Our Yule tree
This is a snap I took using my iPhone. It shows our festive tree bedecked with its usual decorations, plus a few new additions this year. We’ve got a mix of ’standard’ decorations familiar to most people—baubles, tinsel and the like—but we’ve also got some inherited treasures as well. We have some pipecleaner figures with tiny bauble heads and hands that my parents passed on to me, and these little guys are at least 42 years old (older than me, certainly).
We have some other things too, very fragile baubles not like the mass-produced ones you can buy anywhere, that are at least as old. I think of them as heirlooms, and they give our tree a kind of accumulation over time of seasonal good feeling. At least, that’s how I see it and it’s something that always brings me comfort in the cold and dark of the winter. Oh, I nearly forgot—we’ve also got a collection of bobbing-head figurines, characters from the stop-motion animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, including Lock, Shock and Barrel, Jack Skellington and the Mayor.
tags: apparitions, baubles, BBC, celebration, Christmas, festive, holiday, iPhone, LG Group, Martin Shaw, telly, tinsel, YulePennies from heaven and a slice from the sky
Here are two more weird but true stories for you. They’re not scary like the man in the stovepipe hat or the black stick man of earlier tales I’ve told here but probably just as disturbing.
Back in 1987 I was living for a time in St Clement’s vicarage in Notting Hill, London. The vicar provided refuge for young lesbian and gay people escaping persecution from evangelical Christian communities and at the time I fitted the bill, having just been effectively excommunicated for coming out as gay in the Christian fellowship I’d been involved with in Cobham, Surrey. I’d nowhere to go – I didn’t want to go home to my parents, though I could have, I suppose with hindsight – and when I called the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM), they found me the place to stay and recover from what had been an awful experience.
tags: apparitions, apports, Fortean, strange, unexplained, weird
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