Merry Christmas

Christmas Eve addition: My mother tells me that she and my father were sitting quietly the other day in their livingroom, when George the cat walked in. 'George must be getting old', said she to my pa, 'he hasn't attacked the Christmas tree once this year'. George stopped in his tracks, stared at her, and then calmly strode over to the tree and knocked off a bauble.

If you're spending Christmas with a relative's cat, keep your wits about you, that's all I'll say.

Santa's been on the piss

Amazon and Christmas

Mark Steyn reports that the US Amazon site is running scared of the dreaded 'C' word (Christmas), and running a '12 days of holiday' promotion*. Bleurrggh. A reader emails then to let them know how wet he thinks this is, and gets this reply:

Please accept our sincere apologies if you were offended by the use of the word "Christmas" on our website. Our intention in referring to Christmas is to give specific ordering guidance for a specific holiday, not to exclude other faiths.

Reminds me of the letter in Private Eye a few years ago from a man who wrote to Virgin Trains Customer Relations Department to say, look, I know you get a hard time, I just wanted to say that I had a really good, efficient and cheap journey to and from Manchester last weekend. In reply he got a letter along the lines of 'We are sorry that on your recent journey you did not experience the high levels of service that Virgin Trains customers expect. We enclose a £10 voucher towards the cost of your next journey with us...'

*Interestingly, Amazon seem to have changed this to the 12 days of Christmas since Steyn commented on it. The power of the blogosphere...