Bah Humbug - It's December again! 17 days to go!

Thursday 8th December.

Where did the last week go? Now I have to embark on the second week before Christmas.

Somehow, the phrase, "the second week before Christmas" does not quite have the ring of, "the night before Christmas". It does not have a ring at all. Other than the ring of cash registers.

So far, I have avoided the shops. I have ordered online - how did I manage without the internet?

But, sometimes, there is no choice.

Out into the tropical heat I ventured, shorts and t-shirt - always feels strange to me that I should be cold, but I am not. I suppose I could increase the intensity of the aircon when I get home. Not a bad idea, as Christmas shopping in Singapore, seems to start earlier and earlier. As a friend who was visiting from India remarked, "I wondered what planet I had wandered on to."

There were some items I needed and had not found anything suitable online. Last year I had buried the Christmas door wreath after the red berries died my hands red. I had visions of waking in the middle of the night, rubbing my hands and mumbling, "out, out, damned spot.". For weeks afterwards, I looked out of my window, wondering whether the rain-foresty jungle trees opposite, would start marching across the road.

Luckily, no such thing occurred, which is just as well.

And, so, I found myself in an expensive expat shopping mall, staring at the florist's shop. I avoided eye gaze with the staff, I did not want to engage in conversation. My Scroogeness was in vast supply.

I espied one, simple, just twigs, leaves and red berries. No glitter, no cones, no anything else. In fact, it was so red, that it was more luminescent than old Rudolph's nose. That'll shock the neighbours.

Rather chuffed with my over-priced purchase, I meandered through the rest of the mall. Little artisanal and creative stores had set themselves up, or rather been set up by budding entrepreneurs, all vying to make a killing over the Christmas period.

Ah, ha, thought I, some new Christmas lights, and little lights, just like those tiny Ikea jobbies that I bought for my Alt-tree. Before I could prevent myself, my hand reached for a box. Nonchalantly turning it over in my hand, I nearly choked. $84.

How can you charge $84 for a few wires and some LED lights? How can you charge that when Ikea only charged me $14.90? I had to then ponder if Ikea was using the illegal method of child labour, which I somehow doubted, they are Swedish after all. Then it struck me - I was in a glitzy over-priced expat shopping mall. Of course, lights would cost $84 or even $95 and some of them even more. My eyes watered. I coughed a little, picked up another box, pretended to weigh one against the other and then shook my head.


Face saved, I decided the best option was to slink away and be thankful I had Bah flipping Humbug, gone to the home of flatpack earlier.

Bah Humbug - It's December again! 20 days to go!

Monday, 5th December - Austerity Star Date - Go to Ikea for some Scandinavian therapy.

If the truth be known, I was beginning to find myself feeling a little nostalgic for those Christmases when the house was filled with decorations and lights, and the fat feathered fairy that sat on top of the tiny fake tree that my mother liked to place on the table in the hallway. My face used to flush tomato-red when I caught sight of her bare butt. The feathers were not very efficient at covering her modesty.

On the spur of the moment, I filled a water bottle, picked up my car keys and took my life in my hands - I was going to that winter wonderland of flat-packed furniture, Ikea.

I was not sure quite what for, though. Gosh, maybe I was becoming engulfed by the consumerism that I was so desperately attempting to humbug?

After speeding through the meandering walkways of the store, which is obviously trying to make you buy more, by packing more into a smaller space. I whirl-winded along the woodland paths that entice unsuspecting customers to the gingerbread house. I found some solar energy lights - that'll save the planet, and a set of tree lights that was one-sixth the price of lights I had seen in Tanglin Mall. More about The Great Christmas Fairy Light Rip Off in a future blog ...

Then I found what I was looking for - white willow sticks. Perfect for my pagan tree corner. Now all I needed were some tiny lights, and some Nordic Christmas baubles, and I would have an alternative tree - the Alt-Christmas Tree - with no needle shredding. I had the have an alternative tree, after all, this is a Christmas of trends, started with my austerity tree.

Tiny, almost inconspicuously wired, battery operated fairy lights were the answer, which proved their novelty by turning themselves off after a certain length of time. I reckon they gave up when no one was watching. Well, at least that saves on the battery purchase.



