Climate change is threatening your daily cuppa

As the world leaders gathered in Indonesia for the United Nations’ climate negotiations earlier this month, Cafédirect (the UK’s largest 100% Fairtrade hot drinks company) issued a warning that international tea and coffee production is threatened by climate change. Putting the challenges growers face in the media spotlight, nationally and internationally, Cafédirect used the negotiations as an opportunity to issue a press release to raise awareness of the effect a rapidly changing climate has on international tea and coffee production. The website has further information on the Cafédirect and GTZ climate change project.

Grateful for a goat

The BBC website discusses How to receive a goat (if you receive an alternative Christmas present) and other 21st Century etiquette dilemmas.

Boxing Day recipes

Cook more turkey than you needed? The British Turkey website has a range of recipes for leftover turkey. The website also provides some Turkey trivia.

Happy Christmas!

How silently, how silently, the wondrous Gift is giv’n;
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His Heav’n.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in

Match your coffees with festive foods

Cafédirect offer advice on the appropriate festive food to partner your Fairtrade coffee.

Significant anniversaries

Two significant anniversaries have fallen this week: on Tuesday it was 300 years since the birth of Charles Wesley and today is the 200th anniversary of John Newton’s death. How much poorer the Christian church worldwide would have been without these two men......

Wrap Art

Still got presents to wrap? You could take the scientific approach and work out how much wrapping paper you need. Or you could be more artistic and try Wrap Art: wrapping presents creatively, using fragments of paper and miscellaneous items from around your house.

Messiah: still going strong after 265 years

The Guardian discusses why Handel's Messiah has lasted so well:

"Messiah represents Handel's direct, personal response to the Bible, but the pacing remains essentially operatic. He was always an opera man, anxious to tell his story dramatically. The overture brilliantly sets the mood for the rest of the parts, filling us with a sense of hope and lightness. Then Handel launches into the sublime Comfort Ye, which calms everyone down. It's Handel saying: "I'm going to make you listen, because this is a long story." He takes you into another world and has this ability to uplift people, then calm them, before taking them up again. As a result, Messiah never fails."

Last Posting Dates for Christmas 2007

The Last Posting Dates website tells it like it is! There is now 1 day left to use your Christmas stamps before the final Royal Mail posting date for Christmas 2007.

Free rooms for Mary and Joseph at Travelodge

Here's a fantastic PR stunt from Travelodge: it is offering couples called Mary and Joseph a free "room at the inn" at any one of its 322 hotels in the UK. The 'gift' of a free night's stay is to make up for the hotel industry not having any rooms left on Christmas Eve over 2,000 years ago when the original 'Mary and Joseph' had to settle for the night in a stable.

Today's Mary and Joseph are offered a "spacious Travelodge family room which can also cater for a baby and a manger". A free car-parking space will be provided for the donkey and there are plenty of rooms available for the Shepherds and Wise Men to book. The couple can stay anytime from Christmas Eve to the Twelfth Night.

God rest you merry atheist

I was intrigued to read that Richard Dawkins enjoys singing Christmas carols as, despite his strong anti-faith polemic, he has described himself as a "cultural Christian" in a recent BBC interview. Yet the words of many carols are soaked in the gospel, so perhaps one year he may come to find his view that science has all the answers is transcended by a greater Truth as he sings:

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die.
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth

2007 Word of the Year

The Word of the Year in 2007 is locavore. Never heard of it? “Locavore” was coined two years ago by four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. Other regional movements have emerged since then, though some groups refer to themselves as “localvores” rather than “locavores.” There are echoes of Christian Ecology’s LOAF principle.

Carbon cost of Christmas dinner

After the good news about researchers working on solving our Christmas wrapping problems comes the negative news of research into the carbon footprint of our Christmas dinner! Academics calculated the production, processing and transportation costs of the festive ingredients and announced that a combined carbon footprint equivalent to 6,000 car journeys around the world will be produced by the UK population eating their Christmas dinner. The worst offender is cranberry sauce, as the importing the cranberries from the US contributes up to half the carbon footprint related to transport. So, maybe the best gift to request this Christmas is the carbon offset option.

Christmas shopping

Did you observe Buy Nothing Day? If not, maybe the cartoon says it all!

[Cartoon by Dave Walker. Reproduced and posted in accordance with conditions of use at We Blog Cartoons]

Science of wrapping presents

I was delighted to read in the Metro newspaper that a researcher at Leicester University has devised an eco-friendly scientific formula on how to wrap a Christmas present. Apparently most of us overestimate the amount of paper we need to wrap up Christmas presents. However, mathematician Warwick Dumas has been working with Bluewater to devise the perfect method of gift-wrapping to help customers save time and money and reduce the amount of paper that will be wasted. The length of the wrapping paper should be as long as the perimeter of the side of the gift, with no more than 2cm allowed for an overlap and the width should be just a little over the sum of the width and the depth of the gift. Mathematically, this can be expressed as A1 = 2(ab+ac+bc+c2).

Kitschmas

The satirical Christian website Ship of Fools hunts down kitsch religious-themed items it has seen for sale. The BBC website has produced a photo gallery of some of the tackiest. Meanwhile Ship of Fools itself has a Christ vs. kitsch feature about kitsch and true religion.

Want a second go at life?

It is the first Sunday of Advent today. You may have already seen this year's Christmas campaign from the Churches Advertising Network which is: "Want a second go at life?" It has radio and poster ads which invite people to visit a special space on Second Life, the virtual world, where they can find out more about the Christian faith and second chances of life.

Read any good film reviews recently?

It was good to read an article entitled Hooray for the internet movie database in this week's Technology Guardian as I normally link to the relevant Internet Movie Database review if I'm publicising an Infusion Film Night. Jack Schofield notes that "the IMDb is still the best place for movie trivia, but few people realise its history as a net pioneer" - the service was actually set up in 1990 and the first web version of the database went live in 1993. Like Jack, I've used it for a long time - I remember promoting it to film studies students and researchers in mid-1990s.