This is for my future reference, rather than your edification, but you might still be interested. I've been a pretty good girl this year, so despite the recession and protest action from the reindeer (now we discover why Rudolph had a "red" nose...), Santa managed:

• Patterned tights
• "1001 Films to Change Your Life" - a pretty nice collection, which I've read chunks of in bookshops. It collects films by Mood, as disparate as Wonder and Regret. It's going to be fun to dip into.
• A copy of Fortean Times, my sometime favourite magazine. It reports on the weird and wacky - Jesus images in marmalade, big ghost cat sightings, mysterious UFO sightings - all with a pleasing tone of "benevolent skepticism". Charles Fort, after whom the mag was named, is a bit of a hero - like me, he was "skeptical of scientific explanations, observing how scientists argued accoring to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence, and that inconvenient data was ignored, suppresed, discredited or explained away". This month: The Twilight Zone, the Ig Noble prizes, cursed gargoyle statues, and Tommy Cooper in a steak pie. Also, Dennis Wheatly, whose novel "The Devil Rides Out" Spirita owns.
• "This Strange Engine" - Marillion CD
  
• Art papers - soon to be reappropriated for origami
• Spare Parts - Doctor Who CD, classic Cyberman adventure. It's started, by the way, as I knew it would: the era of spotting Blake's 7 castmembers in Doctor Who, not the other way around.
  
• "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" - tee hee.
  
• Delta and the Bannermen - more Doctor Who, and I can't wait.
  
• "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" songbook - unlike the gorgeously irritating Virginia Companion, this one is playable. It still has nice pictures in though. The only downside is, the Xmas holidays mean the whole family is together. So I haven't been able to have a proper bash yet - that music can't be played, merely performed.It turns out the album title is a reference to Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer. Singing a song gives you a different perspective on what it means. In particular Astronaut (wow! chords!), which I gather is meant to be about a literal astronaut. I can't escape the feeling it's about a wife whose husband is being kept alive by machines after a horrific accident. Runs in the Family, frankly, does not work on the piano - but I'm working on it. Ampersand sounds great however it's played, but when I strive to get the rhythm right (one two one two on the top hand, one two three one two three on the bottom) it's exhilerating. Leeds United has lots of instructions reading "improvise something bluesy", which I can't quite do yet, but it cheers me up to see it. Having problems with Blake Says, but it's still lovely to play. The house hasn't been empty enough for me to try Oasis yet. It's just a shame it doesn't have What's the Use of Won'drin in it, but I suppose I can work it out.
  

From my family:

• Art gear - a pencil tin, nice colouring pencils and a new sketchbook. Jolly useful - I can draw, but I can't really do pencil sketches. Not yet at any rate... (grandad)
• Powell and Pressburger boxed set (mater and pater)
• Doctor Who T-shirt (sister of mine)
• A makeup kit (aunt and uncle mark I)
• a donation to the Emily fund (aunt and uncle mark II - may be put towards a copy of Six Characters in Search of an Author)
• a cute keyring, and an ethical "miracle" helping a blind person (aunt and uncle mark III)
  

And my good for nothing buddies:

• one of those mini top hats. You can't even concieve of how fine it makes me look :D And a biscuit, and a pack of jumbo playing cards. The huge, envelope-sized Jack of Hearts is now gracing my top hat.
  
• Magic Position Patrick Wolf CD (plus Baileys...and some awesome religious trash)
  
• A recipie notebook, with some handwritten veggie recipies in for me to try from Castelanne. Take that, housemates: I'm gonna come back and cook! I'm particularly looking forward to the Hazelnut and Vegitable Burgers, the Rice Cheesecakes, mediterranean Kebabs and the Thai Vegitable Curry. Also, origami post-it notes.
• And a model Liberator :D

The day passed pleasantly - I watched some Doctor Who in the morning. We watched The Hangover in the afternoon, which is probably better than you think it's going to be, but was still less good than I'd been lead to believe. Still, pretty good movie. Then the Doctor Who special. I'm having problems articulating quite how I feel about it, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a coherent review, or even a coherent conversation on the topic. Except that, when I had an inkling Russell T. Davies might ruin Christmas, this was emphatically not what I had in mind. Similarly, thought I expected to be dreading New Year's Day, I had no idea it would be for these reasons. Right now I'm not sure whether I prefer being disappointed or traumatised. What on earth does he think he's doing? After five years of defending him, I feel a little let down that he feels the need to pack out the episode with everything he's ever been criticised for.

I can't wait to see Lawrence Miles kick it to pieces. He's a genius Doctor Who writer who plunged out of fandom after having fallen out with everyone. He's rude, outspoken and very witty, seeing himself as our own Voice Of The Silent Majority. Unfortunately, he's very often correct even though no one else would dare articulate half of it. I'm reminded of his review of Ancestor Cell:

"What we've basically got is THE INFINITY DOCTORS with all the good bits missing, a desperate attempt to do something big and important which can't tell the difference between "epic" and "just happens to be set on Gallifrey"."

After this, we watched Star Trek. This didn't do much to calm my awful mood. It's a gorgeously shot film - also, considering everything it tries to do, it hangs together very well. But I still wasn't interested in the plot or characters. I'm particularly irritated that Spock and Kirk seem to become friends purely because they are told they are going to be in the future. That's not development - and I winced and shouted "Blinovich limitation effect!" at the screen every time the Spocks were there together. I was also amused that the much slashed Sulu/Chekov pair don't actually exchange a line of dialogue. How cracky is that. My final hurdle is that the Trek crew are working for "the Federation". Now, while it's clearly not the same Federation Blake is trying to take down (or if it is, then Trek is at least a century into the future), I still got a nasty shiver up my spine every time someone mentioned defending it. I even found myself having sympathy for the villain, when he blamed the Federation for allowing his planet to crack like an egg. Overkill: that's just like them...

Thought of the day:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoralEventHorizon