25 December 2013
[xmas] A Ghost Gave Me Triplets! Xmas Horror! – Epic Christmas Misery from That’s Life! Magazine …
24 December 2013
[xmas] Did Coca-Cola Invent the Modern Image of Santa Claus? … ‘Santa Claus is instead a hybrid, a character descended from a religious figure (St. Nicholas) whose physical appearance and backstory were created and shaped by many different hands over the course of years until he finally coalesced into the now familiar (secular) character of a jolly, rotund, red-and-white garbed father figure who oversees a North Pole workshop manned by elves and travels in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer to deliver toys to children all around the world every Christmas Eve.’
20 December 2013
[tech] 11 parental IT support issues you can expect if you go home this Christmas … ‘No, change the screen resolution back, please. I prefer all my windows to be blurry and weirdly elongated.’
17 December 2012
[xmas] Unicode Holiday Xmas Tree ☃ … a collection of festive Christmas Tree made out of unicode characters to send to friends and family … ‘Each tree is made of valid, semantic, and imageless HTML and CSS!’
19 December 2011
[xmas] All I Want For Christmas…
17 December 2011
[xmas] The 27 Worst Nativity Sets … As prophesised there is a bacon and sausage nativity.
13 December 2011
[funny] Go Look: The Most Awkward Family Christmas Photos … Worth visiting if only for photo #20 which is what my nightmares are made of.
25 December 2010
20 December 2010
[history] Probably The Most Inappropriate Christmas Card Ever Sent … ‘The year is 1938, and you’re looking for a suitably seasonal picture for the front of your Christmas cards. A festive image which will convey seasonal goodwill to all humanity. What could better symbolise those eternal truths than an international peace treaty signed by the two major European powers which had once been at war?’ [thanks Phil]
10 December 2009
[comics] The Comics Reporter’s Holiday Shopping Guide ’09 … great selection of comic gifts to buy this year … On A Drifting Life: ‘Very few if any reviews of this massive autobiographical work from the great Yoshihiro Tatsumi note how completely mad it is on a certain level to follow a young man around as he reads and draws comics over the space of several decades. This book more than has the courage of that particular conviction, and I’ve never seen any artist invoke the relationship-warping monomania of creativity as well as Tatsumi does here.’
17 December 2008
19 December 2007
[comics] On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me… — a Christmas Special from Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog.
12 December 2007
[xmas] Santa putting children’s information at risk, warn experts … ‘Data protection laws lay down strict conditions for the use of personal data and there is no evidence that Claus has an adequate compliance programme in place. Children across Britain who write letters to Claus with a list of gift requests are not told for how long that data is kept, or if it will be used for other purposes such as marketing by third parties.’
27 December 2006
[xmas] Attack of the Sprouts — sick of sprouts? Try this game to release some tension… 
[via Minor 9th]
[via Minor 9th] 26 December 2006
[xmas] A News of the World Christmas — from Pandemian.
25 December 2006
[xmas] Merry Christmas to Everyone … from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. [via Blah Blah Flowers]
22 December 2006
[comics] Have A Cosmic Christmas, Earthlets! — a slightly bonkers Kevin O’Neill Christmas Cover for 2000AD.
19 December 2006
[xmas] Professor Richard Dawkins Speaks at Fair Hills Kindergarten Regarding Santa Claus — a ‘short imagined monologue’ from McSweeneys … ‘I can see that the topic makes many of you uncomfortable. However, this should not be viewed as a bad thing. You may weep now, but your tears are a positive, not a negative. You are now facing the truth, which comes in many forms and is not always comfortable. This is a fact that you will be exposed to again and again throughout your lives. If you wish to live a life that contains only comfortable information and not necessarily the truth, then yours will be a highly deluded existence. Your intellectual maturity depends on whether or not you are capable of accepting the truth at this early age. That is why there is no better place to begin than with the absurdity that is Santa Claus and Christmas Magic.’ [via Kottke’s Remaindered Links]
3 December 2006
[xmas] ‘Tis the Season — an Xmas blog from Anna and Meg. Also worth checking out is Meg’s Mince Pie Mania Flickr Group: ‘This group is all about capturing the ultimate Mince Pie. It’s a Christmas favourite but no-one can agree on what makes it just right. Some argue it’s the deep fill mince, others the shortcrust pastry and others still prefer half and half. I’m on the half and half side but your challenge this Christmas, should you chose to accept, is to get photographing those Mince Pies…’
27 December 2005
[ebay] eBay Auction: Cooked, Unwanted Christmas Dinner Item! … ‘You are bidding on One Cooked Brussels Sprout’ [via Random Acts of Reality]
25 December 2005
[xmas] Happy Christmas Everybody.
