User:DrThneed/Advent Calendar 2024

I thought it would be fun to try a Wiki-themed Advent calendar on BlueSky (other socials would be fun too but who has the time?!). The post threading all the days starts here. Here's what I did, typos and everything, and the resulting edits:

Day 1 Whamageddon

Welcome to #WikiAdvent Calendar #Day1 Today's "window" is a proper NZ rabbithole. Let's go! 🧵 1st Dec marks the start of Advent, and also the beginning of #Whamageddon, which my kids take very seriously. Last year I heard Wham’s Last Christmas in the pharmacy on the 1st. Straight to Whamhalla!

The Whamageddon Wikipedia page explains the rules Whamageddon. It also lists supposed variations to the game, including the statement that “In New Zealand, 'Snoopy's Christmas' is sometimes used as the featured song.” Really? I’d never heard that. It is definitely possible...Snoopy’s Christmas gets played all over NZ. It even has a float in the Dunedin Santa Parade (truly) and yet wasn’t a hit anywhere else in the world. We love it, and apparently we also love to hate it, voting it the worst Christmas song in a Herald poll in 2007. The Spin Off interviewed Bruce Ward, the man responsible for bringing it to NZ and it’s worth a read, not least for the OTHER seasonal NZ hit I strongly dislike and can now blame him for (link). Shudder. Thanks Bruce.

But back to Snoopy. The claim in the Whamageddon Wikipedia article is marked “citation needed”. Can I track down a source? I found this 2022 US article where the author casts doubt, clearly having NO IDEA how popular Snoopy’s Christmas is in NZ. The problem is that looking through the history of the Whamageddon Wikipedia page I can see that the Snoopy claim was added by an anonymous editor (with an IP address in Wellington) on 1 Dec 2020. A citation needed tag got added a while later. So the Petaluma article cannot be our source. Nor can this 2021 Time Out article. In fact the closest I can get to a source is a Reddit post (you knew that was coming, right?) from 2019 saying ONE PERSON played this ONE TIME. Is that the source of this claim? When a piece of incorrect info on Wikipedia gets picked up and used outside Wikipedia, and then the sources get added later to “prove” the fact on Wikipedia, we call it circular reporting or “citogenesis”.

We can avoid creating another example of citogenesis here by removing that unsourced claim (I'm going to take out ALL the unsourced claims in this article). But if any Wiki sleuths able to track down a pre-1 Dec 2020 reliable link between Snoopy and Whamageddon we can always add it back!

Now I did mention rabbit holes so here’s a little quiz for you. Without looking (of course), if I tell you that 1 of the 3 writers of Snoopy’s Christmas was involved in some other hit songs, what would they be? (we can't do polls yet, right? I'll just list them)

A. Can’t help falling in love (Elvis Presley) B. The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimbaway) C. Lullaby of Birdland (Ella Fitzgerald) D. It’s a wonderful world (Louis Armstrong) E. All of the above

You all know its E, right? The mind that wrote Lullaby of Birdland wrote Snoopy's Christmas. Unbelievable! 🤯 You can read about George David Weiss here, and see his song category here (strangely not linked from his Wikipedia page). Time for me to do some quick edits, get ready for this year’s Santa Parade, and see if I can get a better shot of Snoopy! I hope they've adjusted some of the floats so the new George St lampposts don't destroy the wings on the giant albatross this year...I took a look at the Santa Parade article and....hoo boy. Lot of unsourced info, a massive North American bias, and some questionable statements. I have heard our Santa Parade called a Christmas Parade but never a Christmas Pageant! Quick touch up, sourced to Te Ara which has a whole article on NZ Santa Parades! And then I checked the Wikipedia list of Christmas and holiday season parades. Is there one where you live, dear reader? Is it in this article? I had to edit to make clear that Dunedin's parade is 1st or 2nd Sunday, not just 2nd, given we are having it today.

Edits

Removed unsourced words from Whamageddon article to avoid citogenesis
Notable parades: citation needed tags as we definitely have Santa parades throughout NZ and Adelaide being oldest needs a source. Added some detail on NZ parades sourced to our national encyclopaedia
List of Christmas and holiday season parades →New Zealand: Dunedin parade is 1st Sunday of Dec in 2024
Uploaded nine images and one video to Commons from Santa Parade
Uploaded video of Snoopy float from Dunedin Santa Parade to ‘Snoopy’s Christmas’ page, added mention of interview with Bruce Ward and quote
Added image to Buzzy bee article from Santa parade, uploaded image of Cliff the ambulance to Dunedin Hospital page, with two sources on campaign

Day 2 Christmas cards

Welcome to #WikiAdvent Calendar #Day2 Does anyone else still send Christmas cards? My parents send out homemade cards every year (dozens of them) and the weeks from early November were filled with urgent discussions about the design for the year – could it be easily reproduced? Was it different enough to previous designs? Was it too laborious to make? Early designs featured photocopied drawings, rubber-stamped dead rats (really), watercolours, folded stars, paper cutouts, ceramic stars, and more. I adopted the tradition when I left home, although I gave it up the year I didn't get a single one back! I found it harder once I moved to NZ, as a lot of imagery around winter Christmas wasn’t appropriate any more! I did a collage stocking washing line, and a star embroidered right on the card, but I don’t have copies of all of the ones I made over the years.

So I can feel you wondering where the Wiki is...don't worry! It's coming. Here's the page for Christmas cards. Notice anything? The section on homemade cards has no sources (boo!) and the images are not obviously homemade. Looking at Wikimedia Commons (our massive open photo library), I can’t find a category for homemade Christmas cards, which surprises me. Maybe I’m missing it somehow? And there’s no category for cards from the UK or NZ either! So today's editing will be uploading my images to Wikimedia Commons. Why share my pics? Because I made these cards I own the copyright. Copyright is A Big Deal when it comes to sharing photographs of artwork – just because you own the artwork, doesn’t mean you own the copyright, the artist does. I can upload these images because I both made and photographed them. And it seems there are not many images of homemade cards yet, which is a huge gap! I'll be back later to show the editing, in the meantime I uploaded my first video to Wikipedia yesterday – check it out here! I LOVE how excited the fan in the background is!).

Alright I’m back! Let’s upload! First, I go to the front page of Wikimedia Commons, log in and hit the blue upload button. If it was my first time, I’d see a guide to what can be uploaded, like this. After that, I get to select the files I want to upload, but if I make a mistake I can still change my mind, add more files etc. On the next screen, I get to give my files a copyright licence. I made these cards, and took the photo, so I own the copyright. I am going to pick a CC BY licence so people can reuse these images however they like and just have to credit me. Almost done! Now I can rename my files (if I forgot to give them informative names beforehand - Commons like useful filenames, not 123456.jpg!), and add a caption and categories. I'm going to put mine in "Christmas cards" for now. And that's it! A nice thank you for contributing to our shared commons, and I can see my final files. If I click on the filenames in blue I can access each one individually, change or add categories, etc. Oh! BONUS! When I went to create the category "Christmas cards of New Zealand", my homemade card AND this other file were in it. Someone uploaded this image years ago, gave it a category that didn't exist, and left it! Huh! Merry Christmas from Hawera!!! (and to finish off, here's that court house as photographed by Ulrich Lange and donated to Wikimedia Commons in 2017 )

Edits

Uploaded two images of Christmas cards to Commons
Added two categories, Christmas cards of New Zealand, Homemade Christmas cards
Added image of homemade Christmas cards to Christmas card article

Day 3 The Singing Ringing Tree

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day3. I’m not sure what it is about Christmas and horror. Maybe it begins when small children see Father Christmas/Santa Claus for the first time (as evidenced in this perfect reaction, on a very short video from Sunday). My kids loved The Nightmare Before Christmas, and watched it whenever they wanted. But when I was a primary-aged kid you watched what the BBC played, and then waited a year to see if you would ever get to see it again. I loved John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, charming and creepy. But it took me a long time to track down the name of a barely remembered Christmas fairy tale involving a prince, a princess, a tree and a bear. It turns out it was voted one of the spookiest 20 movies of all time in 2004! (citation needed). It continues the theme from WikiAdvent Day1 of things that were sort of hits in their own country but massive hits somewhere else.

