The halls decorated, presents wrapped and already unwrapped, the sweets indulged in and quite likely overindulged; no wonder winter festivities are one of the most awaited times of the year. In fact, this survey has shown that 81% of people see Christmas as the most awaited time of the year. The primary reason for which they like it so much is because of an opportunity to spend time with the whole family (90%).

Silent-screen star Harold Lloyd's huge ornament collection made tree-trimming difficult until he found a way to keep the holidays fresh.

When it comes to throwing an event, there are few who do is as well as stylist Steve Cordony. Here he shares his best kept secrets for Christmas.

A Christmas Proposal Dr Oliver Hay–Smythe seemed to have met a modern–day Cinderella! Ever since Bertha's father had remarried, the kindhearted woman had been put upon by her family. She appeared to live in her step–sister's shadow, stuck doing the housework and wearing hand–me–downs! The doctor was about to change all that. In fact, he was about to change Bertha's entire world.A Christmas Romance When hospital clerk Theodosia is kept out of her family's seasonal celebrations, she finds herself attracting the attention of an older physician who's definitely out of her league. She never imagined she'd be the target of a Christmas romance…A Christmas Wish Olivia Harding was far too pracitical to dream of being rescued – despite the dreary life she endured for her mother's sake. And she never could have imagined her knight in shining armour would be visiting surgeon Haso van der Eisler! Was there any chance Haso could ever see her as more than a damsel in distress?

#1. A Relaxed Christmas Like last year, we kept Christmas really simple this year. We focused on the few things that we decided as a family were priorities: we all wanted to go to Kansas to celebrate Christmas, the kids wanted to put up the tree and decorate the house all by themselves (they wereRead More

Traditional Christmas desserts are traditional for a reason. Learn about their origins, their variations, and get the recipes!

Vegan ginger cookies with a rich spice flavour, crackled outside and soft on the inside.

At age 12, he was the precocious lead in what is now one of the most beloved holiday movies of all time and could have wound up another doomed child star. Instead, 30 years later, he’s quietly reinvented himself as a steady and successful Hollywood player.

this was supposed to be a christmas gift! lol 😭 but i kept doing amazing things like exporting the textures with one errant white pen dot over the kids hands and other such mistakes that slowed me...

Vegan ginger cookies with a rich spice flavour, crackled outside and soft on the inside.

She was eager to show off her figure after being hospitalised earlier this week with a severe flu.

