Will December be magic ?

Yikes!! It’s snowing already. WordPress snow doesn’t need shovelling away, but it may slow down your computer if you’re one of the hardy few still using XP.

Hooray! Here is another music mix with only a couple of Xmas tunes thrown in as befits my current “bah humbug” mood.

Here is a crumbly old British Blackhawk reprint that I remember reading way back when.

One of the fast-disappearing Xmas rituals is the traditional unravelling of the fairy lights and the search for replacement lamps of various wattage/voltage/cap. The instructions/box would have been lost years ago. If the lights were in series, one dud lamp would darken the whole string and you had to remember it must be 12v lamps for 20-sets and 6v lamps for 40-sets or suffer the consequences. There were loads of cheap Chinese strings with “push-in” rather than “screw-in” lamps which relied on two bits of thin bent wire on each lamp to maybe or maybe not line up with the flimsy metal contacts inside the lampholders. Such fun!

Artificial Xmas trees are so elaborate now with computer programming for their built-in lights or pretend snow puthering out the top. Circa 1933 my grandmother bought a Xmas tree from Woolworths. It stood 2 feet tall and had about a dozen sparce branches. It wore six candles on bulldog clips and a few little plastic bells and would emerge every year until the late 1980s.