With my purchases in hand, or in a couple of large reusable bags, I headed home to establish my Alt-Christmas corner, feeling rather Bah flipping Humbugly pleased with myself.

Bah Humbug - It's December again! 21 days to go!

Oh goodness, it's Sunday. I have the tedious task of adorning the tree with trinkets and baubles.

"Ah, but ..." the sneaky little Bah Humbug fairy whispers in my ear, "it's an austerity tree, isn't it?"

"What's that got to do with whether it snows or not this year?" I think I must have been having a conversation with myself.

"Well, it's hardly going to snow in Singapore, now, is it?" chided the Bah Humbug winged thing.

"It might do, if you go to look at the lights at Tanglin Mall." I suggested to myself. Then, I remembered, quite proudly, that in all the years I have lived in Singapore, I have never bothered to venture under the Christmas decorations at Tanglin Mall, with the hope of being soaked in sticky, foamy bubbles.

And now my boys are too old to want to associate themselves with anything like that.

Goodness me, what have I raised?

"Back to the point at hand," grumbled the Bah Humbug bug. Definitely a bug, only a bug would keep reminding me to rummage around in the bomb shelter, hope I didn't discover a dead cockroad, and carry up boxes of Christmas decorations that had amassed over the years.

"Now that's a point for austerity," I ventured.

The bug shook its head, "no one will buy second hand Christmas ornaments - don't kid yourself."

I resigned myself to selecting decorations that were befitting a short, austerity tree.


I think I managed to pull off a fairly decent feat of decorating - using up almost as many trinkets on the tree as a normal year.

Well, OK, not a normal year.

But a year when I have had a taller and wider tree (probably been eating too many mince pies).



So, Miss Nit-picky Bah Humbug Fairy, you can go and Bah-flipping-Humbug off.

Bah Humbug! It's December, again - 2 more days to go

Christmas lights - again

Miraculously, as if a sign from above. A reminder that Christmas should be a joyful event. The other half of the icicle Christmas lights that weren't working, (so I was going to throw them out at the end of this season), suddenly decided to light up and work.

Maybe the lights knew their time was up?

Maybe that cat chewed the wire, he is into plastic bags at the moment, and shocked the lights into working.

On the subject of lights, the BBC rather too brightly and the Daily Mail, announced that Christmas lights from American homes use more electricity than whole countries use in a year! El Salvador, Tanzania, and Ethiopia use far less than America does in the Christmas month. 

While I am all for decorating the tree and making the house look festive, do we really need to adorn our dwellings with so much carbon-emitting light?

What happened to the climate change talks? What happened to Americans (and a lot more of us all over the world), reducing our carbon footprint?

With all that light, how on earth can Santa get down the chimney undetected?

DOWN THE CHIMNEY ©

‘Can’t you see, Old Nick’s got hurt?

His face’s one mass of dirt.

Go find a cloth and something clean,

He’s looking rather green.

But Santa coughed and then stood up,

‘Ho, Ho! My gosh, what luck!

I’ve got a rather nagging hunch,

I’ve arrived in time for lunch.’

Bah Humbug! Turn the lights off!!

Bah Humbug - It's December again! 23 days to go!

Stupid robotic lights

The tree was delivered in a thunderstorm. I wonder if that has some ominous Odin-like portent?

Ah, well, if it does, then we'll either get hammered this Christmas, or it will be a Loki affair - (oh my goodness, what puns and for this time of the morning!).

Instead of filling the house with the arresting aroma (not the alliteration there - just for my students), a dank rankness of rotting wood (oh such onomatopoeia and I can still feel the dampness in my nostrils), wafted through the house. 

"What's that dead wood smell, Mum?"

Sigh, this was not what I was hoping for. I wanted to conjure up a scent from my childhood, and not one that was normally found in an overfilled nappy.

I couldn't put on the aircon to dry out the room, as the drainage pipe, embedded in a concrete wall had decided to leak last Friday.  I shall be buying the aircon a new drainage pipe for Christmas. I've never bought an object a Christmas present, but I suppose the world is becoming a funny place, and very soon, we'll be buying our own personalised robots gifts to keep them happy.

So, does that mean that there will be a robot Santa Claus? And do dead robots go to Calculator Heaven? Too much Red Dwarf.

What has all this got to do with lights?

