Advent Sunday is here, we can sing Hills of the North (and South) Rejoice and say the word Christmas at last. We’ll be bringing in our bough for the kitchen today and will start decorating it having decided that we will enjoy a full season of Christmas cheer this year, especially given the skies are grey and the rest etc. This will involve a trip up into the loft to find the deccies and yes, it doesn’t seem like five minutes since Offspringette helped me to pack them away before she flew back to New Zealand last year.
And if it’s Advent Sunday then it’s time for another scribbles tradition too. The prize draw for a copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s annual Christmas offering very kindly offered by Picador. Every year I ask and every year (except last year, there wasn’t one) they say ‘Christmas wouldn’t be right without it.’
And then there were ten, so this year ten copies of Frost Fair to be won.
It is a snowy London day in The Great Winter of 1683. We follow our bold narrator as she explores ‘the town on the Thames’, a thousand tents and dancing fires lit on the frozen water with jubilant residents and lively festive revelry. All is a fete upon the ice as she sees jugglers, dancing bears, palm readers and even a merry wedding. Her journey leads her to meet many new companions with whom to spend a starry night upon the river, where they sleep with no inkling of who will be looking down on them in the morning light . . .Carol Ann Duffy's new Christmas poem, Frost Fair is inspired by the fairs held on the River Thames in London as it froze over in the uncommonly cold winters of the Little Ice Age. This delightful, moving new poem captures the inventiveness of a great city and the drama of winter. Beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, Frost Fair is an irresistible read for our festive season.
If you would like to be in it to win it, (and these can go worldwide), please do leave a comment on this post and Magnus will engage his Choosing Paw dreckly.
Incidentally Magnus has declared winter, and after a bit of sign language we finally realised it was Basket on the Kitchen Windowsill Season. No fool that cat when the Aga cranks up.
Footnote: comments are now closed and Magnus is doing his choosing.
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