Back away from the celeb endorsements and viral posts. As my gift to you, dear readers, I tried this stuff \u2013 so you don\u2019t have to<\/p>\n
Christmas is all about traditions: repeating the same thing over and over, however silly it might be, because that\u2019s just what you do<\/em> at Christmas. But every time-honoured tradition has to start somewhere. In order to sell us tat we don\u2019t need, and keep the PR industry ticking over, the holiday season has also become the time for all manner of daft fads, and celebs promising to give our favourite festive foods, games and pressies \u201ca twist\u201d. Not wanting to miss the (gravy) boat, I embarked on a spirited mission to try them all.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s hotly touted Christmas trends include \u201cburr baskets<\/a>\u201d \u2013 a care package of cosy items such as blankets and socks given as a pre-Christmas gift, which sounds like an unnecessary extra faff. Then there\u2019s a lot of talk about \u201cThriftmas<\/a>\u201d: re-gifting and buying secondhand gifts from charity shops, which my friend and I havebeen doing for years. The best\/worst such gift, from me to him, was probably an unofficial version of Guess Who? with most of the pieces missing. And from him to me: a used chocolate Advent calendar, with all the chocolate scoffed. Also on trend in the world of gifts this year is burgundy wrapping paper<\/a>, although I say: what\u2019s wrong with tinfoil, like in Gavin and Stacey<\/a>?<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back away from the celeb endorsements and viral posts. As my gift to you, dear readers, I tried this stuff \u2013 so you don\u2019t have to Christmas is all about traditions: repeating the same thing over and over, however silly it might be, because that\u2019s just what you do at Christmas. But every time-honoured tradition … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}