psychics jokes (20 Feb)
2. Prosecco  (3 Aug)
1. Rosa Parks (4 Feb)




FYI the top 20 most viewed topics since the blog began is as follows:

20. Pass Gas Day (Farting)
19. Wrens
18. George McDonald Quotes
17. Oman
16. Feast of the Immaculate Conception
15. Quotes about Christmas
14. St Paul's Cathedral
13. Puerto Rico
12. Beavers 
11. Toilets
10. Bedfordshire
9. Sloths
8. Psychics Jokes
7. Turtles/tortoises
6. Botswana
5. Prosecco 
4. Georgia O'Keeffe
3. Vampires
2. Rosa Parks
1. Pandas 

30 December: The Monkees

Two members of the 60s boyband the Monkees, Michael Nesmith and Davy Jones were born on this date. Here are some things you might not know, or remember, about the band.

1. While the members of the group were all musicians who could play instruments and write songs, they were originally brought together as actors for a TV series about a fictional rock and roll group. The creators of the show were Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, and they'd been inspired by The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night.
2. The recruitment ad for the show read “Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank's types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.” Rafelson later revealed that “Must come down for interview” actually meant that candidates shouldn't turn up high on drugs.
3. 437 young men applied. Contrary to a persistent rumour, Charles Manson was not one of them. He was in prison at the time. The final four chosen were Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. Of those four, only Nesmith had actually seen the advert. The rest were told about the opportunity by their agents or friends. In Tork's case, the musician Stephen Stills. Nesmith showed up at the audition with his laundry. He wore a woollen hat to keep his hair out of his eyes when he rode his motorcycle, which became part of his screen attire, although his early nickname of "Wool Hat" was soon dropped.
4. Mike Nesmith's mother Bette Nesmith Graham invented Liquid Paper, a kind of correction fluid.
5. Englishman Davy Jones was a former jockey who had turned to musical theatre. He'd played the Artful Dodger in the stage show Oliver! and as such, had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on the same night as the Beatles debut on American TV. Despite being British, Jones had no idea at that time who the Beatles even were and had never even heard any of their songs. The main reason he watched them with interest was so he could learn how to make girls scream the way they did. In the Monkees, he was cast as “the cute one”, loosely based on Paul McCartney.
6. It's no coincidence that the character Chekov in Star Trek looks a bit like Davy Jones. Gene Roddenberry, having noticed how popular Jones had become, based the appearance of that character on him so Star Trek would appeal to a younger audience. Another consequence of Davy Jones's popularity was that another British musician whose name was David Robert Jones, decided he would have to change his name in order to differentiate himself from Davy Jones in the Monkees. So he called himself David Bowie.
7. Being real musicians and more than capable of performing, the band released a string of best selling records and went on tour. On one of their tours, their opening act was Jimi Hendrix, who Micky and Peter had seen at the Monterey Pop Festival and been impressed by. However, their audience of teenage girls weren't quite ready for an act like Hendrix and actually booed him, so Hendrix quit after seven shows.
8. As well as acting and performing, two of the band, Peter and Micky also directed episodes. Peter used his full name in the director’s credit: Peter H. Thorkelson. Mike was a songwriter too. He'd already released an album under the name Michael Blessing. One of his songs, which appeared on the album, became Linda Ronstadt's first hit, Different Drum.
9. The TV show ran for two seasons. The first was a big hit but by the second, people had figured out the Monkees were a manufactured band, resulting in some serious criticism. NBC tried to re-invent the show by making the band less clean-cut looking and more like hippies, but that backfired as their young fans stopped watching. The series was cancelled in 1968. The Monkees released more records after that, but they didn't sell as well. They made a film, entitled Head, in 1968 but it was a box office flop. That said, both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones asked for private screenings of the movie.
10. Many sources say that the Monkees sold more records than the Rolling Stones and the Beatles in 1967. However, according to Wikipedia, that wasn't true – Mike Nesmith later admitted he made that factoid up for an interview with an Australian reporter. Nor was it true that Mike punched the wall next to musical director Don Kirshner's face because he didn't want to perform the song Sugar Sugar (later a hit for the Archies). While the band and Kirshner didn't get on and had some serious arguments, and the wall punching incident did happen, with Mike saying, “That could have been your face,” the argument was not about Sugar Sugar.

