A thousand years of Christmas

It started life as Five Hundred Years of Christmas until I realised that one chant I was singing dated as far back as the eleventh century.
The midwinter festival has so many facets to it. Its origins are so very ancient. It used to be called the Lupercal in Roman times, a time for feasting and mumming and clowning.
It was celebrated with special evergreen plants in Druid times, with mistletoe and ivy and pine....and lo and behold, we still go to the pantomime and still bring evergreens into the house. Those customs are nothing to do with the nativity story.

But they sit beautifully alongside it. It's as though the midwinter time of celebration has everything going for it: it is a reverent, spiritual, gentle time of uplift, to honour with wafts of scent (frankincense and myrrh) and floating carol music, and yet it's also a time to go out and get very merry on mulled wine, eat like there's no tomorrow and get into outrageous costumes.

We have incorporated all of these elements into the show! That's why we say it covers all the moods of Christmas from mediaeval mysticism to a hangover.....

The show has been given in such unlikely places as the jungle in Borneo and Manila in the Philippines. There it was rapturously received by people some of whom asked me what snow is like. They had never seen any. I had to tell them it was as though the world outside the house looked like the contents of the freezer!