A beautiful hardcover edition of the timeless story of everyone’s favorite misanthrope, Ebenezer Scrooge, together with four more of Dickens’s Christmas tales and with Arthur Rackham’s classic illustrations. With an introuduction by Margaret Atwood. No holiday season is complete without the story of tightfisted Mr. Scrooge, of his long-suffering and mild-mannered clerk, Bob Cratchit, of Bob’s kindhearted lame son, Tiny Tim, and of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. First published in 1843, A Christmas Carol was republished in 1852 in a new edition with four other Christmas stories—The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. These beloved tales revived the notion of the Christmas “spirit”—and have kept it alive ever since. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780307271754 Media Type: Hardcover Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Publication Date: 11-10-2009 Pages: 411 Product Dimensions: 5.22(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d) Series: Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary ClassicsAbout the Author CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent most of his life in London. When he was twelve, his father was sent to debtor's prison and he was forced to work in a boot polish factory, an experience that marked him for life. He became a passionate advocate of social reform and the most popular writer of the Victorian era. MARGARET ATWOOD is the author of more than 35 internationally acclaimed works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her numerous awards include the Governor General’s Award for The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Giller Prize for Alias Grace. The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace, and Oryx and Crake were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which she won with The Blind Assassin.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt S C R O O G E: A N  I N T R O D U C T I O N Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, when he was thirty-one. He was already very famous, having made his name with Pickwick Papers and then enhanced it with Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge — and all this before he was thirty. This pace was prodigious. No writer alive had written at such a pace and produced such high-quality work at such a young age. Dickens is said to have written A Christmas Carol in six weeks, to pay off a debt—perhaps that was why grasping moneylenders were much on his mind—and he presented this novella as a light-hearted jeu d’esprit—a Christmas fairy tale or ghost story, intended to entertain, and to put his readers in good humour. The story has the traditional three-part structure of a fairy tale—three Spirits of Christmas, three ages of Scrooge—past, present, future—and it has also a fairy-tale ending, in which light triumphs over darkness, goodness and harmony reign, and an innocent life in peril—Tiny Tim’s—is saved, not to mention the gnarly old soul of Scrooge. Dickens’s more covert intention—signalled by the work’s one-time working title, ‘The Sledgehammer'—was to strike a few more blows for the social justice he was so keen on by contrasting avarice and poverty, then proposing his usual antidote: an outflowing of private benevolence. For, as George Orwell has commented, though Dickens burned with anger at social injustices, he never went so far as to urge a wholesale political revolution. But none of this would account for the overwhelming longevity and popularity of the Carol ’s protagonist—Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is one of those characters—like Hamlet—who has become detached from the story in which he had his birth, and has become instantly recognizable, even by those who may never have read the book. Why should that be? Let me consult my own model of that favourite Dickensian respository of infallible knowledge, ‘The Human Heart’. When did I first meet the immortal Scrooge, and why did I become so fond of him? I seem always to have been aware of him. Did I hear A Christmas Carol read on the radio during my 1940s childhood? It’s likely—those were radio days. Or did I encounter him the way I encountered so much else—peering out with sly and narrow but nonetheless twinkling eyes from the colourful ads in magazines? In this respect, Scrooge was a sort of anti-Santa Claus—Santa Claus’s dark twin. The one, fat and jolly and round and red, dispensing largesse; the other, skinny and pinched and dour, withholding it. Yet at the end of the Carol, the new, redeemed, turkeypurchasing, Bob Cratchit-salary-raising Scrooge has become a sort of Santa; which raises the chilling possibility that Santa might one day shrivel and wizen, and morph into Scrooge at his worst—that crabby geezer who opens the book. Consider those punitive Santean lumps of coal—not much mentioned these days, but kept, you can bet, in Santa’s worst-case reserve arsenal of dirty tricks. Coal in your stocking would be just what the mean version of Scrooge would have liked. Whatever the case, by the time my seven-year-old self discovered Scrooge’s descendant living in comic books in the form of Walt Disney’s Scrooge McDuck—Donald Duck’s crusty, miserly, rich old uncle— knew quite well what the name‘Scrooge’ was supposed to signify. It included the fact that within McDuck’s ancient, scheming husk there flickered a kindly and generous impulse. It was a good sign that the Duck triplets adored their Uncle Scrooge, and not only because he let them roll around in his money-bin full of gold coins: no, he was a lot of fun, because in recreational moments he often behaved just as childishly as they did themselves. This is one key to the original Ebenezer Scrooge: he’s a child at heart. But, when we first meet him in A Christmas Carol, he’s a wounded child, albeit an elderly one. In writing Scrooge, Dickens delved deep within, and put a good measure of his own hidden pain into his creation. He had never forgotten the most hopeless period of his life, when his feckless father had been locked into debtors’ prison, and young Charles had been wrenched from school and set to work in a blacking factory to help support the destitute Dickens family. This period did not last for ever, but for a child the present moment is for ever: the young Dickens could see no possibility of rescue from the unfamiliar hell into which his father’s financial mishaps had thrust him. The most poignant moment in A Christmas Carol is not the death of Tiny Tim, weep-making though that is; nor is it the plangent picture of Scrooge’s own possible future corpse,‘plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for’. (The objective mind might comment that it doesn’t much matter to a corpse what sort of outfit it’s wearing or who is standing around it, though it mattered a lot to Dickens.) No, the most sniffle-making scene is the first picture the Spirit of Christmas Past shows to Scrooge: his young boy self, ‘a solitary child, abandoned by his friends’ at a cheerless, run-down boarding school, while everyone else has gone home for Christmas. Luckily this child Scrooge does have some friends, but they are imaginary ones—they exist only in books. However, by the next picture— several years later—even these friends have gone, and despair has taken their place. To be alone—to be a helpless child, neglected and forgotten, in a dreary place—such is the Dickensian nightmare acted out by Scrooge. It’s this, not the arrival of Scrooge’s sister Fan to take him home from school, nor the happy dancing and capering that goes on during Scrooge’s apprentice years at Mr. Fezziwig’s, that sets the miserly part of Scrooge on the road it has followed into old age. Scrooge’s famous cry of ‘Bah! Humbug!' means, ‘I won’t even admit the possibility of human sharing and happiness, because they were denied to me in the most important period of my life.’ The idea that Christmas open-heartedness and brotherly love are frauds had ample proofs in the childhood of Scrooge, and even to some extent in that of Dickens. For ‘sordid school’, read ‘blacking factory’. For ‘uncaring father neglecting his son’, read ‘imprisoned father whose lack of money caused the son’s ordeal’. Scrooge’s heart withered on the vine because Dickens’s almost did. Due to the blacking factory episode, Dickens seems to have been torn throughout his life between two impulses—the fear of going bankrupt, which drove him to work himself into afrenzy in order to make more money; and the desire to exercise, himself, the generosity that would have saved his child self from the blacking factory, had anyone turned up with some of it then. In many of his fictions, Dickens is fond of arranging characters in pairs. The look-alikes Charles Darnay and Sidney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities are the most obvious examples: the virtuous idealist versus the cynic and wastrel. We find such arrangements melodramatic: heroes and villains no longer convince us. However, in Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens melds the two opposites into one. Being neither hero nor villain, Scrooge is both, and also an individual whose conflicts we can understand. Perhaps this is a clue to Scrooge’s long life, and to the popularity he still enjoys: with Scrooge, we don’t have to choose. Not only that, the two halves of Scrooge correspond to our own two money-related impulses: rake in the cash and keep it all for yourself, or share with others. With Scrooge, we can—vicariously—do both. There’s yet another of those young-Dickens hapless-child avatars in A Christmas Carol: Tiny Tim. Some people find wee Tim far too cloying to take straight: he’s so infernally good. But when the Victorians said, ‘He’s too good for this world’—which they often did— the kind of goodness they intended was a passivity due to illness: such children usually died early. Having already written the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop —to international mass wailing, and, according to the author, with the tears coursing down his cheeks as he polished her off —Dickens was well up to the pathos needed for the shorter and

