God rest ye distant, gentlemen!

boybear held his first Carol Evening in 1983, the year he and our mother moved to Tufnell Park, and there's been one every year since; so this year will be the thirty-eighth.. only we weren't able to do it in the usual way. So the Bears sent out a virtual Carol Evening Kit, to be employed on the evening of the Sunday before Christmas - and I am stealing shamelessly from the instructions which accompanied it.

Some suggestions for use:

1. Prepare yourself by laying in whatever refreshments you think will be helpful. When we were younger, and more able to digest such things, large quantities of mince pies were consumed, washed down with copious amounts of mulled wine (red wine, oranges, honey, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves; give it time to work together before drinking). There were appropriately shaped biscuits from A.; one year N. made a meticulously researched figgy pudding with custard. This year, at 7.30 p.m. on Sunday December 20th, raise a glass (or a cup of tea) to absent friends.



2. The Kit contains some photographs of the usual suspects - or as many of them as failed to dodge the camera. Choose a position on the scale from "ignore" via "glance through" or "set up a slide show" all the way to "blow up, print and make cut out figures."



3. The music: "Three French Carols" is the overture, to play as you settle yourself, or have another glass of mulled wine. After that, from 8:00, you are enjoined to sing with us (words attached, in facsimile of the official carol books).



4. Let us know how it goes; send us photographic evidence or drawing if you like – who knows whether we will have to be doing this again next year.

We admired the photos there and then - and last night, running only a little late after dinner, we took our dessert (poppyseed stollen and the last of the Moselle rosé to the sitting room, and played the music and sang the carols, plus a few extra that I had found on YouTube. Then we phoned the Bears to thank them for a good evening, and rigged up a hasty Zoom session so that we could chat.

Since there has been, after a fashion, the Carol Evening, it must be, after a fashion, Christmas: and indeed it is the Solstice, and the days must be getting longer and lighter, even if we can't yet notice the difference.