The film is 1957’s The Singing Ringing Tree, made in East Germany by Francesco Stefani, who will you know from his other films......wait, no, just that. Hmm. Although he probably did other things too, given he got the Federal Cross and the Bavarian Cross, English Wikipedia just doesn’t know about them. The BBC apparently played The Singing Ringing Tree a “massive number of times” between 1960 and 1980. Here’s the trailer, although it was shown in black and white when I watched it (more scary? less scary? more I think). And this review is how I found it, thanks Duck Duck Go. And here’s the Wikipedia page for the film. I’m going to add the link to the trailer in the External Sources section of the page, then I’m going to see if I can add anything to poor Stefani’s tiny stub of an article! One thing I have to show you is The Fast Show spoof of the film. It was made by Paul Whitehouse, working through his childhood trauma. And another bonus - in linking the voiceover artist Tony Bilbow's Wikipedia article to The Singing Ringing Tree page, I came across the amazing wind sculpture of the same name. Coincidence? Or is the artist another traumatised child of the 70s? I've improved Stefani's article a little, linked Bilbow to his work, & added a link to the full length version of the film (with English voiceover) to the 'External links' bit of the Wikipedia page. It's hard to see why I was scared at the time, but in my defence I was 4, and it IS decidedly weird!

Edits

Added ref section, 3 refs, and information to Francesco Stefani
Added source and cult status, and link to full dubbed version, to The Singing Ringing Tree
Added link from Tony Bilbow to The Singing Ringing Tree, and mention that he voiceovered the series

Day 4 Advent Calendars

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day4 This is an advent calendar, so at some point obviously we have to talk about Advent Calendars! Today I’m going to do some research, AND settle an age-old dispute once and for all. Honest. But first – who has a physical advent calendar this year? In this house, I have a tea calendar, my kids have gummies, and my husband has beer (we share). I am constantly amazed by the range of calendars capitalism affords us: 24 little bits of cheese! Socks! Bath bombs! Lego! Puzzles! New Zealand media outlet The Spin Off loves to rank things, and a couple of years ago they snarkily ranked 20 of NZ’s best advent calendars, it's worth a read. And of course there are life size calendars, calendars made of shipping containers, digital ones with music and animation, even a climate change protest calendar made for the chair of Lloyds Bank. Humans really like counting down to things, eh?

Now, to that dispute – it’s an age-old argument, do Advent calendars have windows or doors? My family says windows (13 yo), windows (husband), and “wouldn’t it depend what the printed picture is, I’ve always called them flaps anyway” (16yo). We may have to cast our net wider. Who better to consult than Wikipedia?

The English Wikipedia article says “Many Advent calendars take the form of a large rectangular card with "Doors", one for each day of December leading up to and including Christmas Eve (December 24) or Christmas Day (December 25)” Isn’t that odd? We don’t normally capitalise nouns in English, and there’s no reason to put it in double quotes, really. I wonder if it got translated from German Wikipedia? That might also explain why there are no sources. What if we survey all the language Wikipedias, what will we find? Research method: translate first few paragraphs of Wikipedia article until we find the use of windows or doors. Findings: Clearly a preference for windows! And only a couple of “doors or windows”. (Please do not comment on my charting skills. Excel is not my friend.) I found a surprising number of other terms, including boxes, cut holes, flaps, drawers, pockets, openings, compartments, days, hatches, slots, and JARS! I think this is probably a Google translate fail, it’s from el Wikipedia, and the sentence is “The Christmas calendar is either a large jar that brings poinsettias or a large decorated open box with gifts". You what now? I love poinsettias but how do they function as a calendar?! They work quite well as a tree though! Happy for any el speakers to shed further light on this. A lot of these articles on Advent calendars have similar construction to the English article, so are either sourced from it or from the same place the English one was. But interestingly quite a few have replaced “Doors” with the word for windows. Oh wait. Oh no. Oh nonononono. Back in 2021 the English article used to say “windows” (in quotes, no caps) WITH A SOURCE. And then used the term doors further down the page. What happened? In 2022 there was a series of edits and reversions kicked off by an anonymous editor replacing all the uses of windows in the article with doors. After being reverted, they tried many more times, in the process removing the source that used the term window. There was shouting and bad language. The reverting editors lost track and reverted to “Doors” with no source. Maybe distracted by the insertion of fish and wheels! (not shown) in the article?! But this explains some differences between language Wikis, I think. Windows or doors depends on when you translated from English. I'm going to make some edits to the English article to get rid of that weird construction, add in sources and try to not start an edit war! Wish me luck. This started as a bit of a joke but there are clearly very strong feelings on the matter out there! 😬 And please enjoy this absolutely spot-on poem by the wonderful Brian Bilston. Edits made. Chip in here if you wish. I settled on "a large rectangular card with flaps (variously referred to as doors or windows)" and gave two sources. Will it stick? Who knows!

Edits

Altered Advent calendar article to read “Many Advent calendars take the form of a large rectangular card with flaps (variously referred to as doors or windows),” and added two sources.

Day 5 Pomanders

Welcome to my #WikiAdvent calendar, #Day5 This morning I drove down the road and noticed a fabulous fragrance that wasn’t there last week. It’s possibly the cabbage tree flowers, which have a wonderful smell. You wouldn't know it from the Wikipedia article though. Still, it got me thinking about the smell of Christmas. As I grew up in the UK, that was fragrances like cinnamon, cloves, oranges and pine. For several years in a row I had a Penhaligon's Scented Treasury book in my Christmas stocking.

Penhaligon's is a perfume house in London, which started in the 1860s in the Turkish Baths on Jermyn Street. Those Penhaligon books were treasure troves - beautifully illustrated, scented collections of poems, paintings and stories. Here's the Christmas one on eBay Anyway - back to Christmas scents. I remember Blue Peter showing us how to make a pomander one year, which was an orange studded all over with cloves. They smell amazing and, if you can get them to dry rather than rot, they last for ages. As far as editing goes, today I have already removed some vandalism from the Penhaligon's article. I'm going to look for some sources on modern pomanders, as there are none in the article. And I'm going to consider whether modern orange-and-clove pomanders might deserve their own Wikidata item as distinct from earlier pomanders, which were holders for different scents and spices. I can't say what those smell of, but I CAN say what a modern pomander smells of. @lucymoore.bsky.social began a WikiProject on smells this year so how to model smell on Wikidata is on my mind! I wonder if I can find a description of scent of a cabbage tree flower to add? Suggestions welcome!