Have you read many stories about people who leave their office jobs and start travelling like crazy? We did. And just like many others kept on going for short Christmas/Easter vacations to hang out on the beach and hurry up back home with a bunch of souvenirs for friends. Once we set off to China for a couple of weeks and…now have been staying here for 1,5 years.

Notes From Your BooksellerA timeless classic, A Christmas Carol has surely kept many children off the naughty list. Ebenezer Scrooge has become an iconic character, one whose story of change will inspire others to act kind towards all. A Christmas Carol has had an enduring influence on the way we think about the traditions of Christmas ever since it was first published in December 1843. Dickens's story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by the three ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, has been adapted into countless film and stage versions and is today the most famous and loved of all Christmas tales. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780143122494 Media Type: Hardcover Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Publication Date: 10-08-2014 Pages: 144 Product Dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.70(d) Age Range: 18 Years Series: Penguin Christmas Classics #1About the Author Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth where his father was a clerk in the navy pay office. The family moved to London in 1823, but their fortunes were severely impaired and Dickens' father was imprisoned for debt. Dickens himself was sent to work in a blacking-warehouse, an experience which deeply affected him. In 1833 he began contributing stories to newspapers and magazines, and in 1836 started the serial publication of Pickwick Papers. Thereafter, Dickens published his major novels over the course of the next twenty years, from Nicholas Nickleby to Little Dorrit. He also edited the journals Household Words and All the Year Round. Dickens died in 1870, aged fifty-eight.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D. December 1843. STAVE ONE Marley’s Ghost MARLEY WAS DEAD: TO BEGIN WITH. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain. The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind. Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him. Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did. Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? when will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “no eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!” But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge. Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale. 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. “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach. “Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!” He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again. “Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?” “I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.” “Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? what reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.” Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.” “Don’t be cross, uncle,” said the nephew. “What else can I be” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew. “Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.” “Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.” “Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!” “There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew: “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on o

Traditional Christmas desserts are traditional for a reason. Learn about their origins, their variations, and get the recipes!

These lightly spiced cookies can be made in advance, then kept in the fridge for a week. Just slice and bake when you need them. They’re a perfect nibble for festive carol singers. Take the stress out of festive cooking with more make-ahead Christmas recipes.

DIY Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball Ornament. Photos from here and here. Thanks Donatella!

Vegan ginger cookies with a rich spice flavour, crackled outside and soft on the inside.

