Category: Arts

Advent (non-)activity #9

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Cooking, Music

The official instruction for today is BREAK, which I think means we are allowed a day off from our seasonal chores, so instead I will give you a recipe which I invented by mistake earlier this week when I’d been planning to do garlic bread, then remembered the oven was kaput. If you are not interested in serendipitous culinary discoveries then skip straight down to today’s tangentially-food-related song, which is a DOOZY.

I have no quantities for you here, because I made it up as I went along, but I can’t imagine it mattering how much of anything you use. And it’s almost all staples that you probably have in the house anyway, which makes it easy as well as delicious. I think I’m going to call it HOT SPROUT SALAD.

Ingredients

  • Brussels sprouts
  • Olive oil
  • Chili flakes
  • Garlic (or garlic paste)
  • Grated parmesan
  • Crushed pistachio kernels

Method

  • Shred the sprouts – I grated them, but chopping them up finely would also work
  • Heat the oil in a frying pan with the chili flakes and lots of black pepper for 1-2 minutes
  • Add the garlic and the sprouts and cook until the sprouts have just started to char
  • Take the pan off the heat and add the parmesan
  • Stir and season to taste
  • Serve topped with the pistachio kernels as a side-dish to almost anything

START READING AGAIN HERE We’ve had the Carpenters before, and we’ve had The Christmas Song before, but we’ve never combined the two, which is a shame because this is beautiful, but it’s also good news because it means we can have it for the first time today! I love Karen’s outfit here, even though if I were to wear it I would look like an actual Brussels sprout.

Advent activity #8

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Films, Music, TV and radio

I’m going to be very lenient in the overseeing of today’s job, which is “BUY DISNEY PLUS”. It’s a perfectly good plan if you live in a house where a lot of Disney is going to be watched over Christmas, and it’s an even better one if some of you are under ten and/or isolating. If those things are not true of your household then I am happy for you to interpret this activity in any way you choose, though it should probably be film-or TV-based if you definitely want to score the point.

(There is a free online screeing of Mogul Mowgli this evening for BFI members, which I have decided will count as my contribution.)

There must be a million Disney Christmas songs, mustn’t there? But I couldn’t think of any, and the ones I found when I googled were sickly sweet and/or featured children wearing make-up, so instead we will go to a Disney-adjacent IP (I mean, of course Disney own the Muppets, because they own everything, but they’re not DISNEY-Disney) for an almost-rendition of Shchedryk, or The Carol of the Bells as it’s better known in English.

(If you hate this version, here is a nicer one.)

Advent activity #7

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

GET STOCKINGS OUT is the job of the day for Monday, although whether that is a two-minute task or a two-hour one depends on how organised your house is. Don’t tell anyone, but I think we might skip stockings this year, because we’re trying to reduce the amount of unnecessary Stuff we have and it’s quite hard to fill a stocking with necessary Stuff. For more years of my life than I’m willing to own up to, though, I found opening the Christmas stocking the most thrilling part of the whole day, and I will still insist on chocolate coins and a satsuma before breakfast on Christmas Day, stocking or no stocking.

Also my stocking is really small, because it’s one that I think my paternal grandma made for me when I was tiny, and I don’t want anyone to think that the size of my stocking should be a limit on the size of what Santa brings me.

Luckily some people are far more selfless – for example, the little boy in this delight of a song, put out in the 1950s by US children’s record label Cricket, on vinyl that crackles like a log fire. Enjoy!

Advent activity #6

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Films, Music

If you are my eighty-five-year-old neighbour then you have already done this twice, because you weren’t convinced by your first effort, but if not then today is the day to MAKE CAKE. I think technically this probably means Christmas cake, but I will allow any type of cake, or – in extremis – toast. I’m able to make very little since our oven went kaput last week and the people aren’t coming to fix it until Tuesday, so I will be spending my Sunday decorating the tree (that was supposed to happen yesterday, but the lights have also gone kaput; I am not having a good time, electronically) and listening to proper old-fashioned Christmas Crooner music, beginning with Doris Day’s version of Winter Wonderland. Most non-recent Christmas songs don’t come with a video, but this one does and it’s extremely Christmassy, so do take three minutes out of your day to watch as well as listen.

Advent activity #5

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music, Theatre1 Comment

I’m going to let you interpret today’s instruction, GET NUTCRACKER, in whichever way you choose. Should you happen to own a decorative Christmas ornament in the shape of a toy soldier from the ballet then you will be able to hit the nail squarely on the head, but in the unlikely event that you don’t, you could:

  1. Get your actual honest-to-god nutcracker from the kitchen drawer and use it to crack some nuts
  2. Get the ballet on DVD, or stream it, or, from December 11, stream it live from the New York City Ballet
  3. Get coconut liqueur, cognac, lemon juce, triple sec, pineapple juice, some ice and a strong constitution and mix yourself this slightly terrifying-sounding drink

However you choose to celebrate Nutcracker Day, as December 5 will henceforth be known in our house, you must for sure begin by listening to Pentatonix, last seen gracing these pages two years ago with That’s Christmas To Me, perform this adorable version of the Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy:

Advent activity #4

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

Look, I do apologise, but Edie is a hard taskmaster and if, like me, you are getting your Christmas tree tomorrow then it really will help if you MAKE SPACE FOR CHRISTMAS TREE today, rather than waiting until there’s a great big Christmas tree in the way of everything. She may be six, but she’s smart.

