Who delivers presents.... ... to cats?

 

 

I'm sure I read somewhere that the internet was sinking under the weight of pictures of cats... probably true, there are whole websites dedicated to this topic. My favourite is.. oops, nearly lost all my street cred there.

Actually, I've had cats all my life except for the last 20 years (?) and I have to say, none of our cats ever pulled all the toilet paper off the roll (they would have been thrashed if they had tried it) or climbed up inside the Christmas tree (ditto). Presumably cats, like children, are not taught to behave any more?

Now, back to that cat joke:

Who delivers presents to cats?

 

 

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What do snowmen.... ... eat for lunch?

 (are you tired of these Terrible Christmas Jokes yet?)

 

I love the way that this sort of joke forces us to suspend disbelief entirely - snowmen don't eat anything, they are not alive! And if they were, they would only eat snow - after all, we are made of meat, and we eat meat, so logically all a snowman would need to eat would be more snow?

Perhaps I am over analysing...

Right, let's get it over with:

 

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What do you get.....

...if you cross Santa with a duck?

 

Today is Christmas Eve, and by now most of us are thoroughly fed up with the whole holiday thing, having been suffering it in the shops since early November.

But it wasn't always like this.. I have a series of school books about the Chalet School, they were written by a lady called Elinor M Brent-Dyer, about a pair of English sisters, one much younger than the other, who moved out to Tyrol and started a school. The first one was written in 1925, and she kept banging them out at a rate of more than one a year,  right through the war (which had quite an impact on the school), through rock and roll (which bypassed it altogether) and right up into the 70s. They are utterly fascinating as a social history of private girls' education, continent-based but still very "English".

The parts of the earlier books that always caught my interest - quite apart from the fact that having their hair washed was something they were taken to a hairdresser for - were the descriptions of Christmas, which didn't start until late on Christmas Eve. That was the day when the servants - servants!! - were given the afternoon off to go and do their shopping for gifts, and was the day when the tree arrived and was decorated ready for Christmas day.

So different now....

They didn't do a lot of gardening when they were based in Austria...

 

 

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What do Santa's little helpers...

 .... learn at school?

 

Come on, this one's easy!

Really easy! There's a clue in the picture... what is it, what is it? Go on then, extrapolate....

No? You are really going to make me say it? I might get thrown off the internet for this. OK then, brace yourself:

 

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What is Santa's favourite pizza?

 (Does Santa even eat pizza?)

OK brace yourselves, it's the run-up to Christmas, so it's time for some truly dreadful Christmas jokes. I did try to find ones with a gardening slant, but alas, it was not that simple.

What, then, is Santa's favourite pizza?

 

 I mean, Santa eats mince pies, and drinks sherry, we all know that: he probably gets a lot of those mini-pork pie things as well, the ones where the ratio of crust to air, jelly, and meat is strongly biaised against the meat part...  I can sort of imagine him eating a bowl of thick, warming soup, with crusty bread, perhaps....

 

 

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Bulbs: when are they not fit for planting?

Last week, I was carrying out an end-of-year garden tidy-up, and had almost finished for the day, when Mrs Client asked me, very tentatively, if I'd be prepared to do some planting, for her.

Nothing unusual about that: I plant things all the time, it is rather part and parcel of being a gardener... so of course I said yes, no problem, and I was handed a boxful of packs marked Tulip bulbs, cultivar “Cherry Delight”:

 

 They are rather delightfully red, aren't they?

So why was the Client asking me, in such an apologetic way, if I would plant them? I found out when I opened the box.....

 

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Ivy Myth No. 3: “Ivy damages house walls”.

 Ah, this old chestnut!

Yes, if you live in an old, stone-built cottage with lime mortar, ivy can utterly destroy your house. It squeezes tiny stems into the soft mortar, then they grow and expand, and in no time it is dislodging the actual stones, and you are in dead trouble.

But with a modern red-brick house, built to modern standards, with modern mortar: then no, this simply won't happen. The ivy will cling to the bricks, and to the mortar, but as long as they are all in good condition, it won't penetrate, and it won't damage the bricks.

Personally, I think it's extremely unsightly.....

 

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