Moar Christmas

sea_thoughts recommended the Christmas album Tom Chaplin from Keane did a couple of years ago - Twelve Tales of Christmas. It's rather lovely (I like Keane a lot), and for those of you curious, you can find a playlist of most of the album here. ('Under a Million Lights' is especially apropos considering current developments.) However the song that really struck me was this:

Watch on YouTube

I am not generally a fan of The Snowman. I mean, it's lovely, but quite... twee? Also my other half - who was a chorister at Westminster Cathedral when he was a boy - always grumbles about Aled Jones, and how he wasn't all that.

HOWEVER. This cover is just gorgeous. Enjoy.

~

Also if you are able, please donate to WIRES, the Red Cross and the RSPCA to help those affected by the wildfires in Australia.

~

ETA: Re-reading A Christmas Carol (yet again ♥) it occurred to me that the tone and style are very similar to Good Omens (or the other way round, I suppose). Pulling out a few quotes at random (like, I could quote the whole book, easily).

Our first introduction to Bob Cratchit:

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

Describing Scrooge's lodgings:

He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.

Describing the apples in the fruiterers':

there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.

Iloveitsomuch. And the book is better than all the adaptations (although of the adaptations the Muppets of course rule supreme), because it just contains so much more.

Here it is online - the complete text from 1843:

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

ETA2: The reason I know and love the story so well, is that growing up my mother would read it aloud: One 'ghost' every advent Sunday. (The first one obviously being Marley.) (Every year Tiny Tim's death got more difficult to get through. I challenge any of you to read that part aloud for an audience without choking.) ♥