Happy Christmas and Happy New Year!

An English Christmas song to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Winter Holidays!

  

Besides the interpretation by the Muppets, the song is just as it sounds, featuring a "true love" presenting his/ her beloved one with an increasing number of weird gifts: a partridge, two turtle doves, three French hens, four calling birds, five golden rings, six geese a-laying, seven swans a-swimming, eight maids a-milking, nine ladies dancing, ten lords a-leaping, eleven pipers piping, twelve drummers drumming (the lyrics is here).

I guess these gifts are not your favourites and the whole text may appear surreal, so let's try to make sense of this 250-years-old song and see its connection with Christmas.

A religious interpretation of the symbolical meaning of the gifts can be read in The Voice, a website collecting biblical and theological resources. The article gives a general account on the "twelve days" of Christmas, from the 25th of December to the 5th of January. The cycle closes with the 6th of January, which in many cultures (in Italy, for example) is the day in which gifts are given, especially to the chidren. Then it analyses the twelve figures: the partridge is an image of Jesus Christ, the two turtle doves stand for the Old and the New Testament, etc.

An article on the tradition of Christmas carols (carol= choral song), questioning the previous interpretation, is on the BBC website, which finds the origin of the song in a game played on the Twelfth Night. In this case, the partridge would be the symbol of the devil! An example of "the way in which a popular song can be reworked as a hymn or carol".

Christmas is a celebration of new life. It falls in the days immediately after the winter solstice - in our hemisphere 21st December, with the shortest day and longest night - daytime becoming longer and longer from that date on. It is interesting to know more about other winter festivities with the same character - celebrating the light and new life, feasting, giving gifts, having fun  - held in the same period in other places and times on this page of the BBC.

Beowullf

The LEGO Beowulf video you are going to watch is a fast and fun summary of the epic poem... and yes, all the stuff is made up of colourful LEGO bricks.

Part one 

6th century - The young hero Beowulf comes from Scandinavia to help the Dane king Hrothgar against the attacks of the monster Grendel. Beowulf kills him. 

"Then from the moorland, by misty crags, with God’s wrath laden, Grendel came" 

"Then laughed his heart; for the monster was minded... to sever the soul of each, life from body, since lusty banquet waited his will!"

"... no keenest blade, no farest of falchions fashioned on earth, could harm or hurt that hideous fiend!" 

"To Beowulf now the glory was given..."  

Part two

"Grendel's mother... the death of her son to avenge" 

comes to the hall. Beowulf kills her.

Part three
Fifty years later, Beowulf is king, "old and gray".
He defeats a dragon, but

"The wound began,

which that dragon-of-earth had erst inflicted,

to swell and smart; and soon he found

in his breast was boiling, baleful and deep,

pain of poison"

Celtic Britain

Learn about the Celts and have fun with this BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
learning unit about the Celts. 

Click on the link and start the activities.  

21st-Century Creature

Bionics is the branch of scientific research based on the use of "models of living sytems... in order to find new ideas for useful artificial machines" (definition from the Encyclopaedia Britannica online).
An article in today's Excite News refers about a "man" walking and breathing with artificial parts. Actually, the "man" is a robot made up of sophisticated pieces of technology, with a face modelled after a real living person and dressed up with clothes form Harrods, London.
It's interesting to learn about the reaction of the creators at their first sight of their Creature.

"How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips." (Dr. Frankenstein).

"I thought it was rather revolting to be honest," he says. "It was quite a shock to see a face that closely resembles what I see in the mirror every morning on this kind of dystopian looking machine." (Bertolt Meyer).

Ugliness is not the only motive for these reactions. Can you imagine any other?

Punctuation matters!

The 24th of September in the USA every year they celebrate punctuation. Can't believe that? Then visit the site National Punctuation Day. 
There's even a contest on "how punctuaction changed my life"...
Well, seriously, the contest is on "how National Punctuation Day® has affected the way you think about punctuation (or not), and how the holiday has affected your writing (or not)."... that's much the same as changing your life, since the right punctuation can save lives :)
"Let's eat grandma" or "Let's eat, grandma": guess which one the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood would find appropriate.

Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus

A Gothic novel by Mary Shelley, first published 1818. 

Here is a short biography of the writer.

The picture summarises the plot:

But the structure of the novel is more complex:

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-1824

Friederich's painting has no direct relation to Mary Shelley's novel, but it is a beautiful illustration of the environment in which Captain Walton meets Dr. Frankenstein and the Creature. 

The wanderings of the protagonists can be followed on the map:

A long hunt through Europe and a meeting at the North Pole

Do you love dogs?

Revise the If-clauses with your pet. Watch this veeeery nice clip from BuzzFeed: