This Christmas

Design studio Nendo has created a golden Christmas tree for the Tokyo Midtown shopping centre with kinetic cutouts designed to resemble "sparkling lights".

[Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/features/video-privacy) [Twitter Inc.](https://twitter.com/en/privacy) The registered data is used to categorise the user's interest and demographic profiles in terms of resales for targeted marketing. [Simpli.fi](https://simpli.fi/site-privacy-policy/) Collects data on the user's visits to the website, such as what pages have been loaded. [Google](https://policies.google.com/privacy) [Disqus](https://help.disqus.com/terms-and-policies/disqus-privacy-policy) The data is used for statistical or marketing purposes. [Meta Platforms, Inc.](https://www.facebook.com/policy.php/) Collects information on user behaviour on multiple websites. The source's identity is kept secret by the company, Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc. This allows the website to present the visitor with relevant advertisement - The service is provided by third party advertisement hubs, which facilitate real-time bidding for advertisers.

In 2016, after two failed attempts at dog ownership, I firmly declared to my daughter Delaney: NO. MORE. DOGS. Don't get me wrong: I like dogs.

No longer was I made to feel like the holiday bad guy, the Scrooge, the Grinch. Suddenly, I was the world’s greatest dad who had, in essence, just given his daughter the ultimate Christmas gift: a puppy: a dachshund. I realized I needed to give him the money as much as he needed me to give it to him. I returned home to Christmas silence and sat on the floor in darkness. It wouldn’t have surprised me at that moment to hear the whole world simultaneously break into the chorus of “Joy To The World.” My dad reached for his wallet, but I vehemently shook my head no, sending the vagrant on his way without so much as a penny for his empty pocket. Get this: Later, Delaney had the gall to interrupt my holiday brooding and ask me to hold the puppy while she showered. Over a Grand Slam, I fumed and frothed about the dog that destroyed Christmas. “Out of here in two days,” I shouted, getting madder by the minute. I snapped, shut him down, told him I was trying to enjoy the holiday with my own family without interruption. On Christmas day, I was alone – and a bit lonely. Declaring then that our house would continue being a dog-free zone did indeed make my heart feel like it had shrunk three sizes, but I was doggedly determined to not throw my daughter the proverbial bone.

In the early 1960s, Goodyear and Firestone sold Christmas records in the hopes of bumping tire sales before the holidays. And it worked.

Before long, the era of tire manufacturers selling Christmas records came to a close. Feinauer categorized the Goodyear albums as having more of a pop twist with songs such as "Jingle Bells." As long as Goodyear sold the records for the same amount, the tire company wouldn't pay a penny for the albums. When Goodyear's second Christmas album came out in 1962, it sold every one of the 1.5 million copies it ordered. By December 1, 1961, after only a few weeks of sales, Goodyear stopped promoting the Christmas album—the tire giant had sold every record it ordered. It was around this time Arnold heard that Firestone was working with RCA Records on a Christmas album. Arnold worked with Columbia Records, which agreed to put together a collection of its best recording artists, which it would offer to Goodyear as an exclusive for only $1 per record. From 1961 to the mid-'70s, well before Mariah Carey's monopoly on the holiday spirit, tire manufacturers such as Goodyear and Firestone offered Christmas records in their stores for about $1 (the equivalent of approximately $9.40 today). Arnold's idea was to offer a collection of music, pulled from Columbia Records, to those who mailed in $1 and proof of purchase of Lucky Strikes. "I decided that music would reverse the sales decline of Lucky Strike." Stanley Arnold was the man responsible for the unlikely, yet successful, pairing of rubber and Rudolph. From Spotify playlists to radio stations starting holiday tunes on Black Friday, it's nearly impossible to avoid the sounds of the Christmas spirit.

As the years have gone by Sarah Catherall has grown used to logistically organising Christmas as a divorced parent - but still misses her daughters on ...

Or perhaps Christmas Day with Dad and a second Christmas Day with Mum on Boxing Day.’’ On the year they’re with me, I make a point of making sure that they ring their Dad - and more recently, to video call him - at a time which suits him. “Christmas days are never the same again and it’s about accepting that and creating new traditions and being flexible about change…’’ My ex now lives elsewhere which means we physically can’t share the kids on Christmas Day because we made the choice that their day would be no fun if they spent half of it at the airport, being ferried back and forth between their parents’ homes. After that first Christmas Eve on our own, I spent the morning with the girls, dreading the midday handover. I remember that first Christmas Day like it was yesterday. It didn’t matter what we ate - sometimes it was coleslaw from a bag and cold ham - but the point was our Christmas Day was jammed with adults and kids. For me, there is nothing worse than spending Christmas Day alone, just with my partner and our dog, even though I love both of them. That way, you wake up in the morning and watch their gleeful faces as they rip their presents open, pull toys out of stockings and check Santa drank his beer and the reindeer ate their carrots. It’s one of the difficult and often unspoken aspects of Christmas for the estimated four in 10 families whose parents have split. We typically gathered at one of my aunt’s houses in Hawke’s Bay, with Mum’s six siblings and their broods of children. This year, my daughters will spend Christmas with their father.

This is a bold, festive, celebration dish, designed as much for impact as it is for effectively feeding large groups. And, in spite of appearances, it is really ...

Season well and add the rice. Continue to fry gently until everything has reduced and darkened a bit. Fry quickly until the heads are pink and are starting to caramelise and crisp up. Set aside for a second. Pull the heads off the prawns. For what it is and the impact it gives, paella is incredibly cheap.

Turmeric is great for gut health. Stacey Morrison, Flava Breakfast Host. What are you most looking forward to this holiday season? Whānau time!

