Advent Calendar - Purifying Ritual

Day 24 of anuk's Advent Calendar - Purifying ritual ( / Christmas sauna)

Here in the UK we don't have a ritual sauna on Christmas Eve, so it was on to the broader interpretation of Purifying Ritual.

There are a couple of "rituals" that I have taken part in today, which I always do on Christmas Eve (plus one normally reserved for after Christmas).

When I was young my Mother would always listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College, Cambridge, and this for me marked the real beginning of Christmas, We were never allowed to put up the Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve, and so that along with the 9 lessons and carols marked the start of Christmas - Ritual 1.

I am probably one of the most regular newspaper buyers that there is (in the true meaning of regular - at a repeatable interval), as I buy 1 a year, on Christmas Eve (for the extra quizzes, crosswords etc. that you get in that edition) and you can't get more regular than that! - Ritual 2.

The ritual I took part in early? - taking faulty stuff back to Arg0s. My hand blender proved that it was on it's last legs when I made the cheesecakes on Saturday, so I bought a replacement on Sunday to ensure that I could whip the cream over Christmas. Unpacking it I found that there was a part missing, so after a call to their customer services I took it back, there's a long story attached to this, but they did not come out of it smelling of roses. I got a replacement but only by going to another branch and only avoided joining the huge queues by demanding for a long time that the manager of the other branch was there to sort it out immediately that I arrived, eventually that was done, though they still refused to actually get it out of their stock room in advance of my arrival, so I still had to wait 10 minutes for that. Not a good performance Argos.