My parents aren’t putting up a tree this year, because they aren’t having any visitors, so as a special one-off treat I am allowed to put their fairy, handmade by me in 1978, on top of my tree. More on that anon. For today I will follow the instructions and move the furniture in our front room kitchen sitting room dining room (they are all the same room) house around until I have made a space that will no doubt turn out tomorrow to be just a weeny bit too small.

Talk of Christmas trees means I can share with you one of my most thrilling recent Christmas music finds: Nat King Cole singing O Tannenbaum IN GERMAN. I don’t speak German, so I can’t tell how good his accent is, but his voice is so beautiful that it doesn’t matter.

Advent activity #3

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music4 Comments

Our instruction for December 3 is HOLLY WREATH, which coincidentally is also today’s real-life task in my house, where I have discovered that the wreath I made last year is a little worse for wear after a year under the stairs and needs refreshing: a visit to the closest florist awaits at lunchtime. This is the first place I’ve lived since I was a student where my front door faces the street, and so around this time last year I went to an evening class at the Old Brewery in Greenwich where I paid £10 to make my own wreath while consuming at least £10 worth of mince pies. There were various decorations on offer but the competition for the more traditional elements of a wreath was fierce and so I went off-piste and garnished my fir boughs with thistles, mistletoe and, well, peacock feathers.

My wreath, with peculiar outdoor security lighting

There’s no holly or ivy in this wreath, but I think I will add some ivy to it when I perk it up later, which I have decided gives me licence to make today’s song Annie Lennox’s glorious version of The Holly And The Ivy, from her even more glorious 2010 album A Christmas Cornucopia. If you could sing like that you’d never stop, would you?

Advent activity #2

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

Today’s task is to SING CHRISTMAS SONGS, which since there are no carol services or singalongs this year we will all have to do at home, by ourselves, so I have chosen a song which everybody knows in order to give you no excuse not to join in. Yes, even you. I encourage you to consider this a mere jumping-off point, to be followed up immediately with your fullest and finest Christmas repertoire. You definitely know more Christmas songs than you think you do.

(You also definitely know fewer Christmas songs than I do, but that is because I have spent around <maths> thirty hours a year since 2008 on my musical advent calendar, which by my calculations gets me 3.9% of the way to Malcom Gladwell’s ten thousand hours and hence somewhere between “expert” and “Michael Gove” on the expert scale.)

Advent activity #1

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music3 Comments

We’re starting with a task that you have already accomplished just by being here:

DAY 1: START ADVENT CALENDAR. I have two real-life advent calendars this year; a Nicolas Cage one and a cheese one which has to be kept in the fridge door, taking up valuable Champagne space:

Totally worth it though:

I have already eaten the cheese as a mid-morning snack, which is why a cheese calendar is better than a beer calendar, because you can only really have beer for breakfast at the weekend. (There is a beer advent calendar in our house too but it’s not mine and it’s not pretty so I’m not including a photo.)

I looked for an advent-specific pop song to set us on our musical way but the only recent-ish one I could find was by R. Kelly, which didn’t seem to hit the right tone, so instead here is a lovely arrangement of a traditional song by Marty Haugen, whom Wikipedia describes as a “liturgical composer”, which sounds like a great job.

Reasons to be cheerful: part 1 in a series

On By Laura MorganIn Reasons to be cheerful, Small pleasures, TV and radio2 Comments

dipObviously, if I’d known at Christmas what I know now, my “things to be happy about” series of advent posts would have included things like “the pubs are open” and “supermarkets sell toilet roll” and they would have been much easier to write. But we’re not called Glad All Over for nothing (yes OK, it’s because of Crystal Palace, but if the official CPFC song was, I don’t know, Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter then I wouldn’t have named my blog after it) and so in these exceptionally trying times I am going to do my best to start bringing you doses of good news, fun links and just cheering things, however small.

And also, things to do when you can’t leave the house! A couple of weeks before This All Started I found myself randomly watching an old episode of Death In Paradise and then somehow helplessly watching episode after episode, completely entranced. Death In Paradise has been going for almost ten years, a fact I only know because the original writer, Robert Thorogood, was the brother of my then-boss who told me his brother had only set it in the Caribbean so that he could go to the Caribbean. This seems entirely sensible to me and it obviously worked, because the next best thing to going to the Caribbean is looking at the Caribbean from afar, and since looking at things we like from a long way away is the new normal I think you should follow my example and watch it all on iPlayer. (But don’t follow my example of starting with S4, because I don’t know why I did it and now I don’t know what series to watch next. Just watch them from the beginning like a normal person.)

I should warn you that it is racially problematic (the comedy characters are all black; murder victims and murderers all white) and every episode follows exactly the same formula (though this in itself is also sort of comforting, especially when you find yourself saying the lines along with the characters), but it is so sun-filled and light-hearted that I can just about forgive it its many flaws, because watching an episode and seeing all of that outside is very much a tonic for being stuck on the sofa in a cold and grey Greenwich.

(Although the best thing that’s happened so far this week was going to the park yesterday and staying socially distant from my sister, but being allowed to say hello to the dog. Outside is outside, after all, and there is, as you know, literally nothing better than a dog.)