There’s a reason the NHS invested in Microsoft office. It works. Even if you’re not an excel whizz, & you only scratch the surface of pivot tables, someone who is can send you their work, and you can open it, and embed it in Word, forward it via Outlook and discuss over Teams. The Dark is Rising is a disturbing book, in a way that children’s stories rarely are now. At the beginning, Cooper describes Will’s fear of the dark in a way that makes the hairs stand up on your arms; she draws out echoes of the old powers of the English landscape – now hostile, now beguiling – in a way that recalls the Gawain poet.

darkest Christmas - digitalhealth.net Joe’s View: Out of the darkest Christmas - digitalhealth.net

For years, people have dressed up as Santa to delight little children around Christmas time, but SantaCon has somewhat tainted the tradition. An infamous pub crawl that started in New York City and has now spread to many other cities, and not only does having hundreds of people dress up as Santa spoil the illusion for the kids that witness the event, but their drunken antics cause damage and public nuisance every year. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" has been covered by everyone from Amy Grant to Barry Manilow, but it was originally written for the 1944 movie Meet Me in Saint Louis and sung by Judy Garland. Hugh Martin was given the task of creating a song that could show the family's sadness over celebrating the last Christmas in a home they were soon moving from. With lyrics like "Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last," Martin did such a good job of writing a melancholy tune that Garland complained it was too depressing. The author Piers Torday had been similarly obsessed with the story as a child. He wanted to stage an adaptation while at university with two friends who shared his passion for it, but the rights were not available, and the project was forgotten. Twenty-five years on, the stars aligned: the same friends were now a theatre executive and a producer, and Torday’s new adaptation of The Box of Delights has just opened at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London. Forget turkey… in South Africa, many people enjoy the deep-fried caterpillars of the Emperor Moth on Christmas Day!

17. Ho Ho, Drunk and Disorderly

The family arrive in A&E and are shown to the “crying room”. It’s my job to tell the family that Daddy won’t be home for Christmas. To this day, next to people who dress as Santa, you can find others dressed as Le Père Fouettard, complete with the whip, threatening French and Belgian children. Hans Trapp was said to be a rich, cruel man who lived in the Alsace region of France. He worshipped the devil and would do anything to become more rich and powerful. He was eventually excommunicated and had to live in the forest. He became a cannibal and would go out on Christmas dressed as a scarecrow, trying to kidnap and eat bad children. To this day, children in Alsace and Lorraine still fear him.

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Now this Christmas, I know thousands of NHS staff are feeling burnt out. Record numbers are leaving. 12 years of Tory government has left the NHS where they generally leave it, where it was for me in ‘86. It dawns on me that I feel nothing, because some time in the previous 6 months I have died inside. The hours, the work, emotional trauma, years of tory underfunding of the NHS have left me burnt out. I can’t tell her that, can I? Christmas 1986, the snow fell silently in the ambulance reception area of the Ingham Infirmary, South Shields. I was half an hour in from the end of my day shift when the Ambulance Service hotline rang and we were told to expect a road traffic accident (RTA). I was six months into my stint as an Accident and Emergency senior house officer. Twelve-hour shifts, no set meal breaks, a week on nights, a week on days, constant stream of patients.They know from my demeanour what I’m gonna tell them. I tell them and they dissolve in tears, “no it can’t be true” they say, like they always do. “I’m so sorry, there was nothing we could do, he didn’t suffer”. I look at my watch, 8.55pm. How long is this going to take, I’m late for my hot date.