Oh well this is fun! It looks to me like all the encyclopaedia articles on pomanders are similar to the English one, covering the pierced metal kind and the orange clove ones, EXCEPT Danish Wikipedia, which has an article only about the oranges as Christmas decorations! That article is labelled Juleappelsin, whereas as far as I can tell a pomander in Danish is a Balsambøsse (thank you Rosenborg museum for your multilingual website - I don't trust Google, which told me the orange was studded with carnations!!!). Ah yes, no I am not falling into the trap of trying to figure out how on earth this came about (screenshot of empty Nostradumus section in Pomander article). And if you think that was the end of it you don't know me very well. Of course I looked at the Wikipedia page history, and of course I looked at the edit summary - there were three paragraphs on Nostradamus's recipe for rose tablets, removed for copyright infringement. So I looked in the trusty Internet Archive to see if I could summarise the original - and found rose tablets (pills in this version) aren't actually anything to do with pomanders anyway - they were to be dissolved under the tongue! So I can delete that heading. There's quite a few references to rose in this book, and even a rose pomade (oh, pomade! originally an apple ointment for skin and hair) so maybe I missed scented stuff to go in a pomander.

Edits

Removed vandalism from Penhaligon’s
Added two sources to pomander, removed redundant Nostradamus section
Added word and removed spaces on Pomade
Added flower scent to Cordyline article
Added ‘smells of sweetness’ and applies to part nectar to Corydyline australis in Wikidata
Added common names to Pittosporum eugenioides lemonwood or tarata Q7199141, added ‘smells of’ honey with applies to part nectar.
Created Wikidata item for orange clove pomander, and moved the Danish link there

Day 6 Christmas cats

Welcome to #Day6 of the #WikiAdvent calendar! Today I was remembering the year we got a stray kitten on Christmas eve from a litter born in a friend’s garage. She hid behind the Christmas tree for days, and barely forgave us for taking it down. It sent me down a Christmas cat rabbithole, where I read about Iceland’s Yule Cat – a massive cat who eats people who didn’t get new clothes on Christmas eve! The Yule Cat is associated with the Yule Lads, who used to kidnap children, but now just steal things instead, and the ogress Grýla and you can read about these horrifying characters on the Icelandic Christmas folklore page. In our house though the cat we associate most with Christmas is a very famous cat, worldwide - one of the top 10 of fictional cats along with the Cheshire Cat! I'm talking about Slinky Malinki, who is important enough to have his own Wikipedia page, and the star of 'Slinky Malinki's Christmas Crackers'. In this based-on-a-true-story picture book, this mischievous black cat climbs the Christmas tree, causing chaos. When the family restore the ornaments to their rightful places, they – "Oh Foozle! What a shattering shame!" - can’t find the fairy (it’s under the rug) but Slinky has taken its place on top of the tree so all is well.

As far as editing goes, I will be adding a summary of the story to Slinky's page, and mentioning that he was the subject of a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. If you have access to cats, you are welcome to post Christmas cat pictures below. I'm still recovering from reading about the Yule Cat! Okay so the funniest thing is that whoever wrote this article introduces us to Slinky Malinki and then calls him Malinki after that...as if it's his surname? And like this is a biography article? Not gonna lie I kinda like it.

Edits

Removed copyright violation from Slinky Malinki Christmas Crackers.
Added mention of Edinburgh Fringe and two sources.
Added summary of story and another source to publisher.

Day 7 Gingerbread

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day7 Today’s topic is....(drumroll please) gingerbread! When I was a kid gingerbread was one of two things, a dense moist cake that improved with keeping, or biscuits cut in shapes, iced with royal icing, and for people, currant faces & buttons. I didn’t hear about gingerbread houses for some years. The gingerbread house page tells us that gingerbread has been around for centuries, but that making it into houses was invented by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 in the story Hansel and Gretel. OR The Grimms simply popularised a pre-existing custom (seems more likely to me, seeing as royal icing and gingerbread are all that is needed, and both had been around for hundreds of years before the Grimms). The gingerbread house Wikipedia page tells us that the largest house made had nearly 36 million calories 🤢.

Anyway – how am I going to lever NZ and Wikipedia editing into these wanderings? Well. I live in Dunedin, and anyone who has visited will probably have seen the fantastic Dunedin Railway Station. It earned its architect, George Troup, the nickname Gingerbread George, for obvious reasons. It looks more properly gingerbready to me than any of the pics on the Gingerbread (architecture) page! Inevitably the station was recreated in gingerbread a few years ago by a local chef. Sadly I have no openly licensed image of that to add to the Wikipedia page, but I can add the fact and its source. Here are some pictures of my own gingerbread creations over the year, just for fun. We got bored with houses, and the kids requested a city (I could only manage a hamlet) and a castle. This year? Who knows! We were in Boston living in an AirBNB the year we made the castle. I normally cut the tiniest corner off a ziploc for icing, to get a nice fine line, but the US bags were *stretchy*, so the icing got thicker and thicker as I worked! Nightmare (before Christmas).

‪Oh dear, in adding the baked station to Wikipedia, I linked to the hotel the baker was from (Scenic Southern Cross Hotel). That page is named Grand Casino Dunedin so I created a redirect from the Southern Cross Hotel. It hasn't always been a casino!

Edits

Added gingerbread station to Dunedin Railway Station page, with source
Made redirect for Southern Cross Hotel Dunedin, to Grand Casino Dunedin

Day 8 Wreaths and Big Things

Welcome to my #WikiAdvent #Day8 Today we shall be leapfrogging from Christmas wreaths to road trips, come along for the ride. This thread brought to you by this absolutely astonishing wreath which turned up all the way from a craft fair in England yesterday.

So a Christmas wreath would more traditionally be greenery - I used to do holly and ivy ones in the UK. Naturally in NZ that's not so appropriate or necessary as the flowers are blooming. Anyway, my mother wrote “have a very kitschy Christmas” on her present which led to me trying to explain the word kitsch to my kids. I struggled, and I feel like the Wikipedia page for kitsch also struggles! It says kitsch is “perceived as naïve imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous or of banal taste”. Interestingly although I think Christmas lends itself to kitsch quite well, the only mention of Christmas on that page is in “notable examples” where it just links the Christmas card! Hello? All Christmas cards are kitsch? Harumph.

An undeniably kitsch bit of culture that New Zealand has is our Big Things. There’s a list of Big Things in New Zealand here, where we list and give images for everything from arguable our most famous, the L&P Bottle, to lesser known big things like Hokitika's big wheelbarrow. But wait! One of our most loved (and hated) big things is missing from this list – the Big Hand, which has a name and page all to himself! So I can add the hand to our list page, even if he is was relocated to Australia.

I can hear you wondering what this has to do with Christmas. Well! Christmas means summer holidays, so there’ll be lots of travelling round the country which generally means driving (public transport being what it is). Lots of us will see Big Things on our travels, and maybe we can snap a photo and upload to Commons (see WikiAdvent Day 2 for instructions on how)! In the NI we are currently missing pictures of giant bikes (Taupō and Tūrangi), the Big Dairy Whip (Tataunui), the Big Loaf (Manaia) and the Big Skateboard (Mangawhai) and the Jandal on the Mandel, between Kopu and Thames. In the South Island we are lacking the Big Sausage from Tuatapere and Riverton’s Big Paua. So do your part NZers, take some photos of these most kitsch of Kiwi roadside delights and improve while you're on your hols! And...are we missing any more Big Things?