December 29: Radio Luxembourg

On this date in 1929, Radio Luxembourg was created when a licence to operate a commercial radio broadcasting franchise from the Grand Duchy was awarded to the group of broadcasters which became the Luxembourg Broadcasting Company (Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Radiodiffusion), identified on the air as Radio Luxembourg. I remember it as a pop music station in the 1970s, but there's more to it than that. Here are 10 things you might not know about Radio Luxembourg.

1. The whole thing started in 1923 when amateur Radio enthusiasts François and Marcel Anen installed a transmitter in the attic of their house, 28, rue Beaumont in Luxembourg City. By 1924, they were broadcasting regular music programmes, mostly of military music, for people in Luxembourg. In 1929, a commercial licence was granted.
2. Most of the early broadcasts were in Luxembourgish, but there were German, French and English programmes as well. The attic studio was host to orchestras playing live Music. The station also broadcast sports results.
3. In the late 1920s and 1930s programmes aimed at the British Isles were broadcast on the Long Wave Band. The BBC and British Government accused the broadcaster of being a 'Pirate'. During this period programmes included a broadcast sponsored by the Littlewoods Football Pools company and the League of Ovaltineys as well as recorded music shows.
4. During World War II the station was closed down by the Luxembourg Government and the frequency taken over by the occupying German forces. They used it to broadcast propaganda to the UK in English. One of the voices of their propaganda station was William Joyce, referred to by the British Public as ‘Lord Haw Haw’. At the end of the war the Americans took it over for a while, also using it to broadcast their messages.
5. By the 1950s, the station was broadcasting on the frequency many of us remember – medium wave 208 metres. Music was taking a bit of a back seat with the prgrammes heavily featuring quiz shows, serial dramas and religious programmes. Some of the shows ended up on “mainstream” radio and television - Take Your Pick with Michael Miles, Double Your Money with Hughie Green, Dr Kildare and Perry Mason being cases in point. The Adventures of Dan Dare, "Pilot of the future" was broadcast on Radio Luxembourg, too. There was still music, including the Top Twenty which aired once a week, hosted by Pete Murray.
6. The BBC and Radio Luxembourg weren't exactly on the best of terms. Often, stars who fell out with the BBC for whatever reason would move over to Radio Luxembourg. One such was Vera Lynn, who objected to the BBC wanting her to sing more upbeat songs. She signed a contract with Radio Luxembourg which not only allowed her to sing what she liked, they paid her more, as well. Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, a comedy show which the BBC axed in 1950 found a home in Luxembourg until the BBC relented and brought it back. Neither station ever mentioned the existence of the other.
7. Not all the music shows on radio Luxembourg were made in Luxembourg. During the 1950s and 1960s, some of the shows were pre-recorded in London, something most listeners weren't aware of. They thought the DJ was actually in Luxembourg playing the records live.
8. By 1963, it had become a record playing station, mostly aimed at the teenage market. Older listeners and young families had by and large migrated to watching television.
9. Many of the DJs became household names. Alan Dell, Keith Fordyce, Alan Freeman, David Jacobs, Brian Matthew, Pete Murray, Jimmy Young, Paul Burnett, Dave Cash, Noel Edmonds, Kenny Everett, Johnny Walker, Peter Powell, Tony Prince, Stuart Henry and Mike Read, to name but a few.
10. Radio Luxembourg stopped broadcasting on 208 on 30 December 1991. The last record played was Van Morrison's In the Days Before Rock and Roll, which mentions Radio Luxembourg in the lyrics.

28 December: The Number 28

On the 28th day of the month, 10 things you didn't know about the number 28.

