When I awoke yesterday morning being Christmas Day, ClassicFM had turned itself ‘off’ and Radio4 had taken over and we were treated to a service broadcast from St. Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds. Now despite the fact that our family moved from Harrogate to Leeds in 1963 I did not live in Leeds for a long period because I subsequently ‘escaped’ from my family’s orbit as it were to go off to London for a job at the Central Office of Information. So my only connections with St. Anne’s cathedral are incredibly slight but I do have one abiding memory. The father of the girl who was my best friend in Leeds was to marry was a chorister at St. Annes and, at his daughter’s wedding and having a fine voice, he sang ‘Panis Angelicus’ and his rendition of it is one of those things that is lodged in my memory. I do get the impression that the broadcasters try hard on Christmas morning to transmit carols which reflect the ‘true’ spirit of Christmas and hence are carols reflecting the gospel story. At times, we also hear mediaeval carols which always have a particular and reflective character to them, a world apart from ‘God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen’ which I think is a carol that I least like to hear. We have woken up this morning to a particularly cold and icy blast which seems to be sweeping across the country. Some people of a particularly hardy disposition will have a traditional swim somewhere on Christmas Day but the weather conditions are so adverse in the morning that many of these events are being postponed. Blustery conditions have already prompted the cancellation of numerous swimming events planned for Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Organisers of the Coverack swim in Cornwall said the annual event has been postponed until New Year’s Day to ensure everyone’s safety, while the Start Bay Inn, in Devon, said it was really sad to announce its Boxing Day swim had been cancelled due to rough seas. Elsewhere in the country, temperatures are expected to peak around 7C in the North East of England and 6C in the South East. On Christmas Day, it is traditional for political party leaders to transmit Christmas Day messages and, in the UK, these are generally of a not particularly partisan nature but like to reflect messages of goodwill and hopes for a more prosperous future. But of course the USA is such a different country under the Trump regime and I was not very surprised when I read of Donald Trump’s message to the country. Donald Trump told children he would not let a ‘bad Santa’ infiltrate the US, as he took part in a long-standing Christmas tradition. Sat by a Christmas tree at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, the president and first lady took calls from youngsters who had dialled into the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), which tracks Santa’s sleigh around the globe every Christmas Eve. When asked by two children, aged four and 10 from Oklahoma, why Santa is being tracked, Mr Trump replied: ‘We want to make sure that he is not infiltrated, that we are not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.’ The notion of a ‘bad’ Santa could only have come from the distorted imagination of the current American president and no doubt will be seized upon by psychoanalysts across the USA as a further sign of Trump’s advancing dementia. Children of a young age (say 2-6) generally have a comprehensive belief in the Santa Claus myth and really do believe that their presents have been left by this itinerant figure but it must be older siblings who eventually spill the beans to their younger brothers and sisters that Santa Claus is not ‘real’. Having said that I have a sort of Christmas cad which I keep in my Christmas card collection and bring out each year as a source of amusement. It shows Rudolph on his mobile whilst the sledge has run into a rock and has broken one of its runners whilst Santa Claus is seen as kicking the ground in frustration. The card reads ‘What can I say? Weather’s crap, sledge is buggered, Fatty’s in a strop – just another Christmas really’ and always brings a smile to the lips each Christmas time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Being Christmas Day morning, my son and daughter-in-law were with me as it was the first Christmas spent as a family since Meg’s death last May, My daughter-in-law and I are both attending Tai Chi classes so were spent some time with each comparing and contrasting the various moves that we make in our separate classes. Meanwhile, our son started seeing to the lamb shanks that we had decided to have this Christmas as a marked alternative to our normal fare of beef and evidently avoiding turkey altogether. I prepared a starter which was plain and traditional, being gravlax salmon on a slice of buttered brown bread with a few sald accompaniments and garnishes. Then for our main course we had the lamb shanks with some roasted potatoes, carrot and swede mash, honey roasted parsnips and the inevitable sprouts (incluing some novelty purple ones). This was all very tasted and worked absolutely as meticulously planned. For sweet, though, we had a bowl of dessert that has been bought from Aldi but this was actually a massive disappointment as it seemed to be masses of synthetic whipped cream on the top, with a serving of custard and what seemed to be semi liquid jam filling on the bottom. As the other two elements of the meal had been pretty wonderful, we did not mind to much about the disappointment of the sweet but as advertised as a sherry trifle, it ran near to a contravention of the Trade Descriptions Act. My daughter-in-law had brought along a rather super collection of Christmas crackers that contained within them a series of pub quiz type questions and puzzles such as could be answered by 90%, 50%, 30$ or 10% of the population and we amuse ourselves by working through these as we finished off our meal. The rest of the day was finished off with rather standard Christmas fare on the TV with some classic comedy from dad’s army and the usual collection of one time block buster films like ‘Jaws’ . As always at this time of year, I quite like it when Christmas Day itself is actually over and can start to relax and enjoy the few days after Christmas either doing nothing of another real significance or keeping I touch with old friends though a combination of text calls, emails or telephone calls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I awoke yesterday morning being Christmas Day, ClassicFM had turned itself ‘off’ and Radio4 had taken over and we were treated to a service broadcast from St. Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds. Now despite the fact that our family moved from Harrogate to Leeds in 1963 I did not live in Leeds for a long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7931,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7930\/revisions\/7931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}