Edits

Reordered the list of Big Things, added Quasi, the big hand

Day 9 Caganer

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day9 Today was fine, then it went a bit sideways 💩, and then it settled in the middle. So today's calendar is a Christmas tradition that’s also a bit 💩 It’s the Catalan figurine, a Caganer, who is depicted with his trousers down in the act of defecating. Festive, no? According to the Wikipedia page, he’s been a feature of Catalan nativity scenes since the late 17th or early 18th century. He’s often hidden or a bit hard to find, leading to children playing a kind of “Where’s Wally” with him. The traditional figure is a peasant, and a man, but modern riffs include Spanish and British royalty, nuns, Santa Claus, and even Barack Obama. Delightful. There’s an entire section of the page dedicated to Barcelona city council’s decision not to include a caganer in a public display in 2005, because rules around public defecation and urination changed and he set a bad example. There was an outcry, and he was restored.

But, again, I hear you cry, where are you going with this? Well we have rules about public defecation and urination in NZ too, and police even spoke to one tourist who who was filmed disrepecting a Dunedin street. Whilst that is definitely not Wikipedia-worthy (IMO) we do have a toilet that is heritage listed and does not yet have a page, so I’m going to whip up a quick stub for the Manor Place Conveniences. This brick building was built in 1912 to replace some unattractive urinals, and have their original fittings inside still. And they're octagonal, like our famous city centre, but noone knows exactly why! First step will be to add them to our list of historic places in Dunedin, as a redlink. When you see a redlink on Wikipedia it means a page about a notable subject hasn't been written yet. It's satisfying turning a red link blue!

The toilets have entered the list...sadly the full colour photo on the Heritage List doesn't have any image licensing that I can see, so I can't use it. I'll have to make do with a public domain image imported from Flickr. Thanks Dunedin City Council Archives! Luckily we have an easy tool to import from Flickr to commons, and a nice CropTool to focus in on that cute little building. So, that will do until I can get down there for a colour pic. Also luckily I have previously written pages for heritage buildings, so I can copy the templates etc for a quick wee stub article (hur hur). When I have a chance I'll put a current photo in, and add the full old pic instead of the crop. Anyone that knows me (and the #NZThesisProject) will be unsurprised I cited a thesis on the page - the heritage specialist who got these toilets listed did her master's on Dunedin's underground toilets! And complimentary shout out to NZ's other listed toilets, the Hundertwasser Toilets. Phew! Now I've linked the toilets from the Princes Street article, which also has a list of heritage buildings, and added a talk page for people to discuss, rated it as stub, linked it from Wikidata so the coordinates get pulled in, and added categories. Must be time for a 🫖

Edits

Uploaded photo of Manor Place Conveniences to Commons from Flickr, and cropped it, and uploaded architectural plans
Made stub article and added some sources, crop photo and plans.
Linked article from Princes Street article.
Added walking tour cite to manor conveniences page.

Day 10 Carols

Welcome to #WikiAdvent calendar #Day10 My daughter had her Grade 5 singing exam today, which took the form of a concert. Great fun! But it reminded me about Christmas carols. I used to go carol singing every year with a friend who lived in a tiny village. Everyone would gather and we’d troupe around the houses, being rewarded with lollies at every house, which we’d share out at the end (like wassailing). Like that painting only in the dark and with a bit less snow and a couple more thatched cottages.

As a student I was part of an informal choir that would sing at the Christmas market for charity, stopping midway for mulled wine halfway through to warm our frozen fingers. It was there I first came across one of my fave carols, Boris Ord’s Adam lay y’bounden (video). The manuscript words of this song have survived since c1400. The words to Adam lay ybounden are from 1400, and possibly related songs sung in mystery plays. I never loved singing about being grateful for original sin, but I just love Ord's setting. Another favourite of mine is Tomorrow shall be my dancing day, not written down until the 1800s, but undoubtedly earlier (maybe even pre-Adam), and possibly also a mystery play song. Here's the Willcocks arrangement.

So what makes a carol? Pretty much any song sung at or around Christmas with a Christmas theme, so Wikipedia says. I feel like that's a bit loose - most of us would differentiate between a lot of modern Christmas songs and carols, I suspect! One Christmas carol that I have to include, to inch us closer to NZ, is The Twelve Days of Christmas. YES I WILL SAY IT it’s not the first twelve days of December, it’s not the twelve days before Christmas, it’s the twelve days AFTER Christmas eve! A million variations exist (counting songs invite that) including the well-known in New Zealand A Pukeko in a Punga Tree by Māori Language Commissioner Kīngi Īhaka (I had no idea who wrote it!), published as a picture book in 1981. I'm going to track down a source and add this information to Īhaka's page, but to finish I can recommend this very New Zulland version of The Twelve Days of Christmas by The Māori Sidesteps.

Edits

Added two paragraphs on Pūkeko on a ponga tree to Kīngi Īhaka and four sources.
Uploaded an image of the song from Dunedin Santa Parade and added to Kīngi Īhaka page.

Day 11 Christmas pudding

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day11 I’m starting to think about what to have for Christmas dinner. One thing that won’t be making an appearance this year is Christmas pudding. I do love it (so dense! So rich! So good with brandy butter!). It was my habit to make a batch of five or six, boil them up, wrap them in baking paper and foil and store them in the top of the larder, to be used as needed over several years. But I’m short on pudding bowls after The Big Tipping Over Disaster of 2019 and it looks like it might be warm this Christmas, which means a pav or a trifle is more in order.

Reading the history of puddings on Wikipedia, I absolutely love this bit of Wikipedia editing: “There is a popular and wholly unsubstantiated myth[citation needed] that in 1714, George I of Great Britain (sometimes known as the Pudding King) requested that plum pudding be served as part of his royal feast in his first Christmas in England”. Can I find a citation for the fact the myth is unsubstantiated? Who knows, but I need to try! 😆 (bit tautologous thou', right? If it was substantiated, it wouldn't be a myth)

The 1st printed Christmas Pud recipe was Eliza Acton’s (1845). By the time goldminers were colonising NZ, Christmas and plum pudding were strongly associated, so much that it didn’t feel like Christmas without a pud. Luckily the ingredients were widely available. In 1881 the Christchurch Globe published a pudding recipe in song form, requiring a 1lb of most things, and promised a cheaper recipe to follow but AFAICT didn't print it! The 1874 Weekly News had your back, tho, with several recipes including one that eked out the good stuff with grated carrots and spuds (but thankfully didn’t return to the medieval style of including meat).

My mum showed up one year in NZ with a pudding, having had to explain to the xray staff at Auckland airport what the bomb-shaped thing in her suitcase was. But she was just following tradition, even in the 1860s people were sending puddings round the world – sending slices back to relatives in England, or receiving a whole pudding from London. Enough meandering! I could explore for hours the weird traditions associated with puds – like making them on Stir-Up Sunday (the last Sunday before Advent), or it being lucky for the whole family to stir it 3 times and make a wish, or hiding a silver coin in them, or pouring hot brandy on them and lighting them on fire. Instead I’m going to leave you with one of my all-time favourite Christmas puddings. It’s Albert, the cut-and-come-again pudding from The Magic Pudding (1918) and which my dad read to us as kids. Albert was “a Christmas, steak, and apple-dumpling Puddin’” all at once, and he never ran out, even if he did run away, and his manners were atrocious.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, you can read the whole thing here (with pictures), or just enjoy the summary on Wikipedia. I'm off to find an edit to make!

Edits

Added sources to Stir-Up Sunday and Christmas Pudding, removing a citation needed tag.
Added images/SDC to brandy butter/hard sauce images on Commons

Day 12 Pavlova

Having done Christmas pudding yesterday I feel like it’s essential to cover what would be a more popular NZ Christmas dessert today – pavlova. My mum used to serve it covered with cream and halved grapes soaked in sherry, or fruit salad in the summer in the 70s. So when I moved to NZ it felt like a blast from the past to see the same thing everywhere at Christmas! The shop-bought pavlova here is a big slab of foam confection, which I really can’t recommend, but homemade ones vary between masses of marshmallowy middle or chewy insides. Yum! The inside is the key difference from a meringue, which is meant to be solid. I can't find a Commons picture of the inside of a meringue, sorry.

I have to mention, of course, the dispute about who invented it, NZ or Australia? Both like to claim it. Researcher Michael Symons diplomatically pointed out that there probably isn’t one invention. Other food historians have traced it to very similar textured cakes from Europe, much earlier. What I did discover reading Wikipedia was the delightful range of things called pavlova that are different to the NZ/Aus pav. There was a 1911 Strawberries pavlova from the UK that was a sorbet (there’s an image here). There’s this NZ layered jelly from 1927, and this dry-ice confection from Greece (just because). But I want you to imagine a record-breaking 85 m2 pavlova. How many egg whites is that? How big a beater did they need? HOW DID THEY COOK IT?

To editing! In reading about pavlovas I discovered that one of the food historians had a Wikidata item recording him as having died in 1999, although he was alive and well in 2007 when he researched pavs in NZ, and as far as I can tell, he’s still alive! 🫢 So editing today is to correct that. Rather than delete the incorrect date, though, I will deprecate the statement, and say it's wrong. That reduces the chance that another editor will incorrectly re-add the death date. The info for that year is coming from the German National Library. I hope GND will check and update their records at some point and he can live again! I’ve added some information to show he is still living. To finish, here's Anna Pavlova during her 1926 tour of NZ, which started all the Pavlova fuss here.

Edits

On Wikidata item for food researcher Michael Symons, added a description saying he was still alive, and deprecated death date, which was sourced to GND. Added a reason for deprecation qualifier and reference URL to his website. Added his spouse (and a link from her to him), and another identifier.
On Pavlova, tried to more accurately summarise Symons's views on David Burton.

Day 13 Christmas tree silly season

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day13 Today we are finally going to put up our Christmas tree! So let’s talk trees. Putting up a tree is a popular custom around the world. Basically you can take anything roughly conical, or even other tree-shaped, decorate it with lights and call it a Christmas tree. (Alt: A wire cone with a gold ribbon round it and a star on top, in a public park. Emphatically Not A Proper Christmas Tree). If you do one of these minimalist jobs that look more like you strung baubles on Rudolph than attempted a tree, then firstly WHO HURT YOU and secondly please put some pics on Commons, I had to steal this image off the interwebs. (Alt: a handful of twigs in a glass jar with some baubles hanging off it. No lights no tinsel and no self-respect).

Here in NZ it is summer though, and the trees people sell are mostly Pinus radiata, with big needles and droopy branches (it’s the growing season) and which are unwelcome in my house since I’ve just spent weeks despairing at their yellow pollen EVERYWHERE making me sneeze. (alt: A droopy pine branch silhouetted against a window. A small bauble is clinging on for dear life and an unlit candle is precariously balanced on top. Don't light that sucker it'll burn your house down). Me wondering if I'll have to emigrate in order to get a tree sturdy enough to hang my handmade glass ornaments above a tile floor. (Alt: Girl with hand covering face next to half-decorated Christmas tree. CC BY NC SA https://canterburystories.nz/collections/photohunt/2021/ccl-cs-40430)

Few people know that in the early 1900s there was a national Christmas tree shortage in NZ, which led to a trend for decorating small children and getting them to stand quietly in the corner for two weeks. (Alt: Studio portrait of unidentified girl dressed as Christmas tree with ornaments, probably Christchurch [ca 1905-1926] CC BY NC)(Alt: If your parents were really mean, you had lanterns to hold too. Be quiet, Delilah, children should be seen and not heard. (Auckland Museum Collections, Circa 1908-Circa 1917, no known copyright restrictions))

Even into the 40s people had to scrounge around to get a tree. This family are immensely proud of the fully-decorated tree they've sourced, probably from someone else's garden. And this kid doesn't care he was caught in the act. (Alt: Family proudly posing behind a trailer with a large decorated Christmas tree. Perhaps you can spot a hint of regret in dad's face that they procured a tree too large to get through the front door, a story as old as bringing trees inside (no don't tell me there's a FarSide cartoon about Og getting a tree too big for the cave, right?))(Alt: Pedal faster son, and let's hope they can't follow the trail of pine needles © Christchurch Star)

By the sixties, a Christmas tree was de rigueur for every businessman in NZ in the month of December. You had to be ready at all times for an impromptu Christmas party! (Alt:Man in suit carrying boxed Christmas tree). Apologies to anyone reading the alt text (and if you're not, why not?). This isn't called the silly season for nothing (yes, I know that's a summer thing in the northern hemisphere, but silly season is Christmas down here, keep up!). Silliness aside, today's edits will be improving info on the actual NZ Christmas tree, the majestic pōhutakawa, which was first called the NZ Christmas tree in 1857 but which fact is missing, along with sources.

Edits

Added date of first published reference to pōhutakawa as Christmas tree, and two sources
Added support to move the page to the common name pōhutakawa
Added Christmas costume image to Commons

Day 14 Christmas crackers

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day14 Today I’m thinking about Christmas crackers – and soup! We have always had crackers at Christmas dinner, never at any other time. And of course we expect them to pull apart with a snap, have a paper hat, a bad joke, and ridiculous trinket. Sing along - tradition! If you search for Christmas crackers on Wikipedia, you’ll find it a disambiguation page telling you that’s the name of a couple of episodes of British soaps, Only Fools and Horses, and Are You Being Served, and a 9 minute 1963 children’s film from Canada. It’s a little odd, with a middle section with an insatiable tin crocodile and a little man going to ridiculous lengths to decorate his Christmas tree, but rather charming. Watch it here!

If you make it past these obstacles to the actual page on Christmas crackers, you’ll discover that unlike many Christmas traditions, this one was invented by one specific person, Tom Smith, a confectioner in London. Smith sold bonbons (which to him & me are sugared almonds, or flavoured toffees with a powdery outside, but to Wikipedia are filled chocolates) in a twist of paper. He got from the idea from a trip to Paris in 1846. To keep customers interested, Smith started putting fortunes in the paper. He introduced a ‘snap’, which was a popular joke toy at the time, inside a larger version of his paper-wrapped sweet. Tom’s son introduced jokes, hats and trinkets and dropped the sweet that started it all. Along the way, crackers were variously called Bangs of Expectation (not catchy, Tom) and Cossacks. Smith was so successful he had 2000 staff and had to build a new factory. I found this interesting because when we had Christmas in Australia last year, the crackers were called bonbons instead. Now that name makes sense!