Heute habe ich etwas ganz besonderes für euch. Geballte Sanddorn Power im gesunden, veganen & glutenfreien Weihnachts-Lebkuchen und als Körperöl. Wusstet ihr, dass Sanddorn ein heimisches Superfood ist? Im Herbst werden die Beeren feurig orange und sind dann bereit für die Ernte. Die die Beeren in roher Form recht sauer sind, werden sie gerne zu Saft oder Marmelade verarbeitet. Der wichtigste Inhaltsstoff des Sanddorns ist das stark konzentrierte Vitamin C. Außerdem steckt noch einiges an Vitamin E, Eisen, Kalzium, Mangan, Magnesium und sogar Vitamin B12 in der Power-Beere. Das Obst ist nicht umsonst genau jetzt reif, wenn wir unser Immunsystem verstärkt schützen wollen und eine Extra-Dosis Vitamin C gut gebrauchen können. Übrigens wirkt Sanddorn auch entzündungshemmend und fördert sogar Wundheilungen. Erst einmal widmen wir uns dem Sanddorn-Öl von Weleda. Weiter unten wartet dann auch ein schönes Gewinnspiel auf euch! Ich freue mich sehr, dass wieder eine solch schöne Kooperation mit meinem Naturkosmetik-Liebling Weleda zustandekommt! Ich liebe ja eigentlich alle Öle von Weleda, aber heute möchte ich das vitalisierende Sanddorn-Öl in den Fokus stellen. Es ist ein wahrer Alleskönner – Sanddorn in Kombi mit Sesamöl pflegt und regeneriert die Haut, ist reich an ungesättigten Fettsäuren, steckt voller Vitamine, unterstützt die wichtige […]

Kerstontbijt: de lekkerste gerechten en recepten voor een onvergetelijke feestdag!

He was a cute little guy wearing an oversize traditional Catalán red hat. From his place on the countertop of St. Christopher's Inns Hostel in Barcelona, his raised eyebrows and big black eyes stared at me with an expression of perpetual surprise. His front legs, just a couple of twigs stuck into a rough log,

A useful guide to everything Christmas in London! With updated info on Christmas markets, the twinkling lights, all the free events and lots of useful tips!

Vegan ginger cookies with a rich spice flavour, crackled outside and soft on the inside.

Notes From Your BooksellerA timeless classic, A Christmas Carol has surely kept many children off the naughty list. Ebenezer Scrooge has become an iconic character, one whose story of change will inspire others to act kind towards all. From the bustling, snowy streets of 19th-century London to the ghostly apparitions of Christmases past and future, award-winning artist Roberto Innocenti vividly renders not only the authentic detail but also the emotional impact of Charles Dickens's beloved Christmas tale. In both crowded urban scenes and intimate portraits of familiar characters, we gain a sense of the timeless humanity of the tale and perhaps catch a glimpse of ourselves. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781568462783 Media Type: Hardcover(Reprint) Publisher: Creative Company The Publication Date: 09-15-2015 Pages: 152 Product Dimensions: 8.80(w) x 12.10(h) x 0.90(d) Age Range: 12 - 18 YearsAbout the Author Charles Dickens (1812–70) is one of the most popular English authors of all time. His works include 15 novels and many sketches, travel books, and other nonfiction works. Dickens also wrote five "Christmas books." The first, A Christmas Carol, was published in 1843. Today, it is recognized as one of the most famous stories ever written. Roberto Innocenti is a self-taught artist who has earned worldwide acclaim with such illustrated books as The House, Nutcracker, Rose Blanche, Erika's Story, The Adventures of Pinocchio, and The Girl in Red. In 2008, he received the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for his contributions to children's literature. He lives in Florence, Italy.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D. December 1843. STAVE ONE Marley’s Ghost MARLEY WAS DEAD: TO BEGIN WITH. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain. The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind. Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him. Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did. Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? when will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “no eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!” But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge. Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale. 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. “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach. “Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!” He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again. “Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?” “I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.” “Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? what reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.” Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.” “Don’t be cross, uncle,” said the nephew. “What else can I be” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew. “Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.” “Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.” “Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!” “There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew: “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journe

Looking for the best crowd-free Christmas market in Italy, we invite you to explore some of Italy’s best Italian Town and Christmas markets that are beloved by locals

Vegan ginger cookies with a rich spice flavour, crackled outside and soft on the inside.

A beautifully rendered collection of artistic images shaped into a Christmas tree.  Featuring Australian animals from all over Australia and each states respective flowers.  It even features the Southern Cross.This would make a beautiful gift or someone overseas.. or Australia.  What you need to know: Range:         Devonstone Collections DV5391 Fibre:           100% cotton fabric Material:     quality quilt weight Brand:        Bush Celebrations by Devonstone Panel Size:     PANEL (28") 71 cm  x 112 cm Further Information:      Brand new genuine product, cut fresh from the bolt, 100% quilting cotton.Kept continuous if more than one unit purchased as shown in guide above.Suitable for quilting, patchwork, home decorating, appliquè, cushions, scrapbooking  and general sewing. *if you want a smaller cut.. or you want more and we seem out of stock.. please contact us at [email protected]*WOF = Width of Fabric

Shop Marin Warm Natural Oversized … and other curated products on LTK, the easiest way to shop everything from your favorite creators.

