A return to the Christmas Carol Audit

For the first time in a while I went to several carol services this Christmas. I've previously blogged about which carols are most likely to be sung - my most recent post was in 2019. I went to four carol services this year, so felt that gave me a useful number of data sources. There was some significant variety as well.

The four singalong events were:

1. Carols in the Pub, at The Grange Pub in Cardiff, organised by Grace Church 
2. The Grange Gardens Carol Service, organised by the Cardiff Council Park Rangers in conjunction with Friends of Grange Gardens and other community groups. Music was provided by the brass band of the Grangetown Corps of the Salvation Army with input from Grace Church and Eglwys Anghor.
3. Christmas Eve midnight communion service at Christchurch, an Anglican Church in Bayston Hill, near Shrewsbury (where I was spending Christmas)
4. Christmas Day service at Barnabas Community Church in Shrewsbury

Carols in the Pub at The Grange

Services at Christchurch and Barnabas have featured in previous audits, so there is some consistency there. The formats were a bit different. Carols in the Pub featured an online song sheet, played in request order, with a reprise of the most popular songs. 

Grange Gardens

There were some new songs featured in the combined set lists of the services. These were mainly popular Christmas songs, like We Wish You a Merry Christmas and Jingle Bells. However, the Anghor church led a carol in Welsh at the Grange Gardens service, called Hwiangwrdd Mair (Suia'r Gwynt), which translates as Mary's Lullaby (Gentle Breeze). There are now over 40 carols and songs on my database, with 21 only featuring in one service. 

Christmas Eve midnight service

Joy to the World was a popular choice this year, featuring in three of the services. On Christmas Day we sang an 'updated' version with an additional chorus that was completely unnecessary. There were also a few more added lines in a 'bridge' in the song which borrowed the melody from Ode to Joy. This may have been an homage to the climactic scene at the end of the well known Christmas movie, Die Hard, but it irritated me. It's bad enough when people take it upon themselves to 'improve' classics, but then to cheat and use someone else's tune seems insultingly lazy.

Christmas Day service

Yet again, the most popular carol, featuring in all four services, was O Come All Ye Faithful. This was already the leading song in my little audit and has now extended its lead. In fact, of the 13 services I have listed on my spreadsheet, there was only one service where O Come All Ye Faithful didn't feature. 

Here is the top ten table, with this year's carols included:

Good Christians All Rejoice is a mainstay of the Christchurch midnight communion services - I have three of these services listed in my audit now and it has featured three times. In the Bleak Midwinter is my least favourite carol in the list. With any luck, some other carol will get really popular and replace it in the top ten!

See previous Christmas Carol audits along with over a decade of Christmas Card Audits on my dedicated page!

Star Wars Droid Factory Advent Calendar

For the second year in a row I was a very lucky boy and had a Star Wars Droid Factory advent calendar. The basic premise is every day you get pieces to build a festive-themed droid and you end up with a collection of droids by the time Christmas comes.

The advent calendar is designed to look like a sandcrawler - the iconic vehicle full of salvaged (ie stolen) droids in Star Wars: A New Hope.

The first piece out was a leg for an R2 unit, sporting a gingerbread-themed paint finish.

The complete R2 unit has already featured on my blog, but here he is again. He is carrying a tray of drinks like R2-D2 does on Jabba's sail barge in Return of the Jedi. 

I hope he's mixing egg nog, but surely in the Star Wars galaxy they would use blue milk so the nog is the wrong colour.

Gingerbread R2 was soon joined by a mate - a snowman version of BB-8 from The Force Awakens. 

I was highly amused one day to just get a pair of feet.

The feet belonged to a Gonk Droid, who was both wrapped up as a gift and sported a Santa hat.

Now, that's a possible Star Wars Christmas song. "Santa Gonky, slip a laser under the tree, for me, I've been an awful good droid, so hurry to the crawler tonight!"

Well, maybe not. 

I don't know the identity of this droid. It's large and stripey like a candy cane.

However, I did recognise the holidayfied version of B2EMO, who first appeared in the series Andor.

I'm not sure if he be too emo, but he does seem to have a fringe.

One day there was a complete droid - D-0 from one of the newer Disney-era films. If you didn't know it's name, don't feel bad. I had to look it up too.

I think they missed a trick with this. Painted brown with a red nose it would make a cute little Rudolph.

The final droid was a mystery. Literally. This is what was printed on the back of the calendar.

Well, I say a mystery but the little wheel on the middle leg and arms coming out of the head gave it away. I guessed it would be Chopper from Star Wars Rebels.