New Zealand has its own story of a wide-spread tradition that has one inventor, but in our example the inventor didn’t get to profit from it. I’m talking about the inventor of onion dip. You can’t go many parties in NZ without encountering this specific NZ food, which is made using onion soup mix and reduced cream. A few years ago a journalist decided to track down the inventor, Rosemary Dempsey. Despite being told by Nestle that she was dead, he managed to track her down anyway and interview her. Rosemary invented the dip in the 60s when working in Nestle’s test kitchen, as a way of stopping onion soup mix slipping down the sales charts. It went wild! Rosemary merits 1 line on the onion dip page, so my edits today will expand that (she’s been written about a bit since she was found, but I’m not quite sure I can swing a whole article for her. Maybe eventually when she gets a NY honour?). If you make onion dip, and there’s for some reason any left over, I can recommend using it as the basis for another NZ delight from #Dunedin Southern sushi (which I’m going to create a redirect for to help people find the right page easily).

Edits

Added more detail on Rosemary Dempsey to article on Kiwi onion dip, with sources
Created redirect for Southern sushi

Day 15 Pantomime

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day15 Is this thread about pantomimes? Oh no it isn’t. [Gif: Oh yes it is!]

The pantomime Wikipedia page traces their origin back to Roman pantomimes and Greek tragedies. Although it says “Roman pantomime differed from mime by its more artistic nature and relative lack of farce and coarse humour” so the audience might not have needed to know the Latin for “it’s behind you!” after all. The Middle Ages mummers plays would be more recognisable to us, with stage fights, coarse humour and fantastic creatures, gender role reversal, and good defeating evil. In the 17th & 18th C the incorporation of European characters such as Colombine, Pantalone and Harlequin resulted in the English harlequinade, a comic scene, featuring harlequin and his magic wand (a slapstick!) that he would tap things with, to magic effect. The panto page says harlequinades were mostly silent because only 2 theatres had the right to do spoken drama at that time, whereas the harlequinade page says they were silent because most of the performers were French (having left France when Paris theatres were closed). Take your pick! (Gif: Why not both?)

Apparently it wasn’t until the 1800s that panto began telling fairy tales and folk stories. And after 1843, dialogue was allowed, so word play and puns became an important part of panto, and the harlequinade pretty much disappeared. Important features of today's plays include

Crossdressing – the principal boy and girl are normally both girls, the pantomime dame is a man in drag. Maud Boyd here was dressed as Prince Charming in 1893.
Audience participation – stock phrases include “it’s behind you”, “oh no it isn’t”, “oh yes it is”. Audiences may also have to sing, sometimes in opposition (for instance, half sing “It’s a long way to Tipperary” while the other half sing “Pack up your troubles”)
Risque jokes and double entendres, and incorporation of topical elements (I’m sure there’ll be pantos this year featuring ChatGPT as a character). And the very BEST pantos include a pantomime horse, or camel, cow or zebra. It doesn’t really matter the animal as long as the character is two people stuffed into one suit and therefore made to look ridiculous. (It does look better if their legs match).

If you check the Big Panto Guide website, you’ll find lots of UK pantos. One county I checked had 18 different pantos for 2024! Whereas in NZ there seem to be only a few productions nationwide. In the past, JC Williamson, an American based in Australia, would tour plays and pantomimes in NZ up until 1976, apparently. His Majesty’s Theatre (built 1903) in Wellington hosted pantomimes but also a Cleopatra act that was “the first and last import of snakes into New Zealand”. I can’t check the source that says about the importation, as my library doesn’t have that book, but I can add a source about the Cleopatra act to show it’s real and indicates when it happened. I'll leave you with a cracker-worthy joke: Q: how do you pronounce pantomime? A: Panto, because the mime is silent

Ooh look! Here's Cleo with her snakes in 1907 IN NEW ZEALAND. We don't have ANY legally imported snakes these days, not even in zoos, and especially not on stage! Bit worried about those crocodiles she's meant to have "conquered" tho. Poor things!

Edits

Added source for Cleopatra to St. James Theatre, Wellington

Day 16 Christmas stockings

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day16 Today is wet and coldish so my feet are cold, which means I’m thinking about Christmas stockings. It’s magical when you’re a kid and the empty stocking on the end of your bed/doorhandle/mantel piece, fills overnight with STUFF (peanuts, a mandarin, a Terry’s chocolate orange, a book, wind up toys, etc). But in different countries, different people fill different things! For instance, I grew up with Father Christmas filling a stocking on Christmas eve. French tradition has Papa Noël filling children’s shoes on Christmas eve, accompanied by his donkey. The Italian Befana seems like a conglomerate of a lot of traditions – she’s an old witch, who gives coal (or candy coal!) or gifts, in shoes, you leave out food for her but also, people burn effigies of her?! Many Catholic countries have the Three Kings as gift-givers at Epiphany (Jan 6), or you might find presents in your shoes on Dec 6th after St Nick visits, but in some places, only if you polished them enough! Other figures include Grandfather Frost, the Christ child, Sinterklaas, and the Christmas goat or gnome. There’s a list of gift givers on this page, although it doesn’t cover the differences about WHEN gifts are brought or WHAT they are put in. Pillowcase anyone?

My edit today will happen when I’ve dug out my kids’ homemade stockings and taken a pic. It’s not that I think that my stockings should be the canonical homemade stocking image, more that noone has labelled a stocking on Commons as homemade yet, and I don’t want to offend someone! I’ll leave you with an enduring mystery, Who fills the stockings on the international space station? And if they get them on the 24th, which country's traditions are they following?

Edits

Uploaded two images of patchwork Christmas stockings to Wikimedia Commons, and then added one to the Christmas stocking page

Day 17 Christmas stamps

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day17 Today I was reminded of Christmas stamps, which when I got were always ripped off and stuffed in an envelope to give to some charity that collected them. But first I got to admire them! So let's take a world tour of Christmas stamps! Starting with a Faroese one. I love that lily of the valley. And this 1994 Faroese stamp which was one of two illustrating a traditional counting Christmas song.

Here’s a pair from 2008 in India. I just love those curly lambs! A 1987 series from Germany featured a number of these wooden spinning decroations which I can’t remember the name for, but aren't they beautiful? Finland 1974 - Christmas elves feature quite a lot in Finland. Both the US and Romania decided to use their stamps to advertise mailing things. Very clever! Although you might call it preaching to the converted. This Brazilian series drawn by children is stunning and among my favourites. If you like your stamps with silver or gold at Christmas - Armenia and Ukraine have got you. Ukraine again – are they caroling? I think they are , so cute! And an equally delightful angel with bell from Belarus.

I could go on but after seeing all that I want to show you the three images from the Christmas stamp Wikipedia page. There's this 1898 map with a strongly colonial message, and then these two rather boring examples, one for the British forces in Egypt, and one from Australia. And that's it!!! All my previous pics were from Commons, so I'll be adding a small gallery to the page. I'm also going to add a category to commons for NZ Christmas stamps. I thought there were none to start with but it turns out they just hadn't been identified as Christmas stamps.

Edits

Make category for Christmas stamps from New Zealand, apply it to three images
Add gallery of images to Christmas stamp page, and change lead image to colourful stamp with religious imagery (which seems more representative of the genre than the Canadian map)

Day 18 Christmas things

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day18 Today I’ve been exploring things named Christmas and why. There are geographical things, like several Christmas Islands. Some of them are named because of their date of discovery by Westerners e.g. Christmas Island in Tasmania and Kiritimati atoll in Kiribati. Wikipedia doesn't explicitly say for either of these WHY they have their names but the Tasmania one is part of the New Year group, and James Cook visited Kiritimati on Christmas Eve 1777 so I think we can join the dots.

