Also available on PDF, if you wish to print it for reading by the fire with care.

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Happy Mid-Winter Holidays, everyone, however you celebrate them.

He does get a few classic Minchin digs in (“the lyrics are dodgy” is a personal favourite) but it’s mostly a very nice song about family, holidays and such. The real meaning of the upcoming Solstice holiday, in whatever version most of us celebrate it, in other words.

Quite a change from my first introduction to Minchin, which was the F-bomb-laced, glorious and awesome “Pope Song”…

Anyone offended by the Pope Song hasn’t actually listened to the lyrics.

The Big Picture started their 2009 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar back on December 1st. (I’m of the opinion that the Hubble Space Telescope is the greatest public art project ever undertaken. The science is a bonus.)

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society does excellent mock-carols on Cthulhuish themes. Here’s a Youtube vid of Death To The World.

Bartender/blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler has a excellent eggnog recipe. Easy, quick and yummy. Suggestion: cut the amount of sugar in the recipe in half; it’s still plenty sweet enough done that way. I’ll be doing this at a couple of Xmas parties in the next few weeks, as I did last year, and I’m sure it’ll be a hit all over again.

Oh, and December 25th is also Newtonmas (birthday of Isaac Newton), amongst other things.

Last year’s post on approximately the same theme.

The always-spectacular Big Picture has a 25-image Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar which was completed today with one of my favourite images of all time – the Hubble Deep Field photo, in which all but a half dozen of those little points of light is an entire galaxy.

In similar vein, the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day sight has the Apollo 8 Earthrise photo from 1968. The Deep Field image shows a slice of the entire universe; the Earthrise image was our first proper glimpse of our small blue piece of the galaxy.

Sick of the same dozen Christmas tunes in stores and on the radio over, and over, and over, and over again? Isn’t everyone? SomaFM has a pair of streaming Christmas channels up; the Christmas Lounge stream has a great mix, including different versions of all those classics the malls and commercial radio inflict on us.

Merry Cthulhumas, Happy Newtonmas, Satisfactory Festivus, Merry Christmas, etc etc. I hope you get good food, interesting presents (and gave interesting ones), excellent drinks (I’m planning homemade eggnog…), and interesting companions (please remember that strangling relatives is not permitted, even at Christmas).

Things of an approximately holiday-season nature.

• Squidmas
• Axial Tilt: The REAL Reason for the Season
• Darth Fiddler
• Squidmas II: Cthulhumas! Ai! Ai!

Today was also supposed to be the brightest, largest full moon in fifteen years, but in classic Victoria-in-winter fashion there’s a low stratus layer and drizzle out there. Oh, and a snow warning for tonight. We’re not supposed to get snow, that’s supposed to be the Rest of Canada’s problem…