Welcome back, everyone! Settle in!
It’s the last Links before Christmas. If you’re celebrating, I hope it’s lovely and exactly however you imagined it. But even if it’s not, that’s okay! Be gentle with yourself, especially as 2021 ends and 2022 begins.
Sarah and I recorded a podcast yesterday for an end of the year chat. I can’t wait for you all to listen to it!
As the title suggests, all of today’s links are related to the holidays or Christmas. Enjoy!
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When I read this, it wasn’t behind a paywall yet, but I may have used up my free articles. I know The Holiday is amongst my friends’ favorite Christmas movies and two women sought to recreate it with their own swap experience. It’s super cute.
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Here’s a thread of weird and wonderful Victorian holiday postcards. It makes me want to start collecting them for myself. Where would I even begin?!
https://twitter.com/LaurynIpsum/status/1471680617452429312
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For all my fellow dark and twisted lovelies out there, McSweeney’s has a reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as a Hallmark movie.
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The Great Dickens Christmas Fair has a racism problem, but if there is any bright spot to this article, it’s discovering and seeing all these gorgeous costumes created by the Londoners of the African Dispora. If you want to check them out, here is their Facebook page, their anti-racism initiative, and the president LaToya Tooles’s Instagram account with even more lovely costuming.
More than 200 cast members and thousands of guests have pledged to boycott the Great Dickens Christmas Fair over its failure to protect its volunteers and guests from racist and sexist behavior.https://t.co/06prXJoJai
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) December 4, 2021
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Lastly, prepare to laugh and wheeze. Note that this video gets loud toward the end, so don’t have your headphones at max for your own comfort.
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Not Christmas related, but found this link through NYT: “Peter Dinklage on ‘Cyrano’ and Life After ‘Game of Thrones’ The actor is happy to upend 100 years of clichés by playing the romantic lead. It’s a liberating change after the series became his life.” Lovely reimagining of Cyrano. Probably also behind a paywall, but it’s what I ended up reading after I couldn’t read more than the headline about the Holiday swap.
It’s become one of my annual holiday traditions to listen to the Stuff You Should Know episode on the Star Wars Holiday Special. It’s funnier than two guys talking about a tv show I’ve never even seen has any right to be. Here’s the link to the Apple podcast page; I’m sure it’s in all the other podcast feeds too.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/selects-star-wars-holiday-spectacular/id278981407?i=1000545351201
(Heads up, there’s nothing *too* egregious in here by my standards, but you may not want to listen with young children around. There are some references to drugs and also a very strangely ~adult~ segment of the SW holiday special. The 70s! What a time.)
Tony the Tree Frog and his Adventures in a Lettuce Box!
https://twitter.com/simoncurtis/status/1473144616828510212?s=21
Not holiday related, but this lit my heart up:
https://twitter.com/HG_Watson/status/1471848511985659911?t=H_Y_7fS8YXnJLK7PhBvK4A&s=19
Thought you might like this: The Hilariously Specific Career Options for Christmas Movie Heroines
https://jezebel.com/the-hilariously-specific-career-options-for-christmas-m-1848237233
The story about the Dickens Fair is awful but sadly not surprising. A close friend’s mother in law has been involved in the event for decades and there’s a lot of gatekeeping in that circle.