Tag: Christmas

#1374 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent, Serendipity2 Comments
Exeter City Centre

I found this temporary sculpture yesterday. Doubtless commissioned as a photo opportunity. But beautiful in its own way without humans  posing against it. I love the ambiguity of it. Are they Angels wings or Fairy?

Christmas has become for many of us the most delightful mash up of Sacred and Secular. Consumerist and cozy. Family and friends. Memories and Magic.

I nearly always overthink Christmas. Preparing for the present yet nostalgic for the past.

Studying Fine Art as a mature student, gave me a new mentor as I found the writing of Robert Hughes as an excellent guide to Art Theory. But his famous quote about Christmas baffled me when I first read it. I had completely forgotten my bafflement until I was standing near his plaque in Sydney two weeks ago.

Friends and their feet at a plaque to commemorate a favourite writer and thinker. Robert Hughes

So here I am having given myself renewed bafflement fresh from the sunshine of Sydney. Bafflement caused by a man who had rejected Catholicism for deeply personal reasons and yet mentions God in one of his often quoted quotes.

I suppose my circular counter argument would be that a deep winter celebration was much needed by early humans in the Northern Hemisphere.Short cold days can be relentless. Early Christians saw an opportunity and popped God into the mix by a convenient Birth of Christ Story to coincide with Winter festivals.

Bob is your Uncle and Christianity gets a popularity boost. Whose heart did it start in?

Actually Bob probably becomes your drunk Uncle who always appears with his slightly grumpy partner Sylvia whose family Christmas traditions do not involve being pleasant to anyone.

So wherever Christmas sits in your heart currently. Seasons Greetings.

Fairy or Angel? Whichever is right for you xx

#1148 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn 26 Days to Boxing Day1 Comment

Christmas Eve. 2 days before Boxing Day.

Who are the biggest influences in your life?

I knew the topic of this Christmas Eve blog  when I started the countdown to Boxing Day on December 1st. As it happens the planned blog melds rather comfortably with the prompt from my blog hosts. In fact the prompt focuses the mind somewhat.

I have a hierarchy of influencers/ influences in my life.

  1. All generations of my family that I know or have known.
  2. My Friends
  3. Books
  4. Music
  5. Colleagues and acquaintances
  6. People that I don’t like.

1,5 and 6 are beyond my control. They just happen to me.

This group becomes A.

2,3 and 4 are chosen, an echo chamber of my tastes and likes. This group becomes B.

Honestly so difficult to say which group is the greatest influence on me. I believe it is a healthy mix of both.

Pondering this is mind meandering. Give it a try if you have a few minutes over the festive season.

And so to X on 26 Days to Boxing Day and a late revelation of another factor in choosing ’26 Days to Boxing Day’. X on Christmas Eve is easy, Xmas. Christmas Day will be Y for Yule and Z will sort itself out on the Day.

Oh dear, how I dislike the abbreviation of Christmas down to a reductive Xmas. My apologies now but I find it such a difficult word to think about. It feels like that awful squeak of  chalk misdirected on a blackboard. I have chosen the bright colours on the blog inages to visually create that wince making sensation. The other word I dislike for the same reason is ‘kids’.

Sometimes and rather awfully those two words appear in the same lazy sentence at Christmas.

Happy Xmas to you and the kids.

Eughhh!

Happy Christmas to you and yours.

Same sentence, more or less, but much more comfortable. Or is that just me?

#1133 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn 26 Days to Boxing Day, Serendipity1 Comment

18 days to Boxing Day.

When less seems like more. If there was a plan for less decorating of our house on a grand scale, this Christmas, you might think the job would be quicker and easier. But that seems not to be the case. I am not sure why . Maybe being selective takes more effort. One side task that required patience was the re-repairing of a wise man who was last repaired in the eighties. Thank goodness for occasionally catching The Repair Shop.

A British T.V show that works miracles on precious items. From idly watching I knew that I needed to remove all old glue and a little shimmy with an emery board. To give the best result for the successful joining of a wise torso to wise legs.  The Wise Man is currently at one with himself, his fracture invisibly repaired.

Tomorrow the unusual job of returning unused decorations to the storage box will be done. For an inexplicable reason the sandalwood box that always holds our Christmas Decorations for 11 months of the year also holds the ashes of a long deceased cat. He may wonder what is going on, his fragrant sarcophagus is usually baubleless in December.

And on to I in 26 Days to Boxing Day.

Inukshuk

An Inukshuk from Canadian relations. Always part of our Christmas.

#68 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent, FamilyLeave a comment

Advent and the run up to Christmas is not all about the ‘front-of-house’ stuff. Some prep is definitely more mundane. A new loo seat and a consignment of loo rolls were part of this week’s plans.

As it turns out some nice soft tissue was exactly what we needed. Christmas is bittersweet for many people. There is the excitement of gathering with family and friends tinged with sadness remembering the people it is no longer possible to mingle with on the earthly realm. With this in mind we took ourselves off to see the Stephen Spielberg, West Side Story.

Having both grown up with this vinyl recording of the soundtrack in our homes, we thought it was a good way to remember our mums. Obviously @theoldmortuary blog is not normally a film reviewing blog.

We loved it, a fabulous way to spend three hours in a reclining seat. Spoiler alert. You may need tissues.

Pandemic Pondering #287

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent, blogging, Covid Christmas, Friends and FamilyLeave a comment

Its been a funny old festive season @theoldmortuary . We have a smallish family circle and a larger circle of friends. We are very lucky. One Christmas lost to being decent citizens, who stuck to the rules, is not actually a ‘ lost’ Christmas just a diminished one without all our treasured people around us.

Pyjamas @theoldmortuary

Today it is 360 days until Christmas 2021. Our strange distorted world will look very different.