1. 28 is the second perfect number. A perfect number is one where its divisors add up to the number. 28's divisors are 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14.
2. It is the atomic number of nickel.
3. In non-leap years, February has 28 days – the shortest month of the year.
4. The surface of the Sun takes 28 days to rotate at its equator, as viewed from Earth.
5. The human menstrual cycle is 28 days long.
6. There are 28 dominoes in a standard domino set. Staying with games, in India there is a card game called twenty-eight, a trick taking game for four players.
7. The London Transport 28 bus route covers Harrow Road, Kilburn Lane, Great Western Road, Elgin Avenue, Westbourne Park Station, Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill Gate Station, High Street Kensington Station, The Design Museum, Kensington Olympia, Fulham Town Hall and Wandsworth Town Hall.
8. The Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, a large us military transport plane, has 28 wheels.
9. In the I-Ching, the 28th kua means Excess, meaning there may be too much of a particular thing. The symbol is a flooded forest – the forest needs water to grow, but too much Water is a bad thing. Therefore, if a person is seeing the number 28 everywhere, it means there is an excess of something in their life and they need to seek balance.
10. In numerology, people born on the 28^th are confident, independent and self-motivated. They are natural leaders and enjoy debate and making plans for exciting new experiences. They may, in spite of this, dislike change.

27 December: St John the Divine

December 27 is the feast day of St John the Divine, Apostle and Evangelist, the "beloved disciple" of Jesus.

1. He was born in Galilee in about AD 6 and was the son of Zebedee and Salome. His brother James was also one of the Apostles.
2. Jesus referred to John and James as "Boanerges," meaning "sons of thunder." Although they were usually calm and gentle by nature, when really pushed they could display violent tempers, such as the time when they wanted to call down fire from heaven to punish the Samaritan towns that did not accept Jesus.
3. Saint John is the patron of love, loyalty, friendships, authors, booksellers, burn-victims, poison-victims, art-dealers, editors, publishers, scribes, examinations, scholars and theologians. Saint John's attributes are a book (his gospel), a serpent in a chalice (from when he was forced to drink poison), a cauldron (from when he was boiled in oil) and an eagle, symbolising the heights he rose to in his gospel.
4. John is known as the author of four books in the New Testament – his gospel, three epistles, and Revelation. However, there are theologians who dispute his authorship of two of the letters, believing them to be written by another John.
5. Saint John refers to himself in his gospel as "the disciple whom Jesus loved," or "the Beloved Disciple". None of the other gospels refer to him that way.
6. While most of the disciples went into hiding during the crucifixion, John was there. It is John who, from the cross, Jesus charged with looking after His mother.
7. What John did after that is somewhat uncertain. Tradition states that he went to Ephesus and was banished from there to Patmos, which seems likely since banishment was a common punishment for prophecy, and especially prophecies that the Roman authorities saw as a threat. It was on Patmos that he wrote the Book of Revelation.
8. It's believed that John was the only Apostle not to die a martyr. He lived to the age of about 92. This isn't to say that the Roman authorities didn't do their best to kill him. One legend says he was sentenced to death by being boiled in oil, but emerged from the cauldron unscathed. Another says he was ordered to drink poison as a test of his faith, and he survived that, too.
9. At the end of the 2nd century, Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, claims that John’s tomb is at Ephesus, and that John was a priest and a teacher in the region. Two different sites in Ephesus claimed to be the site of his tomb until eventually, one was officially accepted as such and became a shrine. It is said that dust from St John's tomb has healing properties.
10. In art, John is often portrayed as androgynous or even feminine. It's said he became a disciple when he was a young man, which could explain why he is often portrayed without a beard. Some historians believe that the feminine portrayals of John, some even showing him with long hair and even small breasts, might have been so women would have a disciple they could relate to. There were also men in Medieval times who favoured a highly emotional style of worship, not seen as very masculine, so it may be that the artists portrayed John as a disciple they could relate to.

26 December: National Candy Cane Day

Boxing Day is also National Candy Cane Day. A candy cane is a sugar stick, bent into the shape of a crook. They are usually red and white stripes and taste of peppermint, but other colours and flavours may be available as well. Here are ten things you may not know about these Christmas treats.

