Trapped!

As well as the trees, fairy lights and tinsel; my colleagues have taken to decorating their offices for Christmas. We have a fireplace scene, a winter wonderland, and a gingerbread house. My team is less inclined to frivolity, but this year we made a nativity. It started off a very basic stable made out of with some bits of board that used to support a heavy monitor and some teddy bears that one of my colleagues has on her desk. The bears (Mary and Joseph) have been dressed. The stable has been thatched. The baby Jesus (a knitted penguin) has been wrapped in swaddling clothes and lain in an authentic manger made out of budgie ladders and ice lolly sticks. The three wise men are represented by small rubber ducks, and their crowns have been made with incredible accuracy out of post-it notes and sellotape. The Archangel Gabriel is played by a souvenir vulture from Death Valley. (He won that part mainly by virtue of actually having wings). The most meticulous part is the gold frankincense and myrrh made out of fragments of tinsel and biscuit crumbs.

Over the weekend there was a catastrophic stable collapse! The thatch got everywhere, the ducks had their crowns blown clean off, and the virgin Mary was found trapped in the wreckage.

Richard "Bah Humbug" B