And it was!

The wreath doesn't sit easily and it interferes with the droid's little arms. But eventually I got it to pose for a photo. I think it's meant to be decorated as a penguin. I'm not certain though.

I added the droids from last year's advent calendar to the display as well. The final line up of 13 droids looks great.

Comparing this year to last year, there is more variety. The selection peaked with the first droid, gingerbread R2, but this year's Gonk droid had a much better pattern (and a Santa hat!) It was also cool to get BB-8 after getting his nemesis droid (BB-9E) last year.

I really enjoyed building these droids from the Droid Factory and with any luck a new sandcrawler will wend its way from the depths of the deserts of Tatooine in time for Christmas next year.

You might not be looking for your perfect Pokemon pal...

...but sooner or later they find you.

Everybody, meet Lechonk!

Book cover comedy - dinosaur edition

Here are a couple of book covers I spotted in a charity shop today that are crying out for humorous captions. 

This demure dinosaur is clearly saying "Who, me? Be the cover star?"

Meanwhile, this suggestive guy is saying "Hey, baby, do you like therapods? Yeah, you do!"

Neither book came home with me despite making me chuckle.

Add your own caption by leaving a comment!

The Longest Yarn

We arranged a pre-Christmas meet-up with Cathy's aunt and uncle and they suggested visiting The Longest Yarn, an exhibition in Tewkesbury Abbey. 

The Longest Yarn is an 80-scene knitted diorama of events around D-Day, including the beach invasions in Normandy, paratrooper landings, various battles and some re-creations of scenes from the film The Longest Day. 

The crafting on display was incredible. Some of the scenes are surprisingly graphic. There is one just called 'Dead Horses' featuring equine casualties. There are also some very moving scenes - the family with a baby born during the bombardment; a young girl giving flowers to a liberating American soldier moments before a shell struck and killed her; a dropped helmet on the beach.

I watched The Longest Day several times as a kid, even though it was a very long film and was in black and white. Several key scenes are recreated on the exhibition. A paratrooper snagged on the bell tower in St.Mere Eglise; Lord Lovat in his white jumper arriving at Pegasus Bridge; the nuns walking into the battle to bring medical assistance to the Free French forces at Ouistreham; an American platoon and a German platoon walking right past each other in the middle of the night. 

We had a personal connection to some of the events through Cathy's Grampy, Jim. He was in an airborne unit, although he ended up in one of the beach landings instead of being in a glider. (Because apparently they didn't have enough gliders.) It felt strange to think he had been through some of this and saw it for real. 

I didn't really know what to expect from this exhibition and the concept of knitted dioramas. But it turned out to be a very thoughtful tribute to the men and women of D-Day. 

Scary angel and pregnant Mary

I went to Tewkesbury Abbey today and saw a Nativity scene with a scary angel - it looked like one of the Weeping Angels from the most terrifying Doctor Who episode this century.

You may notice that Mary is pregnant and the manger only has a lamb in it. Well it's not Christmas Day yet, so Baby Jesus hasn't arrived!

Meanwhile, the Wise Men were halfway down the church, making their way to the holy crib.  I suspect they won't arrive until 6th January - which is still a decent pace for mannequins. 

Book of the Month - Orbital (Booker Prize winner!)

I bought Orbital by Samantha Harvey in Wolverhampton on our wedding anniversary back in September. It was marked as being on the Booker long list when I bought it. Shortly after I started reading it, it won!

I was attracted to the book by the premise - a team of astronauts completing a 24 hour cycle on board, orbiting the planet 16 times during that period. It felt like sciencey fiction rather than science-fiction, and it was intriguing. 

It has the added bonus of being a short book, but that didn't make it a fast or easy read. There is a deliberateness to the prose - I get the sense this is one of those books where the author lingered over every sentence and rewrote every paragraph. It certainly feels over-written. I've seen it described as 'would have been better as a poem' and there is a descriptive poetic quality to the language.

However, there are benefits in the way the prose mirrors the exacting over-engineered nature of the space station. Firstly, it slowed me down as a reader, forcing me into ponderous progress not unlike the astronauts struggling to keep artificial time in a scenario where time is essentially meaningless - it will be sunset or sunrise soon, they will see both in the next hour or so and then again in the hour after that. 

The second unexpected benefit is a sense of cool detachment. The astronauts are both inhabitants of Earth and not, so their perspective is suddenly wider in its compass, seeing the planet as a whole. 

