Christmas hurray!

The Pet Shop Boys are releasing a Christmas EP, which includes their version of My Girl, which is great.

In other Christmas news I need to find a feminist book for my little god-daughter, whose mother is tired of reading things to her like Rumpelstiltskin, where the king threatens the girl with death for three days in a row before finally asking her to marry him, and she accepts with apparent joy; and The Princess and the Pea, where an idiot prince scours the world for a woman so precious that even when rescued from a storm by kind strangers she still complains that her bed is uncomfortable; and the Little Mermaid (not-Disney version) in which she just suffers herself to death by degrees for love of another idiot prince. I certainly don't mean feminist in an anti-men way, just that I want to find her a book where sex isn't portrayed as a woman's economic asset, and where relationships between men and women might be based on equality and mutual respect. It's a different kind of fairy tale.

What I want for Christmas is a beard from the "I made you a beard" etsy shop. When I got to Palestine, where of course most of the wilderness monasteries don't allow women in, I was very disappointed that you couldn't buy false beards like in The Life of Brian.

I think I've posted this before, but anyway here is the Pet Shop Boys' version of My Girl: