Dec. 12 2025

If you are an American of a certain age in Britain during the holidays, you might be viewing the surroundings through a red sparkly haze of mania called Love, Actually.  I do not have anything to add to the L,A conversation and consider Bobby Finger's writeups in The Hairpin to be the definitive word on the subject. It's just futile to deny its imprint. At minimum, every holiday outfit I have worn in the last twenty years has been measured in my mind against Natalie's ruby red sweater-black pencil skirt combo and been found wanting.

How did it measure up? Let's start with my younger son's nativity play. Have you ever registered the thought, deep down, that any language or accent other than yours is somehow just an affectation? I’ve dropped off my kids at this school every morning, interacted with the other children countless times, and yet when the play started and the first narrator stepped up to the microphone to say LONG AGO IN THE TOWN OF NAZARETH THERE WAS A LADY CALLED MARY (layday cooolled Mehhhhray) there was a moment when I thought ahhhh even the kids talk like that! 

There were no lobsters, as L,A would have you believe.  There were two centurions who were clearly very jazzed about their swords.  There were three girls dressed as sheep whose jobs were to lean into the microphone like the Andrews Sisters and, after a weighty pause, say “BAA.” (Pause).  “BAA.”  One boy was too nervous to do anything other than mumble for a second before scurrying back to his seat, so all the parents made what were probably meant to be "There, there" sounds but in aggregate came off as perhaps a bit disapproving? The kids sang a few songs I now know by heart because we’d been instructed to watch this video of blank-faced young women demonstrating the accompanying hand motions as practice.  

I'm not allowed to share pictures of the kids, so instead here's the sign that was outside the fismonger's.

All in all a successful event, even if the prime minister didn't make an appearance. When B got home, he told us that because they had all been so good, they each got a chocolate biscuit.