1. They've been around, in some form or other, since 1670. The legend has it that the then choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral in Germany got tired of bored children making a noise during the Christmas Nativity service. So he ordered candy sticks from a local sweet maker to keep them quiet.
2. They weren't just sweets, though. They were sweets with a message. With the top bent into the shape of a shepherd's crook they served to remind the children of the shepherds in the Christmas story. The sinless life of Jesus was represented by the White colour. Some say, too, that if you turn the cane upside down you get a letter J, for Jesus.
3. It might be an obvious conclusion to draw that the Red in a candy cane represented the Blood of Christ, but the original canes were plain white. We know this because images on cards from the 19^th century show them as being completely white. The red was only added in the early 20^th century. No one is sure exactly when or why the red stripes got added in.
4. German immigrants brought the tradition to the USA. The first reference to candy canes there dates to 1847, when August Imgard of Wooster, Ohio, decorated his Christmas Tree with them.
5. Back in the 1800s candy canes were made by hand in a labour intensive process in which the canes had to be bent by hand at the very end. Up to 20% of the canes would break at this point. In the early 1920s the Bunte Brothers filed one of the earliest patents for candy cane making machines, but it wasn't until 1957 that Gregory Harding Keller patented a machine that could automatically twist the candy into its characteristic shape.
6. Most candy canes are around five inches long, weigh about half an ounce, and contain about 50 calories and no fat or cholesterol – but a whole lot of sugar.
7. An exception is the one built in Geneva, Illinois in 2012 by chef Alain Roby. His candy cane was a record breaking 51 feet long, and required about 900 pounds of sugar to make. Once the record had been verified, the cane was smashed up into pieces so people could take a bit of it home. Most sources I looked at cited this as the official Guinness World Record for the largest candy cane ever. I did try to find this record on the actual Guinness World record site, aware the record could easily have been smashed by now, but my search for candy cane brought up hundreds of irrelevant results about candy in general. So as far as I can ascertain, this was the biggest candy cane ever at time of writing.
8. Surveys have shown that 54% of children eat a candy cane by sucking it while 24% (most often boys) crunch it right away.
9. Approximately 1.2 billion candy canes are made every year. 90% of them are sold between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
10. If you want candy canes on your tree but don't want the temptation of a sugary sweet, you can make slightly smaller ones from red and white pipe cleaners. Simply take a red pipe cleaner and a white one, twist them together and bend the top, and you have a sugar free candy cane for your tree.

25 December: Turkeys

10 things you might not know about your Christmas dinner.

1. Turkeys belong to the genus Meleagris, which is native to the Americas. Not Turkey. The name turkey either originates from settlers in America mistaking wild turkeys for guinea fowl, which were imported via Constantinople, or because in Europe, turkeys were imported from the Americas via Turkey. So what do they call a turkey in Turkey? Hindi, meaning “India”. In French, the word for turkey is dinde "from India", and in Arabian countries, Russia and Poland, the word also suggests an Indian origin for the bird.
2. The collective noun for a group of turkeys is a rafter. A male turkey is called a gobbler, a female is called a hen, and a baby turkey is called a chick, poult or turklette.
3. How do you tell a male turkey from a female? The male is bigger and has Red, Purple, Green, copper, bronze, and gold feathers. They are the ones which make the gobbling sound. If all else fails, you can tell a turkey's gender from its poo. Males produce spiral-shaped poo and females produce poo shaped like a letter J.
4. The turkey was sacred in ancient Mexican cultures. Mayans, Aztecs and Toltecs referred to the turkey as the ‘Great Xolotl’, viewing them as ‘jewelled birds’.
5. A wild turkey can fly at up to 55 mph, although only for short distances. Domestic turkeys can't fly at all, because they've been selectively bred to be larger than their wild cousins.
6. The bare skin on a turkey’s throat and head varies in colour depending on its level of excitement and stress. When excited, a male turkey’s head turns Blue, when ready to fight it turns red.
7. The long fleshy object over a male’s beak is called a snood. Studies have shown that the health and reproductive success of a male turkey is linked to the size of its snood. A 1997 study in the Journal of Avian Biology found that female turkeys prefer males with long snoods and that snood length can predict the winner of a competition between two males.
8. There are approximately 5,500 feathers on an adult wild turkey, including 18 tail feathers making up the tail fan.
9. Part of the turkey’s stomach, the gizzard, contains tiny stones to help it digest its food.
10. Benjamin Franklin is often said to have wanted the wild turkey to be the national bird of the USA, rather than the bald eagle; but one according to the Smithsonian's article on turkeys, he never actually proposed the turkey as the symbol, only praised it as being “a much more respectable bird” than the Bald eagle.

24 December: Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes, entrepreneur, aviator and eccentric may have been born on this date in 1905. I say “may” because there's a discrepancy between his baptism record, which gives his birthdate as 24 September, and an affadvit birth certificate signed by his aunt in 1941, which claims Christmas Eve. Whatever the truth, Hughes himself said his birthday was on Christmas Eve.

1. He may have inherited his obsessive compulsive tendencies and germ phobia from his mother – she was afraid her son would contract polio and wouldn't let him have any friends. He became interested in science and technology instead, and built himself a wireless transmitter at the age of eleven and a motorised Bicycle at the age of twelve.
2. His father was a millionaire. He had invented the “Hughes Rock Easter,” a self-sharpening oil well drill bit and made a fortune from it. Howard's mother died when he was 17 and his father two years later, so Howard inherited a fortune at the age of 19 and built on it.
3. When his father died, he dropped out of college and set off for Hollywood and a career making films. Films would be one of his great obsessions in later life when he'd lost his marbles. In 1958, he embarked on a four month long binge watch in a film studio. He never left the studio during this time. He sat there watching films naked, eating nothing but chicken, Chocolate and Milk. His favourite film was Ice Station Zebra, which he watched at least 150 times. He even bought a TV movie channel and ordered them to play that particular film on a loop, over and over again.
4. He took his first flying lesson at 14 and would go on to be a trailblazer in the field of aviation. His achievements included flying across America in a record breaking (for the time) nine hours, 27 minutes and 10 seconds in 1936. A year later, he smashed his own record, completing the journey in seven hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds, at an average speed of 322mph. He broke the landplane speed record in 1935, reaching 352mph in the Hughes H-1 Racer. He also broke the record for flying around the world.
5. He built a plane out of wood. This plane, nicknamed the Spruce Goose (even though the wood it was made from was Birch), had the largest wingspan of any aeroplane before or since. It was made from wood because it was originally intended to be a flying boat during World War II and Hughes wanted to use non-strategic materials to build it. However, it only flew once, for a single mile, in 1947 and only reached a height of 70ft (21m).
6. He married twice and dated any number of actresses, including Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, Ginger Rogers, Janet Leigh, Rita Hayworth and Joan Fontaine. His first wife was Ella Botts Rice, who he married at 19. She moved with him to Los Angeles but filed for divorce after four years. His second marriage was to Jean Peters. They eventually lived in separate houses with Hughes nevertheless trying to control her life by sending her thousands of memos and having her followed by his security staff even after the marriage ended.
7. He didn't take rejection well and could be quite vindictive to women who turned him down. Jean Simmons did, because she was married when Hughes came on to her. He did all he could to sabotage her career, and while under contract to him, he made sure she was treated badly on set. Once, he instructed director Otto Preminger to make sure her co-star Robert Mitchum to slap her hard in one scene. Mitchum turned and punched Preminger in the face, asking him if that’s how hard he wanted it.
8. As an engineer, he'd look for ways to improve things wherever he was. After a near fatal air crash after which Hughes was in hospital for weeks, he re-designed his hospital bed. The bed he designed became the prototype for hospital beds in use today. He also re-designed Jane Russell's Bra to accentuate her breasts. Russell actually hated the bra, though, and refused to wear it. She'd adjust her own bras to make it look as if she was wearing it. Hughes never knew this, because his staff never told him – they were too afraid of him.
9. Stan Lee based the Marvel character Tony Stark (Iron Man) on Howard Hughes.
10. If Howard Hughes was alive today, he'd almost certainly be diagnosed as severely OCD. Examples of his odd behaviour include arranging Peas in size order before he could eat them; insisting that staff serving him canned food must disinfect the can first and serve food in a bowl no-one had touched; wearing tissue boxes on his feet believing they protected him from germs; storing his pee in jars; not cutting his nails or Hair for weeks on end. Some have speculated that the reason for the latter eccentricity was an actual mental condition called allodynia which meant he felt pain from things which don't cause pain in people who don't suffer from it.

My Christmas Novella!

A Very Variant Christmas

Last year, Jade and Gloria were embroiled in a bitter conflict to win back their throne and their ancestral home. This year, Queen Jade and Princess Gloria want to host the biggest and best Christmas party ever in their palace. They invite all their friends to come and bring guests. Not even the birth of Jade's heir just before Christmas will stop them.

