Happy New Year

This year's Christmas Stocking missed its deadline... Josephine, my stepmother, never got to hang it up on Christmas Eve and will have to wait for next year. Instead of having a slick organised Christmas I spent it in a blizzard of little bits of wool partly because in order to work in the quotation - the only reference Shakespeare ever made to Christmas - I had to make the stocking bigger than usual. Appropriate though, for a lady resident of Stratford on Avon.

Here is the whole passage - Marcellus to Horatio at the end of Hamlet, Act one - Scene one.

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is that time.