Anish Kapoor at Pitzhanger Museum and Art Gallery

And while it can never turn the full 360 degrees to return us to our pre-pandemic normal. ( We can’t ever turn back the clocks.) Things will look and feel very different 360 days from now.

Less

A feature of a cleaning cupboard at The Box

And more.

The tunnel at Royal William Yard during Illuminate 2019

Pandemic Pondering #286

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Food ( but this is not a food blog), Serendipity1 Comment

Merryneum continues, as do the leftovers. Turkey Pie, fresh sausage rolls and smoked salmon quiches were created @theoldmortuary baking session yesterday.

Under normal circumstances the above plate of food would have been hoovered up in half a day. Not so this year, on a positive note that is all the left overs gone from Christmas day food. I’m not sure how many calories Zoom meetings consume but that was our peak activity yesterday. Books were also consumed in large amounts. An activity not usually listed as a fat burner.

Dog walking in abysmal weather was also a feature of the day. Not satisfying to the body and soul of human or dog. The dogs now have thermal coats to pop on when we stop for coffee, so they can warm up. There are unlikely to ever be cute photos of them walking in their thermals. Because they refuse to walk in them but stationary dogs in thermal jackets might appear.

Like so much, our doggy thermals were made in Shenzhen an industrial town just north of the border between Hong Kong and China. The pollution from Shenzhen was dreadful for our granddaughter yesterday, she lives on the Hong Kong side of the border.

She was stuck indoors to avoid the pollution caused by the manufacturing industry starting up after the Christmas break. Inadvertantly, in a virtual world, we also got stuck indoors there too. Our Zoom chats took place inside her play tent and when she got a little bored of screen time she finished the call by leaving us and the phone inside the tent. The next day we were, again, talked to only in the tent while she busied about. Being stuck in a pale green teepee is our punishment for not shopping local. Although I think it will take more than us shopping local to cut pollution from the monumental manufacturing sites in Shenzhen.

Advent#34

On By theoldmortuary.designIn AdventLeave a comment

The end of Yule and the end of theoldmortuary Advent. Starting on the first day of a chocolate advent calendar and ending on the last day of Pagan Yule. Fittingly, as with much of the festive season, today’s blog is about something Pagan that is enmeshed in the secular and sacred traditions of a Christian Christmas. Christmas is for everyone… Lights are not just for Christmas…

Christmas Lights

The custom was borrowed from Pagan Yule rituals that celebrate the slow returning of light and lengthening days after the Winter Solstice.

©Kate DuPlessis

For Christians, lights symbolise the birth of Christ, the bringer of light to the World.

William Holman Hunt

©William Holman Hunt.org

Light was created for Pagans with the burning of the Yule Log, early tapers and braziers.

Early Christians had much the same. Candles,gas lights and then electricity. In the mid twentieth century, it became popular not only to decorate the tree with lights but also to decorate homes and commercial buildings with strings of lights. Cities have year round light shows that are only marginally ramped up for the festive season

©theoldmortuary Hong Kong

More recently, landscapes and country parks have realised the commercial value of having Festive Season illuminations.

Ginter Garden lights. ©Bob Kovacs


In many countries festive lights go up at the beginning of Advent and come down at Twefth Night or Candlemas.

But there is a new thinking out there…Psychologists suggest that putting Christmas decorations and lights up early makes people happier and the happiness spreads to friends and neighbours.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/people-put-christmas-decorations-up-early-happier-feelings-stress-anxiety-december-experts-study-a8065561.html

It doesn’t stop there, keeping them up beyond Twelfth Night is also a good thing.

https://www.inspiralist.com/home-garden/when-take-christmas-lights-down/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=sharelink

Shared from Inspiralist – https://www.inspiralist.com

theoldmortuary adopted year round Festive lights long ago. Although we are often quite late to decorate for the festive season.

Both of us have a background of medical imaging. In the pre-digital age that required a lot of time in an actual dark room but even in the digital age it requires working life in a darkened room. Domestically our interior design is inclined towards the dark side. A little bit of twinkle is good for us.

The fireplace has year round fairy lights. Two years ago a star stayed up on the fridge accidentally. It’s still there.

The Cornish Range is somewhat aged and thankfully we don’t rely on it to feed us or heat the house. A little bit of Festive illumination gives it the look of fabulous domestic productivity.

So from the glowing heart of theoldmortuary, it’s farewell to Advent until December 1st 2020.

Tomorrow is another day.

Advent#26

On By theoldmortuary.designIn FamilyLeave a comment

Seaton Beach Christmas 2019

Christmas Day 2019 and the weather was very kind to us. It took extremely creative photography to make the beach seem as quiet and tranquil as this. There were hundreds of people and dogs taking in the sunshine .

The pre- turkey sandwich beach walking team.

Going back to Advent#24
https://theoldmortuary.design/2019/12/23/advent24/

Two strangers who discovered they were siblings, walking on a beach.

Advent#24

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Family

Christmas Eve, normally the last chocolate in the advent calender, however this blogs advent is going to stretch just into January to cover the whole of Yule, an all encompassing Advent.

 

Like many families we have a few empty chairs at Christmas . Grief and sadness is part of the festive season for many people.
But replenishment happens too. Sometimes in unexpected ways. Two years ago we bought an AncestryDNA kit for our brother/ brother-in-law.

AncestryDNA

The story is not ours to tell but here is a link to a radio programme that tells the tale, make a cup of tea it’s a good listen.

http://www.wypr.org/post/finding-family-dna-tests-help-two-strangers-discover-they-are-siblings

A consequence of the DNA kit is that we all have a whole new chunk of family in the USA.
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/dna/

Today these two lovely people arrived to spend Christmas with us


Also joining us for the first time is our adorable VV.

Families have a way of filling empty chairs.