The guest list includes most of Britain's complement of super-powered crime-fighters, their families and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Gatecrashers, unexpected arrivals, exploding Christmas crackers and a kidnapping, for starters.

Far away in space, the Constellations, a cosmic peacekeeping force, have suffered a tragic loss. They need to recruit a new member to replace their dead colleague. The two top candidates are both at Jade and Gloria's party. The arrival of the recruitment delegation on Christmas Eve is a surprise for everyone; but their visit means one guest now faces a life-changing decision.

Meanwhile, an alliance of the enemies of various guests at the party has infiltrated the palace; they hide in the dungeon, plotting how best to get rid of the crime-fighters and the royal family once and for all. Problem is, they all have their own agendas and differences of opinion on how to achieve their aims.

Not to mention that this year, the ghosts who walk the corridors of the palace on Christmas Eve will be as surprised by the living as the living are by them.

Available from Createspace, Amazon and Amazon Kindle

23 December: Donna Tartt Quotes

Born this date in 1963, Donna Tartt US writer, author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch. 10 quotes from her.

1. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
2. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
3. I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
4. When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
5. Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
6. Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
7. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
8. Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
9. Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
10. There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial.

My Christmas Novella!

A Very Variant Christmas

Last year, Jade and Gloria were embroiled in a bitter conflict to win back their throne and their ancestral home. This year, Queen Jade and Princess Gloria want to host the biggest and best Christmas party ever in their palace. They invite all their friends to come and bring guests. Not even the birth of Jade's heir just before Christmas will stop them.

The guest list includes most of Britain's complement of super-powered crime-fighters, their families and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Gatecrashers, unexpected arrivals, exploding Christmas crackers and a kidnapping, for starters.

Far away in space, the Constellations, a cosmic peacekeeping force, have suffered a tragic loss. They need to recruit a new member to replace their dead colleague. The two top candidates are both at Jade and Gloria's party. The arrival of the recruitment delegation on Christmas Eve is a surprise for everyone; but their visit means one guest now faces a life-changing decision.

Meanwhile, an alliance of the enemies of various guests at the party has infiltrated the palace; they hide in the dungeon, plotting how best to get rid of the crime-fighters and the royal family once and for all. Problem is, they all have their own agendas and differences of opinion on how to achieve their aims.

Not to mention that this year, the ghosts who walk the corridors of the palace on Christmas Eve will be as surprised by the living as the living are by them.

Available from Createspace, Amazon and Amazon Kindle

22 December: Christmas Tree Lights Day

Today is Christmas Tree Lights Day. Here are 10 things you might not know about the lights on your tree.

1. As  Christmas Trees originated in Germany, so did Christmas tree lights, back in the 18^th century. In those days, the lights would be candles attached to the tree by melted wax or with pins.
2. Electric Christmas tree lights are an American invention, starting with Thomas Edison, who used a display of Christmas lights around his factory in 1880 to advertise his light bulbs.
3. The first person known to put electric lights on a Christmas tree was Edward H Johnson, vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company. His lights were custom made for the purpose.
4. The first US President to have Christmas tree lights was Grover Cleveland in 1895, which helped make them popular with the general public. The tradition of lighting the lights on the National Christmas Tree at the White House started with Calvin Coolidge in 1923.
5. In the UK, another name for Christmas lights is “fairy lights”. The first building in the world to be entirely lit by Electricity was the Savoy Theatre in London in 1881. Savoy owner Richard D'Oyly Carte went a step further in 1882 by incorporating miniature lights into the costumes of the fairies in his production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe. Hence fairy lights.
6. In 1900, only the rich could afford to put lights on their trees as it would cost around $2000 in today's money – people then didn't only have to pay for the lights but for a specialised electrician to install them. Pre-wired strings of lights that could be installed by the customers themselves were invented by General Electric in 1903.
7. To encourage sales of Christmas lights, General Electric organised contests for the best domestic Christmas light displays. Competition can still be quite fierce in neighbourhoods on both sides of the Atlantic, even when the only prize is your neighbours admitting you have a better light display than they do.
8. There are Guinness World Records relating to Christmas lights. The most lights on a tree, at time of writing, was 576 on a tree in Belgium in 2010 while the record for the most lights on an artificial tree is 570,546. This record was set by Universal Studios in Japan in 2017. The largest display of Christmas tree lights in terms of the number of trees was set by the Hallmark Channel in New York with a display containing 559 lit trees.
9. How do they get the lights to twinkle? It's actually quite simple. A strip of metal in the bulb melts as it heats up, breaking the circuit. As it cools, the metal solidifies and completes the circuit again, so the lights go on and off.
10. Where do Christmas tree lights go to die? A place called Shijiao, in China, the Christmas tree light recycling capital of the world. 20 million pounds of discarded tree lights end up there a year, where they are separated into their component parts – brass, Copper and plastic, and recycled into new objects and gadgets.

