And the last red-coloured-festive post of the year. Actually, I’m not even going to blog for the next ten days, as anything that appears on this website will be courtesy of my fair lady: An Americans point of view in Eng-er-land. I’ll try and cajole her into doing at least a couple of posts. [...]

The five levels of adjusting to the American Way.
Level 1
This is the stuff that everyone knows about because you watched a lot of American cop TV as a kid. Cagney & Lacey, Hill Street Blues and ChiPS is where I first learnt that side walks were pavements, pants were trousers and an elevator was a [...]

Five Christmas Presents
1979: The lego train set. My goodness was I excited at this! It had a PP9 battery powered ‘engine’ and I spent all day, all week, all month and beyond in fact playing at trains. And when I got bored of it being a two-rail train track, I built a mono-rail [...]

Right, c’mon then - where’s everyone going for Christmas day then?
I shall be spending it in Lake Norman, North Carolina as a lone Englishman amongst thirteen Americans (four of those under the age of 7) trying to explain why we say ‘Father Christmas’ instead of ‘Santa Claus’.

My favourite email that I got sent today:
> Are you looking forward to coming back then?
> (on a scale from 0 to 10)
It will have been 239 days next week since I’ve seen my mum, my home town, and all of my best friends.
A ‘10‘ is nowhere near big enough.

I’ve just had a look at my list of ‘five favourite Christmas songs’ from this blog entry last year, and I have to say, it still pretty much stands the same twelve months later. The clips are still up if you want to go play ‘em.

But to this year: 2006, and when I was [...]

How warm is it where you are right now? Seriously - I’d like to know.
It’s December 14th, eleven days to go until Christmas and I’ve just been out at 8pm in the evening, and it’s 20 degrees centigrade here - that’s 68F.
You what?
This cannot be December. But yet it is, and it’s screwing [...]

So it’s still the festive season. And that’s CHRISTMAS, and not a generic holiday reference either.
The good news is that we found some Christmas Crackers. Target had them (some nasty cheapy ones), so instead we bought two boxes of higher quality ones at 50% off in World Market.
Now I just have to convince the [...]

Greetings pop pickers! Yes, it’s that time of year again - where Geoff unleashes his dulcet tones upon your ears, mixed against sixty-eight tunes from the past twelve months, plus a few news & ents clips too.
The Review of the Year is here, except of course with an added twist this time - in [...]

Standby: Holiday season starts here.
Ok, so I relented at the weekend and we bought a Christmas Tree. A week after everyone else apparently had theirs, as Christmas starts in America the day after Thanksgiving.
People have been know to go out on the last Friday of November and get their tree and decorations up [...]