Top 5 Darkest Christmas Songs - Holidappy Top 5 Darkest Christmas Songs - Holidappy

But for bad children, she slits open their bellies, takes out their organs and replaces them with pebbles and straw. As if kids don’t have enough trouble sleeping on Christmas Eve! Like many in the NHS, there is a feeling here that technology will solve all – interoperability, AI, EPR and so on. I have 50+ years in IT and hundreds of visits to NHS clinics and hospitals and my conclusion is that the Clinical PROCESSES are badly deigned ad hoc or non-existent. The surgeon above spelled out his needs. This is what is needed but those needs need to be stated in clinical flow diagrams with data sources and sinks included – no technology, just a diagram which shows how his part of the world wants to operate. This is then translated into an IT architecture to map on to the processes and then that architecture is translated into products or technology in IT terms. I have diagrams to illustrate this principle, free if you send a note to me at [email protected] The message in a nutshell is Process design (by clinicians) first, then architecture, then technology. The fact that NHS efforts seem to start with technology tells me they will never get it right, however hard they try and whatever ‘shiny’ new technology they employ. Trust me, I have been around a long, long time and know this from experience.It was shattering and dehumanising, after a number of months of chronic sleep deprivation, I’m seeing things no 24-year-old should ever see. I was a burned-out husk of my former self. I’d come to regard the public as the enemy. People became acronyms. On the small white cards which served as the record of a visit to A&E I’d record the history: December 1942 saw the bloodiest Christmas in the history of mankind. From the islands in the Pacific to the China front, from the trenches in Russia to the battle lines in North Africa, in the skies over Europe and in the depths of the Atlantic, men were killing each other in greater numbers than ever before. The Holocaust continued, and innocent civilians were murdered by the thousands throughout the evil Nazi empire, even as the perpetrators celebrated the birth of Christ. As if they Yule Lads weren’t creepy enough, Icelanders also tell children about their horrifying mother Grýla. She’s a hoofed half-ogre, half-troll who’s covered in warts and has large, terrifying horns. She gets her children to snatch bad boys and girls from their homes at Christmas so she can cook and eat them. This story was so terrifying to Icelandic children that the government eventually had to ban using the story of Grýla and the Yule Lads as an intimidation tactic to make children behave. Inspired by the earnest James Brown original from his Funky Christmas album — in which JB implores Santa to please pay a visit to the “soul brothers” — Snoop and his Dogg Pound elves fly through the night in their ’64 Impala sleigh, elucidating the yuletide realities of the “needy and greedy.” But amid all the gangstas and dope fiends, the song is really about the power of Christmas to evoke feelings of innocence and family, even if you’ve gotta harvest your turkey down at the church shelter. C.A. Merle Haggard –“If We Make It through December” (1973)

Dark Christmas: Seven seasonal monsters from myth and legend

Christmas has always been a religious holiday, but they take it one step further in Guatemala. Every December 7, Guatemalans take part in La quema del diablo, or burning the devil. Families gather outside their houses and burn flaming effigies of the devil as a way to cleanse their home of evil. I understand how hard it is for NHS staff this Christmas. We have 3 kids and 2 of them are junior doctors on the front line. Their workloads are overwhelming, and I can see them developing the character-armour and detachment from people required to survive. Gryla has a variety of companions, including the Yule Lads – her 13 unruly troll children/ Large Adult Sons – and the Jólakötturinn, or Yule Cat. At the same time, Christmas 1942 saw the injunction of 'good will to man' distorted in ugly and callous ways. At Auschwitz, SS guards played cruel games with their prisoners. In Berlin, the German heart of darkness, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels spent time with his family while still buried in feverish fantasies about the Jewish world conspiracy. Between 1966 and 1970, the Godfather of Soul made a string of Christmas records, some of them funky (“Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto”), some of them deep (a spectacular soul version of “The Christmas Song”), and some of them totally bizarre. This one is the weirdest: a churning, overwrought orchestral groove, over which JB apparently improvises a totally incoherent rant about Christmas, peace protesters, God, partying, and (tellingly) wine. By the end, he’s quoting “Hava Nagila” and “Volaré.” The original single included an instrumental version labeled “Sing Along With James,” as if that were possible. D.W. Crass –“Merry Crassmas” (1981)years ago I thought we might achieve this, but I don’t think we’re any closer to seamless integration between different clinical systems. Just like in other countries, people in Glamorgan, Wales go from house to house caroling. But unlike in other countries, they bring around freaky horse figure called the Mari Lwyd, and they try to argue their way (with song) into the house for food and gifts.