My perennial hate, fairy lights - why on earth are they called fairy lights? There are no fairies in sight - unless you count the froufrou fairy who only wore feathers, and sat on top of the small fake tree my mother used as a hall table tree when I was growing up. No one liked her; she was just too froufrou.

The lights, well the icicle lights have let me down, as I mentioned.

The two reindeer are so disgusted, that whichever way you look at them, they are showing you their butts!

Back to the lights and the apparently tenuous robotic link, which in fact, is not that tenuous. Chasing Christmas lights, are programmed, controlled with a little box. Rather like a robot. 

Robotic lights on the Christmas tree, so it won't be long before we have talking decorations.

In true Christmas tree light fashion, and as a reminder that even robots will have to retire to calculator heaven one day, I cannot control the lights. There are eight options, none of which work, apart from one, mega flashy freaky light mode. That is on one set. 

The second set twinkles. OK, I can just about handle twinkling. 

The third set, yes a third set - it is a large (well relatively) tree - fades in and out. Gosh, that one is almost as mind-jarring as the first.

And then, there is the final set. The set I recently purchased from Ikea. Stupid time to shop in Ikea, Sunday afternoon. That is when half of Singapore goes to window shop as there is nothing better to do. Exit a grumpy ang moh lady from Ikea over an hour later. The final set doesn't do anything. It just doesn't match.

And, as if to make matters worse, I need to remember to turn all the lights off when I go out (they are on a timer), just in case they short and set fire to the tree.

I now have nightmares of Victorian Christmas trees, adorned with candles suddenly bursting into flames.

Maybe my son was had a point when he asked for no Christmas tree this year ...

Bah Humbug. It's December again - 14 days until Christmas

Bah Humbug, it's 11th December. It's Thursday and now I am half way through another week and only 14 days to go.

I've just realised that I brought a box of Christmas decorations up from the basement and left them sitting behind the piano. Now that is clever, or rather absent minded of me. 

I now have the conundrum of whether to unpack them and decorate the tree, which after all will only be decorated for another couple of weeks, or just put them away. I don't even remember what is in that box, other than little glass trinkets. Little glass trinkets that the cat will probably play with. Maybe I'll just put the box away.

Which raises the question of why on earth do we cut down evergreen fir trees, and of a particular type, we tend to get Noble Firs here in Singapore while in the US they like the Scots Pine, which always makes me think of men in kilts moaning that they've been forgotten at Christmas.

I digress.

If you are not in to chopping down forests, even if they are grown for chopping down, then you will have invested in a recyclable Christmas tree - in other words, a fake one. One that you take down each year, tape up with tie-wraps and stick in a cupboard to gather dust for the next 11 months of the year. But it does save money and trees and necessitates a certain amount of exercise and exertion to put it together and stand it up. Mine weighs a ton.

I digressed again from the point, why do we decorate fir/pine trees at Christmas?

Johansen_Viggo_-_Radosne_Boże_Narodzenie.jpg

The ritual, for that is really what it is, of decorating the Christmas tree, is a family occasion, when everyone helps and gets into the Christmas spirit. Well that is how it used to be; now it is just me, as my boys feel too grown up for this.

I decided to look into this, and here is my potted - like the tree - summary of where it all came from. I've included some links at the end for anyone who really is interested ;)

Legend has it that St Boniface travelled from Devon in 7^th Century to the area of what is now Northern Germany to convert the pagan tribes to Christianity. He is said to have used the triangular shape of the fir tree to explain the Holy Trinity.

Whether that is true or not, many northern Europeans would hang pine trees upside down in and around their homes – (they do make things smell nice when it is stuffy at Christmas). Romans used to decorate their doors with wreaths and arrangements made from greenery to signify a celebration. It was also believed that they kept out evil spirits and witches.

Trees began to be decorated at Christmas fairs held in sixteenth century, to attract people to merchant’s stalls. The merchants hung gifts and food and all sorts on their trees. Rather like the shop windows of today and the scenes outside the shopping malls in Singapore, the trees became more and more elaborate as merchants became more competitive.

It was Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer who first decorated trees with candles to capture the scene of the stars in the sky at Christmas.

The Christmas tree eventually became popular in Great Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria. She used to have one in her room as a child each Christmas. She decorated her tree with candles and was sketched along side it with Prince Albert and their children.

The one downside with putting candles on trees is that you are mixing wood and flames, which equal fire. 

Some insurance companies in the US wanted the government to pass a law banning candles on trees. A prime example of Bah Humbug! In 1895 and American Ralph Morris invented the electric Christmas lights. Which sort of put stop to the insurance companies spoiling Christmas!

That covers the lights, but what about the other decorations and trinkets we put on the tree?

Many years ago, people believed that when a tree lost its leaves outside that their spirits would leave them and then the leaves would never grow again. So, people dressed up the trees in brightly coloured strips of cloth to make sure that the spirits stayed with the trees.

When people began to bring trees inside at Christmas, they started decorating them with sweets and fruit and toys and beads and even tinsel. And the rest is history.

Which shows that traditions come from somewhere, often intriguing and varied and that we should always try to capture the original essence of why we celebrate certain festivals.

That reminds me, I still never got down to the bottom of why we give gifts at Christmas.

That will have to be for another day.

BAH HUMBUG.

The History of Christmas Trees

Why do we decorate a Christmas Tree?

Chronological History of the Christmas Tree

History of Christmas Trees

Bah Humbug. It's December again - 19 Days until Christmas

Bah Humbug, it's 6th December, and we have reached the weekend. Where did the week go? 

There are too many stupid distractions when it isn't Christmas, and now Christmas fever is hitting our overly commercialised minds, there are even more. I really need a brain the size of the Universe to stuff everything in.

After the regular Christmas tree light upgrade, the decorating of the tree - oh whoops, I have another whole box I overlooked - I actually got the Christmas cards written - an old-fashioned custom of getting in touch with people that you have probably forgotten throughout the year - and posted. Important that they were posted yesterday as Singapore has decided not to handle post on a Saturday while at the same time increasing the cost of postage.

Is it my imagination or has the cost of living, and more especially Christmas increased this year? I mean, $20 for a box of cherries in the supermarket and not much cheaper in the wet market (fruit & veg).

All of which leads me on to the wise words of wisdom of my teenage son who is fast rejecting the commercialisation and sensationalising of festive occasions - that should be respected for what they were originally meant to represent. He has suggested a budget of $50 per gift, per person this year. I am not sure that will necessarily be achieved, nevertheless, it will leave my pocket with less holes and the pockets of retailers and large manufacturers less fat.

As for me, I have decided to make my own gifts, and support independent - indie - bookstores and creators. So I shall buy books and purchase gifts, where possible, from smaller creators of useful items or organisations that need people to support them.

So, for anyone looking for some great gift ideas, books for kids and other cool stuff, take a look at the latest: Eric and the Volcano on Etsy:

Save some money this year and support small and local businesses.

Say:
BAH HUMBUG
To the big guys.

Bah Humbug - It's December again - 24 Days to Christmas

Bah Humbug, it's 1st December. Funny how this year again, I've got headache, just when I need to put up the Christmas tree.

Once more, in respect of tradition, I dragged the tree out of the garage cupboard and shook off the dust and whatever else had attached itself. That was yesterday. Maybe that's why I have a headache?

The cat was rather intrigued. But then again he'd never seen anything like it before. 

Nor had he tasted green stuff like it before. 

Quick removal of feline from synthetic tree bits, or should that be removal of synthetic tree bits from feline?

Almost deja vu - the came the joy of lights - or rather frustration. 

Without fail, manufacturers have some sort of fail device on fairy lights that ceases operation after so many goes. Not to mention the set that just won't stop reverting to the haywire randomness of every setting.

Decorations will probably have to happen in phases.

BAH HUMBUG

The Twenty Fourth Day Before Christmas - Bah Humbug

Bah Humbug, it's 1st December, I've a headache and need to put up the Christmas tree.

Dragged it out of the garage cupboard, shook off the dust and whatever else had attached itself - fortunately no Fukushima's roaches.

Then came the joy of light - or rather frustration that there are no such things are controls for fairy lights, and there will always be two boxes that just don't work from last year. A wicked ploy by manufacturers to ensure a constant purchase pattern.

BAH HUMBUG

And where is the partridge in the pear tree?

Looks like we'll be eating roast turkey at this rate.