So, I’m thinking that’s on my list and a new duvet cover that I’ve had my eye on. I love Kaiteriteri and Waiheke. It taught me to go easy on myself. A book that has been on my list all year is The Mountain Is You. The thing I look forward to every year is looking at all the houses that are decorated in Christmas lights. The Lake Rotoiti Hot Pools are well worth a visit if you find yourself in the area! Exercising more, taking better care of my mental health and getting a bit more routine in my day-to-day life. Some of my top picks from this year are Fletcher’s album Girl of My Dreams, Calum Scott’s album Bridges, and nothing pops off more on a road trip than some Celine Dion, so anything from her discography. I plan on living in my togs next to a beach of some description. I have learned a lot in 2022 both personally and professionally. Hopefully less disruption in terms of Covid but also, I’m in admiration of the resilience people have shown over the past few years. I’ve been putting it off for 32 years so it’s time I made a start on them

Every year, a handful of New Zealanders donate one of their kidneys to a total stranger. Alex Casey meets one of them. The bottles of piss were the biggest ...

“I hope this can keep you well for a while, and you can enjoy yourself and do what you will with the time you have.” “I guess I hope you have a good life,” he says. “It is a bit funny to think tonight is my kidney’s last sleep with me,” he says. And they could be a great possible donor, but not your match, so that pair kind of gets put on hold while they look for someone else that can match,” she says. By the end of 2020, after a year working in housing policy during the pandemic, he started the donation process in anticipation of his 25th birthday. “I started to think to myself ‘OK, what do I actually need out of my extra kidney resource versus what could it do for someone else who really needs it?’” He contacted the hospital in January 2021, received some forms to fill out, and had the first of many rounds of blood taken. With that idea in the back of his mind, a When 26-year-old Tim Bradley started the process to donate his kidney to a stranger in 2020, he had prepared himself for the litany of blood tests, the hospital scans and the psychological assessments. Bradley is one of a handful of New Zealanders opting to give one of their kidneys to a stranger in a non-directed donation, also known as an altruistic donation, every year. “It makes all the difference in the world.” “You don’t want to just carry it onto the bus,” he laughs.

New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union Dunedin local secretary Senior Station Officer Mark Leonard said the union's national committee had arrived at a ...

The union was proud to be bringing the industrial action to a close with decent terms for its members, Watson said. The agreement would make for a very special Christmas, SSO Mason said. “The union is definitely welcoming getting back in a working relationship with Fenz,” SSO Leonard said.

Shoppers are being forced to leave their trolleys behind as the supermarket sturggles with network issues.

“We are working with our partner to get this fixed as quickly as possible, and we apologise for any inconvenience. “It’s a nationwide outage, so we have no idea right now.” One shopper said she only had Apple Pay with her and would have to leave all her groceries and go home. * “It’s a bit annoying,” she said.

This odd ejaculation is at the behest of Australian singing teacher Sam, who's part of today's four-woman therapeutic “cursing circle”, a group therapy trend ...

[Victoria Emes](https://www.victoriaemes.com/), a 39-year-old comedian based in London, is the author of Welcome to Motherhood, Bitches (2022) and a blogger of “Unfiltered thoughts from a potty-mouthed mama navigating the peaks and troughs of parenthood.” Emes’s recent posts explore “sprout hos”, or mums who suffer flatulence after a surfeit of the festive brassicas, and annoyances about having no loo roll left to “wipe my b-hole thanks to the kids”. “Swithe” and “sard”, once obscene verbs for the sexual act, with some translations of the Gospels rendering the Sixth Commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery” as “Thou shall not sard another’s wife,” dropped out of use in the modern period. Studies on swearing and class have found that, historically at least, the working and upper classes were more prone to swear, with the middle classes being the least sweary and most censorious of the blue outbursts of others. In South Korea, meanwhile, “swearing granny restaurants” allow customers to let off steam as they dine by shooting the breeze with unapologetically foul-mouthed older woman proprietors. John Cohen’s The Natural History of Swearing (1961) relates: “A member of the royal family, somewhat irritated by a slight tear in her dress at a public ceremony, uttered the rather unexpected exclamation, ‘Christmas!’” Financial adviser Errol Slater, 42, spent 20 years working as a floor trader in London and says that swearing provides a pressure release for workers in a constant state of central nervous system stimulation The swearers tolerated more pain and found more humour in the experience than those using the invented curse, but even the invented curse provided more emotional relief than saying the neutral word, an effect that’s behind the cursing circles’ use of group swearing as therapy. “I’d say 30 out of 50 words uttered on the site are swear words,” he says. The aforementioned “Go piss up a rope ya fuckstick” was a popular curse in 1990s Australia: yelled at queue-cutters or the sort of unreconstructed drongos who enjoyed snapping women’s bra straps. This odd ejaculation is at the behest of Australian singing teacher Sam, who’s part of today’s four-woman therapeutic “cursing circle”, a group therapy trend that emerged, like all things in fringe therapeutics, on the west coast of America. Most nations and points in history have seen sexual and body-part categories of profanities, whereas religious profanities have dwindled in Protestant nations while they retain currency in culturally Catholic nations such as Spain, Italy and Ireland. Sam, our group leader today, sees her compatriots’ reputation as experts of the profane as a form of honest discourse that might help uptight Britons improve our intimate relationships and let off steam.

A free app developed in New Zealand is giving online shoppers the chance to avoid buying Christmas presents tainted by slave labour.

Nearly 60 percent live in the Asia-Pacific region. [according to the 2021 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery Report](https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_855019/lang--en/index.htm). Find Fair is an internet browser extension - developed by the ethical shopping directory fair&good - which marks ethically produced products with an orange stamp of approval in online search results.