Echoes of Christmas Past

'I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas' and 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer' were playing in Sainsbury's this evening whilst I was doing my shopping.  After the day I'd had at work, they were strangely far less annoying than I'd normally find them.  They were also somewhat symbolic of the fact that, as I predicted last time, the start of December has seen Christmas kick off in earnest.  Driving around this afternoon, I came across several full-on external Christmas light displays in gardens - raising the possibility of another film chronicling the festive lights of Crapchester to supplement last year's effort.  I must admit that Christmas has been on my mind quite a bit over the past few days.  Not because of any new found enthusiasm for the season of goodwill, but because I'm sourcing material for the planned Christmas edition of the Sleazecast.  The initial phase of this had me trawling through the sound archives at the Internet Archive in search of anything yuletide related.  Believe me, there's a lot of it and immersing yourself in it for a couple of days makes one oddly nostalgic for Christmases past.

Anyway, I now have a repository of 'stuff', including bits of music, radio documentaries, variety programmes and old sitcoms, which I will spend the next few weeks (when I have time) shredding, so as to provide 'filler' for the episode.  These will be combined with the usual linking narrative and features such as Suzie Sleaze's news headlines and 'dramatisations' of old stories from The Sleaze.  I'm hoping to achieve a better integration of the material this time around, providing a template, hopefully, for the next batch of Sleazecasts I'm planning for next year.  Getting back to the present planned production, I'm aiming for some sort of investigation into the meaning of Christmas, aided by the audio clips.  It will probably turn out to be a disaster, but you never know.  Somebody out there downloads and presumably listens to the previous Sleazecasts.  God knows who they are, but I'm grateful to them!   Still, getting back to that nostalgia for Christmases past listening to the raw material evoked, as ever I'm left wondering whether those wonderful family Christmases around the fire, pulling crackers, eating walnuts and watching Morecambe and Wise on the telly ever really existed.  Or whether they are my memory conflating various vague childhood memories into a non-existent perfect Christmas.  Certainly, it all seemed so much simpler back then, which, I'm sure also made it more enjoyable as there seemed to be less pressure from advertisers, retailers and the media to create some kind of 'perfect Christmas'.  Like they say, the past is another country...