However, this slowed down detachment gets tedious very quickly. To add to the dreamlike narrative, there is no direct speech. Conversations are reported on the same way as characters internal thoughts, the same way as flashbacks to Earth, the same way as the characters past experiences. The sentences are full of descriptors. Consider this passage and you will see what I mean:

"Blue becomes mauve becomes indigo becomes black, and night-time downs southern Africa in one. Gone is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel-overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains green and velvety like mould growth. Gone is a continent and here another sheer widow's veil of star-struck night." (p.91)

Exhausting, isn't it. 

Back when I was in school we had an English lesson discussing the difference between metaphors and similes. I count six (maybe seven) metaphors and one simile in that short section. And that's not even a complete paragraph. 

It's lovely, beautiful, evocative language that effectively replicates the grandeur of seeing a continent slip below your window as you sail past in low earth orbit. But, my goodness, it's draining to read. 

And the spaceship makes a complete orbit of the Earth every 90 minutes. Each chapter of the book is an orbit. There are regular updates of which parts of the planet the space station is travelling over. I like geography but even I grew tired of reading lists of countries, continents and seas. 

Amid all the metaphors there are the stories of the individuals in the team of astronauts. Two main stories dominate the book - one personal, the death of a parent; the other a personal connection to a disastrous typhoon that the astronauts observe building up into a colossal fury unleashed on part of the world that isn't built to withstand typhoons. 

As they go about their various jobs and tasks, ranging from examining the effects of life in space on mice through to taking their own blood samples to examine the effects of space on them, we learn about each character's drive to get into space. We discover their inspiration, their similar personalities that carried them through astronaut and cosmonaut programmes. They have wildly different origin stories but their common humanity shines through.

The base shared humanness of the crew is the central underlying theme of the book - that actually we are all astronauts, travelling through the hostile barrenness of space on an amazing spaceship that happens to be a planet called Earth. The theme that we should be taking better care of this precious home of ours permeates the book, with a hard contrast to the cold vast emptiness of space. (I did smile at the description of the Voyager probes "wimbling into wayless dark".)

There is an urgency to that message that contrasts cleverly with the pace of the story. The detached astronauts orbiting overhead can see that we are one world, that frontiers are stupid, useless, arbitrary things that can't be seen from space. But can those of us locked to land see it too? And see it in time to avert disaster? That's the question that Orbital is really asking.

Snack of the Month - M&Ms Crispy chocolate

First up, an announcement - I think this is going to be my last regular snack of the month post for a while. I've been blogging monthly snack posts for four years now so it feels like it's time for a break.

So, let's make it a fun, Christmassy one. This is another snack that Cathy found for me. There is a bit of M&M character confusion because Yellow M&M, who features on the wrapper in a Santa hat, is usually peanut. But there aren't any peanuts in this. Instead there are teeny tiny crispy M&Ms in a fondant centre.

The moulded character on the actual chocolate is well done, complete with giant Santa hat!

The chocolate shell is reasonably thick with a relatively decent shell-to-filling ratio.

The chocolate and filling are both quite sugary and sweet, as you'd expect from a Mars product. But as it's a small chocolate bar, it's not overwhelming. 

The Christmas snack market is over-saturated and I don't really think this will stand out much. However, as something quick to snaffle over the festive period it would be a welcome treat in my Christmas stocking!

When packaging commits to the joke

Froot Loops are one of my favourite cereals. The proper radioactive American cereal, not the anodyne, watered down version sold in the UK. 

Anyway, knowing I like Froot Loops, Cathy gifted me this pair of boxers made by Swag.

Don't worry. I'm not doing a review of the pants. What I really liked about this novelty gift was the way the packaging took the gift to the next level of humour.

Including the 'nutritional information'...

And adding in some puzzles for that retro 'something to read at the breakfast table' feel. (And, yes, I was one of the kids who would read the cereal box at the breakfast table!)

Feel free to do the wordsearch!

A beanie for me; a cap for Bloopy

Cathy recently ordered some gear from a company specialising in American sports. This included a new beanie for me so I can represent my favourite baseball club in cold weather.

Cathy's order also included a keyring Padres cap.

Which turned out to be a perfect fit for Bloopy the Blue-footed Booby. 

Bloopy arrived in our home as a result of sponsoring a blue footed booby through the Galapagos Trust - a great charity protecting wildlife on the other side of the world.

I'm a big fan of animal sponsorship. We started sponsoring animals during the pandemic when several trusts and charities needed an extra bit of support. (I wrote a post back then about the virtual menagerie we collected.) 

I don't think it would be possible to get a real blue footed booby to wear a cap, nor should we try to make them. Bloopy looks like a dude in his, though.