Then there’s Little Christmas island – is it a little island and was visited at Christmas? Or is it named after Little Christmas, which is 6 Jan? It's a mystery! Who knows! (not Wikipedia). And there's Christmas Island, Nova Scotia, which is named for a person, a Mi'kmaw leader named "Noel", which is of course French for Christmas. Predating Cook's naming of Kiritimati was Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, named by Captain William Mynors on Christmas Day 1643.

More fun though are the settlements called Christmas, which are in Arizona (mining stake claimed Christmas Day 1902), Florida (soldiers arrived to build Fort Christmas on December 25, 1837), Michigan (established by Julius Thorson, of Munising who built a factory for holiday-themed products here in 1938, the factory burnt down in 1940 but somehow the name stuck). No reason is given for the naming of Christmas, Mississippi and “Christmas Knob” a summit in New York.

Then there’s wildlife. There’s the Christmas beetle, the Australian Anoplognathus that is named because it is plentiful at this time of year. The Christmas bell Sandersonia or Alstromeria psitticina. And Christmas cactus because that’s when it flowers. And then there are the odder things named Christmas. Christmas factor is a clotting factor in blood that is named after the person it was identified from, Stephen Christmas. One type of haemophilia used to be known as Christmas disease for this reason. And there’s a plane, the Christmas Bullet, which was named after its inventor and has the dubious distinction of being "considered by many to be among the worst aircraft ever constructed for its time". Oof. The inventor William Whitney Christmas supposedly invented & flew six other planes before this, but maybe didn't and just...said he did? It'd be funny except that both times the Christmas Bullet flew it crashed and killed its pilot 😢

Naming things after people named Christmas leads us to the surname Christmas. People don’t agree on how it evolved, but 2005 genetic studies found 70% of men named Christmas descended from one 13th C Yorkshireman, so I guess at least we know WHERE. Tiny shout out for high school gardening teacher Mr Krismas, not sure where that name came from either! After this extremely non-exhaustive Christmas list, I'm going to edit the page of a NZ comedian named Christmas.

Edits

Add section on personal life to Jarred Christmas, with source

Day 19 A Christmas Carol

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day 19 Today I'm thinking about Charles Dickens & A Christmas Carol. Why? Because it is on the front page of Wikipedia (attached a screenshot for posterity) in the “On this day” section for Dec 19, as that's when it was published in 1843. This prompts me to make two confessions. Firstly, I rarely look at the Wikipedia front page, unless I am expecting something I’ve written to come up in the set of links called “Did you know” or if I’m specifically looking for some Christmas inspiration...! The second confession is that although I’ve read a couple of Dickens, I have never read A Christmas Carol, which is remarkable for someone who spent more than half their childhood with their nose in a book. So I’ve been reading about A Christmas Carol instead, and learning all sorts of things I didn’t know. For instance, did you know it was divided into (musical) staves rather than chapters? Nice touch.

Or that it was written in a hurry when Dickens’ wife was pregnant with their fifth child and his publisher threatened to cut his pay if sales didn’t increase? His previous book (Martin Chuzzlewit) hadn't done well, so Dickens paid to publish Carol and took a cut of the profits. A Christmas Carol was published in a run of 6000 on 19 Dec 1843 and had sold out by Christmas Eve, leading to two more editions by New Year, and eleven more editions by the end of 1844! It has never been out of print since. It didn't make Dickens much $$ though, as production costs were high.

A copyright battle occurred almost immediately when someone published a condensed version in Jan 1844. Dickens sued for copyright infringement, won, and then had to pay £700 costs as the other party declared themselves bankrupt! The book has never been out of print and yet doesn’t make it onto the bestseller list on Wikipedia (is that just missing data, or does that reflect actual sales?).

Adaptations of the story have got their own extensive Wikipedia page. Two stage adaptations opened in Feb 1844, just weeks after the first publication! Numerous films, TV series, specials, derivative works followed, including SIX operas and FOUR ballets! The influence has been lasting – as well as contributing the phrase “Bah! Humbug” to the lexicon, and popularising the greeting “Merry Christmas”, the term Scrooge for a miser was added to the dictionary in 1982. So it took 139 years, but it got there!

Now, how to get from here to New Zealand and editing? Well, Carol is also a given name, and Wikipedia keeps lists of all the notable people with a given name. BUT shock horror no NZers are listed here! I'll be adding some (at least three).

Edits

Added Carol Beaumont, Carol Owens, Carol Oyler, Carol Hirschfeld, Carol Marett, Carol Shand, Carol Roberts, Carol Wham to Carol (given name)

Day 20 Snowmen (medieval, exploding, unbelievable, not men, and not made of snow)

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day20 Today I'm mostly thinking about snowmen! It feels a suitable topic because it’s cold and wet here today (though not quite that cold). There have probably been snowmen as long as there have been people and snow - but documentation of that is another matter. This poor half-melted figure was identified by snowman historian Bob Eckstein as the first illustration of a snowman, from c 1380 in a Dutch Book of Hours. I would know more except unfortunately WorldCat says the closest copy of Bob's history book is in Hawai'i. Too far to interloan!

The earliest known photograph is by Welsh photographer Mary Dillwyn in 1853. Also giving you the second earliest photo also by Mary because the snowman is barely visible in her first snap! Here's a New Zealand snowWOMAN from 1945. But I want to get into some unbelievable snowmen...some are from before photography, and so are recorded in etchings, such as the following, from a huge snowfall in Anvers in 1771. Colour me dubious but I do not understand how someone renders something like these in snow. (See the whole book of them here).

And there is something extremely odd about this amazing construction called Father of the Glacier, from Clarence Leroy Andrews in Glacier Bay Alaska, 1902. I tend to think he might be more ice than snow...and there's got to be reinforcement in those arms. And what is the head made of? So many qs!

Here's a snowman to bridge the divide between winter and summer snowmen. A sand snowman! Sadly I can't upload this image to Commons as Tasman District Libraries used a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence. That's not an open licence and restricts reuse even though this 1930-40 image is out of copyright. 😢 And did you know in Switzerland they have an exploding snowmen festival? It's held in April each year and looks like a way of waving goodbye to winter in dramatic fashion.

I'm going to look and see if I can add the medieval snowman image to the snowman Wikipedia page (I'm going to check the history and talk page first though in case it was ever there before and was removed). And lastly - a shout out to David @davidnind.bsky.social for sending me this Public Domain Review about snowmen photos, that sent me down the rabbithole.

Edits

It turned out the Book of Hours image is considered antisemitic due to the hat and the context of the text on the page (see Eickman book in Internet Archive), so I added a snowwoman image to the Snowman page section on 'variations' instead.

Day 21 Yule logs

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day21 Today is wet and somewhat cold (again) so I’m thinking of warm things like fires, which led me to the Yule Log tradition. As a kid I just knew a Yule Log as a chocolate cake we got to shape, ice and decorate at school. I thought it was invented for fruit cake-haters. But it actually represents a very old tradition! Yule was a winter solstice festival long before Christmas became a thing, and the word comes from Norse. According to the Wikipedia page on Yule, the venerable Bede wrote about Yule in the 8th century as a term for the months Dec/Jan. With the growth of Christianity, Yule and Christmas became merged. But we still have the Yule Log as a delicious reminder of the earlier festival.