23 December 2005
[toys] The Toy That Ate Christmas — the Guardian looks at the story behind the Roboraptor. ‘… when Roboraptor behaves “intelligently” you catch yourself feeling impressed, and when it doesn’t, you catch yourself responding as you would to a clumsy toddler, rather than as you ought to respond to an assemblage of 132 plastic parts, 235 metal ones and 191 electrical components. But Roboraptor is not, primarily, intended to be cute. “This is the first robot that really has the ability to scare small children,” Tilden says proudly. “Our previous robots could annoy your cat. Roboraptor can hunt him.” All this is achieved with a radically simple design: the toy’s decision-making circuits are modelled on the chip in a musical Christmas card.’
15 December 2005
[movies] Letters to Walken — amusing Christmas Letters to Christopher Walken … ‘Mr Walken, Please, will you come Dance at my Birthday Party?’ [via linkbunnies.org]
7 December 2005
23 December 2004
[xmas] Santa Moblogged: Reject False Icons [via Die Puny Humans]
17 December 2004
[xmas] The Beatles Christmas Records — MP3’s of recordings the Beatles made for their official fan-club between 1963 and 1969. From a description of the 1969 recording: ‘Yoko makes an appearance as John’s interviewer, and the two sing a duet reminiscent of the “All in the Family” theme before finally predicting the 70s will be “peaceful,” and full of people “flying around.” McCartney sings a pleasant ditty.’
16 November 2004
[lard] Lard Crisis: Mince Pies Threatened As Supplies Dwindle … ‘Demand in east European countries for cheap cuts of pork has led to a shortage of meat suitable for rendering into lard. New members of the European Union, including Hungary and Poland, are buying within the union to avoid a levy on non-EU imports. Supermarkets such as Morrisons have been forced to display signs on shelves apologising for the lack of lard’ [Related: Mefi on the Lard Crisis]
29 October 2004
[work] Forty per cent of IT workers vomit at office Xmas party — ‘…while more than third admit to snogging their boss or a colleague […] The research doesn’t reveal what proportion of people threw up before snogging their boss.’
24 December 2003
[xmas] Graybo’s Christmas Message: ‘…remember the true meaning of Christmas – a distorted winter solstice festival that was hijacked by Christianity in an attempt to win over pagan tribespeople in Europe, that is now the preserve of business and corporate policy. Enjoy!’
Conservative Commentary’s Christmas Message: ‘ Have a great Christmas … unless you prefer the term “Winterval” or “Solstice” or something, in which case I merely wish you a 25th of December marginally less dull and empty than your indoctrinated minds.’
Conservative Commentary’s Christmas Message: ‘ Have a great Christmas … unless you prefer the term “Winterval” or “Solstice” or something, in which case I merely wish you a 25th of December marginally less dull and empty than your indoctrinated minds.’
23 December 2002
[xmas] The Wrap Trap — Mil Millington on Christmas Presents … ‘Presents are what Christmas is made of. The joy (or disappointment, or horror) of receiving them, the joy (or misery, or trauma) of finding them for others; the paraphernalia of present use; the shocking void created by the present that never came; and the Christmas remembered by the present that did. It is a rite with precise rules; “a shopping trip to buy Christmas presents for one’s extended family” is what it says in the OED under the entry for “dispiriting”; looking down at a freshly opened present and realising with sudden, suffocating dismay that this item is how the giver – and possibly the world – sees you; the special laugh you use to indicate how very funny the comedy socks you’ve just been given are: all these things and more are intertwined.’
19 December 2002
[xmas] Cut-Up Christmas Card — nice flash distraction from Steve Bell.
3 December 2002
[xmas] ‘Tis the Season — a Christmas blog from Anna and Meg … ‘It’s pretty fucking difficult to do a google search on interesting facts on Christmas Trees without landing you on sites that smack you around the face with computer generated jingle bells. After five of these sites, psychosis develops. So it’s best not to bother with them at all.’ [Kinda Related: Secret Santa]
18 November 2002
[xmas] Secret Santa is Back … ‘The idea of Secret Santa is very simple – you pull a name out of a hat and buy that person a present. Your name is in the hat as well, so someone buys you a present too! Everyone gets a present! Everyone’s happy!’
27 December 2001
[xmas] plasticbag.org: ‘The world outside Norfolk can go fuck itself for one week.’
24 December 2001
[linkmachineSTOP] Happy Christmas. Next update will be when I’m bored of it all — probably just after The Great Escape finishes on Christmas Day… :) [Related: Great Escape on IMDB]
21 December 2001
[xmas] Check out Marcia’s Crappy Crimbo Cards … ‘Bah, humbug.’
24 December 2000
[weblogs] Luke’s Christmas Message: ‘…a bodypainted woman wearing a large box walked up. Some vampy number was played, and she proceeded to take off the big box, revealing three smaller, strategically-placed boxes which were, in turn, removed to reveal naught but naked flesh. All well and good. It wasn’t until she pulled a yard of tinsel out of herself that I started to worry.’ :) :)