My Christmas Novella!

A Very Variant Christmas

Last year, Jade and Gloria were embroiled in a bitter conflict to win back their throne and their ancestral home. This year, Queen Jade and Princess Gloria want to host the biggest and best Christmas party ever in their palace. They invite all their friends to come and bring guests. Not even the birth of Jade's heir just before Christmas will stop them.

The guest list includes most of Britain's complement of super-powered crime-fighters, their families and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Gatecrashers, unexpected arrivals, exploding Christmas crackers and a kidnapping, for starters.

Far away in space, the Constellations, a cosmic peacekeeping force, have suffered a tragic loss. They need to recruit a new member to replace their dead colleague. The two top candidates are both at Jade and Gloria's party. The arrival of the recruitment delegation on Christmas Eve is a surprise for everyone; but their visit means one guest now faces a life-changing decision.

Meanwhile, an alliance of the enemies of various guests at the party has infiltrated the palace; they hide in the dungeon, plotting how best to get rid of the crime-fighters and the royal family once and for all. Problem is, they all have their own agendas and differences of opinion on how to achieve their aims.

Not to mention that this year, the ghosts who walk the corridors of the palace on Christmas Eve will be as surprised by the living as the living are by them.

Available from Createspace, Amazon and Amazon Kindle

21 December: Winter Solstice

Winter solstice, the longest night of the year, also known in the pagan wheel of the year as Yule, falls today. 10 things you might not know about this celebration. 

1. Yule is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Yula, which means Wheel of the Year.
2. In many traditions, virgin mothers give birth to sacred sons. Rhiannon to Pryderi; Isis to Horus; Demeter to Persephone. Not to mention that it's almost Christmas as well. The sun itself is said to be reborn on this day and the days start getting longer.
3. An old tradition many Witches and Pagans still observe is bringing in the Yule Log, once a centre of the Yule celebrations. The log should be lit on the eve of the solstice from the remains of the previous year's Yule log. It should light on the first try, and be kept burning for twelve hours, for luck. It was also customary to wish on the log.
4. Another custom was carrying a corn dolly from house to house while singing Carols.
5. Mistletoe played a part in pagan Yule traditions, too. Druids believed the plant had special powers, and enemies who met under mistletoe were required to lay down their weapons, greet each other, and honour a truce until the next day. It was also used in fertility rites. It was customary on this day for the chief Druid to climb a tree to cut down the mistletoe, while other Druids would stand below with a sheet to catch it in. The idea was that no mistletoe should touch the ground.
6. Houses would be decorated with greenery and lights.
7. In some traditions, this was seen as a dangerous time to be out and about. In the Orkney Islands, for example, it was said to be the night of the wild hunt, led by Odin on his eight-legged Horse.
8. In Iran, people would stay awake throughout the longest night of the year, keeping all the lights on, reading poetry to one another, waiting for the sun's triumphant return in the morning.
9. In Asia, tonight is the Dongzhi Festival, celebrating the return of positive energy. Families get together to eat Rice balls cooked in sweet or savoury broth, and sometimes brightly coloured.
10. Another name for the winter solstice is hibernal solstice. It occurs when one of the Earth's poles is at its furthest point from the sun. This occurs in December in the northern hemisphere and in June in the southern hemisphere.

See also Summer Solstice

My Christmas Novella!

A Very Variant Christmas

Last year, Jade and Gloria were embroiled in a bitter conflict to win back their throne and their ancestral home. This year, Queen Jade and Princess Gloria want to host the biggest and best Christmas party ever in their palace. They invite all their friends to come and bring guests. Not even the birth of Jade's heir just before Christmas will stop them.