🎄【NATURAL & FULL APPEARANCE】Featuring a mixture of 359 individually PVC branch tips for remarkable realism, this christmas tree can be easily fluffed and shaped for a splendid and natural display. The Christmas tree also provides abundant space to showcase your favorite ornaments. 🎄【STURDY CONSTRUCTION】The Christmas tree is 4.5 feet tall with a 34-inch base diameter. Featuring all-metal construction and comes with a foldable metal tree stand. It strikes the perfect balance between grandeur and versatility. With the high quality materials, the prelit christmas tree will bring holiday joy for years to come. 🎄【PRE-LIT CHRISTMAS TREE】Pre-strung with 200 Warm White LED lights which emit a warm natural glow, adding a fantastic festive atmosphere to your home. The bulbs that the Christmas tree used meet the strict UL standard, safely designed to remain lit even if one burns out. 🎄【EASILY ASSEMBLE】Equipped with convenient hinged branches that easily fall into place during set-up and fold back up for storage, separated into 2-sections which allow for easy assembling, dismantling, and storing. 🎄【WARRANTY】Hykolity’s prelit Christmas tree is guaranteed for 1 years. We aim for quality followed up with quality customer service directly provided by manufacturer. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We offer free-exchange for any quality problems within warranty.

Hi and thanks for stopping by! A new challenge begins today at Serendipity Stamps Challenge Blog! This month we're looking for Holiday Cards. I thought I would do something a little non-traditional this time. These bells are from the Ornament Pops Stamp Set. It's available as an outline - so you can color it yourself, or as a solid image set - ready to dip in ink and stamp like I used today. I really love purple and pinks at Christmas. Those colors always remind me of the advent wreath in church. It was always a delight to see a new one lit every week counting down to Christmas. I stamped the bells in two shades of purple, fussy cut them, and adhered them with adhesive foam tape to add some dimension to my project. This sentiment is the Happy Holidays II and you can find it on sale for $2 here. Could you use a little more inspiration? Check out designs from our team. We have a special guest this month too!! I hope you will stop by and say hi to Hazel Hodgkins from Hazel's Paper Designs! Vickie Zimmer Jenny Gropp Julie Warner Karen Amidon Marybeth Lopez Miriam Napier Want to go shopping? The 50% off Stamp of the Month is Snowman Ice Skating I hope you'll be able to join us at Serendipity Stamps Challenge Blog! Supplies Used: Finished Size 4.25 x 5.5" Stamps: Serendipity Stamps Ornament Pops, Happy Holidays II Dies: Pretty Pink Posh Stitched Borders, MFT Fishtail Flags Pattern Paper: Twinery Lilac Twine Buttons, Lavender Seam Binding - Snug Hug Silver Twine

Shauna Groenewold wasn't looking for any special recognition when she started making baby blankets. "It just kind of kept going from there," she said.

Vintage Kewpie Pudgie A MERRY CHRISTMAS GREETINGS POSTCARD Pristine Condition! Rare! Shackman Collector No.90367j This postcard is rare and hard to find as it has been out of production for many years and is no longer available for purchase in retail stores. Wonderful! KEWPIE/PUDGIE VINTAGE POSTCARD. Rare, fine quality postcard measures 3 1/2" x 5". We have kept this beauty stored away in plastic for nearly 40 years! Pristine condition-Awesome find for collectors. Perfect gift for ALL Kewpie/Pudgie fans! Rare postcard-made many years ago by B.Shackman Company (NY,NY) no. 90367j. We ship fast & safe worldwide-everyday. ***For a limited time***Purchases totaling $35 and above qualify for FREE shipping....Buy more and save $$$! SEE MORE items from KMS Vintage Eclectibles Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/kathleensmiles?ref=profile_shopname

For decades, Di Morrissey and Boris Janjic’s only contact was through updates from Di’s mother. Then at a dinner party she learned he was single

Move over Vienna; Advent in Zagreb is Europe’s best destination for Christmas. Here is your local's guide to Christmas markets in Zagreb.

In one of the most memorable moments in National Lampoon's 'Christmas Vacation', Chevy Chase's character, Clark Griswold, goes on a rant in front of his family. According to Chase's co-star, Beverly D'Angelo, they filmed the scene in sections and kept cue cards nearby.

For years, Monica's mother-in-law, Lina, has been giving her porcelain dolls for Christmas. Mon always assumed they were just antiques and kept them hidden in her closet. But her husband, Andy, sees them and reveals their purpose.

About five years ago I started a special Christmas tradition for my son. On Christmas Eve my husband or myself write our son a letter summa...