A Christmas Carol

I'm reading A Christmas Carol at the moment - I've never actually read it before, though obviously was fairly familiar with the gist of the story, and I'm encountering a problem. Quite a nice problem actually - I'm not complaining!

From the very first line I've got the Muppets elbowing in. I love The Muppet Christmas Carol. It's one of the great Muppet films (second only to the sublime Muppet Treasure Island - sorry Mr Depp but this is the definitive pirate film) and I love it to bits, so I can't read 'Marley was dead to begin with' without thinking 'the Marleys were dead to begin with'.

I'm tickled to see that the rather po-faced Wikipedia page for The Muppet Christmas Carol has this to say about the Marleys - 'One notable difference from the original story is the addition of Jacob Marley's brother, Robert, who was not present in Dickens' story, to allow the use of both Statler and Wardorf. It is suggested this name was chosen as an oblique reference to musician Bob Marley'. Just let me roll my eyes there - it's not an oblique reference, it's a joke! Muppet films are littered with jokes! It's what makes them funny!

Anyway, I'm enjoying the original. It's funnier than I expected, the only Dickens I'd read before being Great Expectations (which was okay but not really my cup of tea). I like it! Though the Muppet film follows it quite closely so I'm not really getting the feeling of reading anything new!

Enough of that - we finally got our Christmas tree up today! It was weird opening the box containing our artificial tree - I vividly remember packing it away last year.

Fortunately I'd had the foresight to re-label the colour-coded branches (different sizes for different layers) and change the 'apple-green' which was barely distinguishable from the 'yellow' branches and caused a lot of confusion last year. Boring, but I'm glad I did it - it saved a lot of time this year. And made me feel like an organised person! The boy-cat managed to knock the tree over before we even got the decorations on it but hasn't actually climbed it yet. Yet. It'll happen - he doesn't know that he's too big to climb Christmas trees.

Anyway here it is, in its fuzzy glory:

The stripey tail at the top left is the giant toy tiger that lives on top of our bookcase. It's adds a Calvin-and-Hobbesian element to our lives.