Dear Gossips,

Thank you for your messages yesterday re: Your Voice In My Head by Emma Forrest as my best book of 2011. For those of you asking, my review of the book, originally posted in February, is here.

What’s your favourite Christmas song? Oh so many, right? There are at least a couple dozen Christmas albums on my iTunes. Now I’m not saying this one is mine, like at the top of the list, well maybe, but there’s something so 80s evocative for me about Wham’s Last Christmas, which purists don’t even consider a real Christmas song, I thought it’d be a timely play for today, since he’s been let out of hospital in Vienna after a month of convalescence from, um, pneumonia.

My ma gets a Christmas weekend pass from the hospital so we’re bringing her home for a suckling pig Christmas Eve tomorrow and more pork on Christmas Day. Illness has not lowered the volume on her Squawking Chicken nor has it tempered her…attitude. By Monday I’ll want to yell at her which… sounds like a really awesome welcome return to normal.

This holiday weekend, my best wishes to you and yours for the same.  Maybe not with the constant criticisms and judgments of a Tiger Mother but all the quirks and craziness that characterises Family, in whatever beautiful way Family looks like for you.   

Happy Holidays and Happy Christmas!

Yours in gossip,

Lainey