The guest list includes most of Britain's complement of super-powered crime-fighters, their families and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Gatecrashers, unexpected arrivals, exploding Christmas crackers and a kidnapping, for starters.

Far away in space, the Constellations, a cosmic peacekeeping force, have suffered a tragic loss. They need to recruit a new member to replace their dead colleague. The two top candidates are both at Jade and Gloria's party. The arrival of the recruitment delegation on Christmas Eve is a surprise for everyone; but their visit means one guest now faces a life-changing decision.

Meanwhile, an alliance of the enemies of various guests at the party has infiltrated the palace; they hide in the dungeon, plotting how best to get rid of the crime-fighters and the royal family once and for all. Problem is, they all have their own agendas and differences of opinion on how to achieve their aims.

Not to mention that this year, the ghosts who walk the corridors of the palace on Christmas Eve will be as surprised by the living as the living are by them.

Available from Createspace, Amazon and Amazon Kindle

20 December: Christmas Cake

Christmas cake is also known as fruit cake and usually contains dried fruits such as raisins and usually some alcohol. Some things you might not know about Christmas cake:

1. The Romans didn't have Christmas, but they did have a cake similar to the Christmas cakes we eat today. They mixed pine nuts, barley mash, Pomegranate seeds, Raisins and honeyed Wine and shaped it into a cake they called “satura,” meaning a mixture of sweet and sour ingredients. The modern word “satire” is derived from this.
2. Christmas cake wasn't always eaten at Christmas. Originally, it would be saved for Twelfth Night. That we eat them at Christmas now is down to Oliver Cromwell, who banned feasting on Twelfth Night. Hence people would still make the cake, but they'd eat it at Christmas instead.
3. Another tradition was to keep some of the Christmas cake mixture and use it to make another cake at Easter.
4. According to Harper’s Index, a fruit cake is as dense as mahogany.
5. If you don't manage to polish off all the Christmas cake on Christmas Day, never fear. If it has been made using the correct preservatives and is properly stored, it can keep a long time. Not only could you eat it next Christmas, but up to 25 years later. This may be because of the alcohol content in the cake.
6. In Yorkshire, Christmas cake is eaten with Cheese. Wensleydale is a popular choice.
7. In Japan, “Christmas cake” was a slang term for a woman who wasn't married by the age of 25 (unsold after the 25^th), although there is less stigma attached to marrying later, if at all, these days.
8. As with Christmas pudding, it is a tradition to add a coin, such as a sixpence, to the cake mixture. The person who finds it is supposed to receive good luck (although breaking a tooth and having a trip to an emergency dentist is perhaps a meaning of the words “good luck” previously unknown to makind).
9. December is National Fruitcake Month.
10. Not everyone is fond of Christmas cake. It's almost like Marmite – people love it or hate it. In Manitou Springs, Colorado, some of the haters came up with the idea of an annual “Great Fruitcake Toss” on January 3rd. Although the event hasn't taken place for a few years, there is interest in reviving the tradition.

My Christmas Novella!

A Very Variant Christmas

Last year, Jade and Gloria were embroiled in a bitter conflict to win back their throne and their ancestral home. This year, Queen Jade and Princess Gloria want to host the biggest and best Christmas party ever in their palace. They invite all their friends to come and bring guests. Not even the birth of Jade's heir just before Christmas will stop them.

The guest list includes most of Britain's complement of super-powered crime-fighters, their families and friends. What could possibly go wrong?

Gatecrashers, unexpected arrivals, exploding Christmas crackers and a kidnapping, for starters.

Far away in space, the Constellations, a cosmic peacekeeping force, have suffered a tragic loss. They need to recruit a new member to replace their dead colleague. The two top candidates are both at Jade and Gloria's party. The arrival of the recruitment delegation on Christmas Eve is a surprise for everyone; but their visit means one guest now faces a life-changing decision.

Meanwhile, an alliance of the enemies of various guests at the party has infiltrated the palace; they hide in the dungeon, plotting how best to get rid of the crime-fighters and the royal family once and for all. Problem is, they all have their own agendas and differences of opinion on how to achieve their aims.

Not to mention that this year, the ghosts who walk the corridors of the palace on Christmas Eve will be as surprised by the living as the living are by them.

Available from Createspace, Amazon and Amazon Kindle