Going quackers for Christmas

I am a massive fan of Christmas. I love everything about the festive season, from singing along to Christmas songs and putting up the tree and decorations, to the big turkey dinner and spending the day with family.

It's a time of year when everyone seems to feel more positive and happy. Whether that's because they are dreaming of gorging themselves on chocolates and mince pies or because they just like shiny decorations, people are more fun at this time of year. It may only be mid-November, but I have already seen some Christmas decorations hanging out of people's windows in my village.

We bought our tree and some decorations a couple of weeks ago, but we won't be putting any up until we get back from Mockmas (my mum's cleverly-coined term for our early Christmas celebrations) in England at the beginning of December. That hasn't stopped me from getting into the Christmas spirit though.

In the last couple of days I have found myself singing some Christmas songs to Lydia, including such classics as Bing's "White Christmas", Elton's "Step Into Christmas", Jonah's "Stop the Cavalry" and Mariah's "All I Want For Christmas Is You". Singing those famous songs made me feel all Christmassy, and I decided to do some Christmas-related searches on Google for some inspiration on how to either celebrate Christmas or the decorations we could put up.

One of the first things I found was this:

Penguins dressed as Santa and Elves!! What could be better than that??

This has very quickly become possibly my most favourite picture of all time. It's from the March of the Christmas Penguins at the Everland attraction park in Yongin, South Korea in November 2010. I have never had any particular desire to go to the Koreas, North or South, but I think I now have a very good reason.

In fairness, these penguins were probably a bit warm with the extra layer of clothing, given that the temperature in Yongin mid-November tends to be about the same as these penguins' (they look like the African/Jackass penguin species from the Spheniscus order) local habitat temperature. Might have hampered their ability to swim as well...

Anyway, I am a massive fan of Christmas, and I love penguins. That's pretty much what this blog entry is about - I just wanted to share the picture of Christmas penguins with the world.

Seriously, are there any better photos in the world?

Hooray for Christmas and hooray for penguins!

Penguins!

Here Pingu, have a fish

For my birthday last year my parents-in-law gave me a unique opportunity - to feed the penguins at the Paradise Wildlife Park in Broxbourne, England. Those of you who don't know me might not know that penguins are my absolute favourite animal in the whole world, so this experience was something I was truly looking forward to.

I was made to wait for it though. I had booked the experience for last summer, but unfortunately we were informed by the people at Paradise Wildlife Park that they had to close the penguin enclosure for maintenance, so my experience would have to be re-scheduled at a later date. So, I rebooked it for this summer, after the wedding of my brother James and his new wife Kelly (see my last blog, "Congratulations James & Kelly").