Christmas Links #23

I love vlogmas – it celebrates the banality and familiarity of Christmas:
"The Youtubers’ Christmas tradition is a chance to turn off your brain and relax."

‘…a strange story of spirits, and worth reading indeed’
"What could be more cosily festive than settling down after a good Christmas dinner to listen to a ghost story as darkness falls outside? This Christmas Day will mark 350 years exactly since Samuel Pepys did just that, his wife Elizabeth reading to him the strange tale of a ghostly drummer said to have haunted a family home in Wiltshire a few years previously."

Christmas in London: then and now – in pictures:
"Photographer Christopher Ratcliffe has digitally merged the past with the present in a series of festive images. From sandbags in Selfridges in 1939 to Santa Claus at a Holborn bus stop in 1960, the photos deftly connect the old with the new."

Lechon is the world’s most delicious Christmas tradition:
"One of the most convincing arguments that Filipinos have mastered the roast pig, or lechon, is its skin: brick red and so immensely crunchy it crackles between your teeth like you were chewing glass."

The Gift of Loneliness A single woman’s secret to surviving the holiday season alone:
"It is time, finally, to tell the story of “The Bag of Shame.”"