The Yule log itself was originally of course an actual log, generally a very large one. I first came across it in a story set in the 14th C, where the servants got the biggest log they could, lit it on Christmas Eve, and were on holiday until it burned out. I didn’t find anything to back that up as an actual tradition, but there do exist customs of burning it one piece a day, and other Yule traditions of making ale and keeping the festival until it was finished. I doubt many people try to burn an entire tree any more, hence the cake in log form. But reading up about logs brought me to the Yule Log (TV program) page which I had heard referenced in films over the years but did not appreciate was a real thing! Apparently it was first filmed in the mayor's residence in 1966 for a New York TV channel as a seventeen second piece of footage of a burning fire, and then looped and played for 2-4 hours with Christmas music. The log was refilmed in 1970, due to film deterioration, and a fireplace in California was used for a 6 min loop. Of course you can get many versions of this sort of thing now, but I think it’s hilarious that someone thought of it so long ago and it was so instantaneously popular that it repeated annually for 23 years!

A somewhat less attractive kind of Yule log is the Catalan Tió de Nadal which is a cross between a Caganer (see WikiAdvent Day 9 I'm not reminding you if you don't remember) and a pinata. Today's edit will be v delayed as I am going to add some detail and sources to the page about Yule log cakes, but I need access to a physical book in a library and its now closed until 7 Jan! Looking forward to reading "The Twelve Cakes of Christmas: An Evolutionary History (with recipes") though!

Day 22 Christmas lights

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day22 Today I'm thinking about Christmas lights. Specifically the over-the-top can-hardly-see-the-house-for-the-decorations type. Weirdly plenty of people do this in NZ even though sunset is after 9.30pm on Christmas Eve and it isn't properly dark until well after 10. My kids were quite old before I dared keep them up that late to go see them, but now we try and go every year if the weather's nice. Last year we were in Melbourne and it was heavy rain so we missed it. I've got baking to do so I'm going to give you some nice images and point out for the NZers here that there are is no category on Wikimedia Commons for Christmas lights in NZ! I'm going to create one, as the Christmas in New Zealand Wikipedia page has some images that would belong in it. But we need more! So if you're touring lights in NZ this year, consider uploading your best shots to Wikimedia Commons (see Day 2 for how).

Alright now to pick some favourites. This bungalow apparently belongs to "the King of Christmas Lights" in Somerset UK. Love the penguins. This is a very typical example of the genre. The Christmas lights Wikipedia page covers all sorts of lights, including municipal, trees etc. I'm focusing on private houses but I recommend you look at the Night of a Million Lights category on Commons. There are entire streets that do this in Auckland. Here in Dunedin the houses are dotted around, and you need to use the map someone kindly puts together via a Facebook group. This is a street in Portland Oregon that goes all out. Right - some quick edits on Commons, and then I'm making cherry icecream and brownies to take to a Christmas bbq, because Christmas=cherries here. All hail the seasonal fruit of Christmas in NZ! And here's the new category, if you have anything to add!

Edits

Added new category to Commons, put four images in it

Day 23 Radishes and Nesselrodes

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day23 Today I saw the Night of the Radishes on the “On this day” section of Wikipedia’s front page, and couldn’t help but click. It turns out to be an annual festival in Oaxaca where they carve giant radishes and make displays of them! There’s a public display and competition, and some people also use them as centrepieces at Christmas dinner (they wither pretty quick, I imagine, so maybe you have to carve another for that). My mum used to put angel chimes in the middle of the dinner table with four red candles, which we were given by a friend from Austria. The heat from the candles turns the fan and the bells ring (there is a sound clip of the bells on the Wikipedia page, but no video, so if you own a chime, go ahead and upload one!).

If you don’t have angel chimes or any giant radishes lying around, maybe you want to use a Boar’s Head as your traditional medieval Yuletide celebration centrepiece, just don’t forget to bedeck it properly! The carol tells you how. If you are in Monaco you might put a U Pan de Natale on the table, which is a Christmas loaf (no photo 😢) But it is cross-shaped and decorated with 4–7 walnuts or hazelnuts. Importantly it is surrounded by 13 desserts which are kept topped up until Epiphany 😋 Polish tables on Christmas Eve might have straw or money under the table cloth, and a place setting left empty for a traveller or the Christ child. In some countries like Bulgaria the dishes are not cleared away until the next day, in the hopes that spirits will enjoy the leftovers. I too often leave the Christmas dishes on the table but for less traditional or laudable reasons.

The died-too-young Mrs Beeton, whose book of Household Management I received as a wedding present (and refer to rarely), recommends only flowers for your table, and surprisingly has no extra special instructions for Christmas tables. Isabella does include the mysterious Nesselrode pudding in various forms in her December menus though, without a recipe (at least in my edition). The internet informs me it's a type of icecream cake made with chestnuts and dried fruit, and without a Wikipedia page...So I shall try to find some reliable sources (not Mrs Beeton, unless the recipe is hiding in some unindexed part of the book) and create at least a stub.

FYI From Mrs Beeton, December dinner for 10 persons: 1st course: Mulligatawny soup, fried slices of codfish, soles a la creme. Entrees: Croquettes of fowl, pork cutlets and tomata sauce. 2nd course: Roast ribs of beef, Boiled turkey and celery sauce, Tongue, garnished, Lark pudding, Vegetables. 3rd course: Roast hare, grouse, plum-pudding, mince pies, Charlotte a la parisienne, cheesecakes, apple tart, Nesselrode pudding

Day 24 Nativity scenes

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day24 Today I'm thinking about nativity scenes. If you have a nativity scene in your house, you might be adding a figure to it day by day, in which case the baby is about to appear. There are lots of types of nativity, including those in churches, streets, homes, schools etc. This one is in a shop window in London but you'll also find them in slightly less expected places this one on a postbox from Cornwall made me laugh. Knitted, ceramic, plastic, wooden, or indeed living with the animals and baby and everything...people do get creative!

But here in Dunedin the scenes every kid goes to see at Christmas are a bit different. In the 1930s someone called Fred Jones from Nelson made some pixie automata, which toured the country. They were so popular they even toured to Singapore and Australia, and Fred had to open a factory! In Dunedin the DIC department store started displaying them at Christmas in 1951, where they were part of Santa's grotto. And when it got too expensive to tour them in 1979, they were sold off, and the DIC bought some and continued to show them. The DIC closed in 1991, and Pixie Town was again sold off. Toitū Otago Settlers Museum bought 13 of the displays, and creates a walk through grotto every year (with generally 8 on display - I'm told we won't see the naturist scene ever though!).

The point of automata is that they move. So I made a short video of this year's display. This year there's the shops, the playground, the orchestra, the funfair, the circus, the firemen, the carousel, and the beer garden.

While I was there a visitor was telling her out of town guests that the opera singer character is Bianca Castafiore, the singer from Tintin. As Bianca appeared in 1939 that's certainly possible! Fred Joneshas a Wikipedia page but it doesn't have more than a mention of Pixie Town so I'll be working on that, and linking it to the page for Toitū and DIC where the pixies have been displayed. This is my last advent calendar 'window'. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing. Maybe it's inspired you to make an edit or two to improve our grand collaboration that is Wikipedia! Here's my tree with the star on top, to celebrate women's biographies finally reaching 20% of biographies on 🥳. May the New Year bring even more! Merry Christmas all.

Edits

Added a section on Pixietown to Freddy Jones, linked it to DIC and Toitu, and from Toitu back to Freddy Jones. Added video and several sources.