While shepherds moshed: A Musical Advent Calendar: Day 4 - Ding dong

Here's Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band doing one of our family's favourite carols. Kai sometimes torments us with his version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtKVi3Ippu0

Maddy will be familiar to all you folkies as the singer of Steeleye Span. A quick wiki revealed that she was born in Blackpool, now runs an arts centre in Cumbria and that her father, Alan Prior, was the co-creator of Z-Cars!

The Carnival Band are an early music group who she has done a whole series of albums with and frequently tours with at Xmastime. Clearly they have a lot of fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carnival_Band_(folk_group)

Here they even throw in a few corny Xmas cracker jokes.

Reading Potter last nght, I noticed that they pull crackers at Hogwarts. That must be a nightmare for a translator to explain. A strange tradition unique to the Anglo-Saxon world and integral to the British Xmas.

I tried to bring some Xmas crackers back for Kieron a few years back. I didn't get further than security at Heathrow. Those Crackers of Mass Destruction were not going on any plane! Just the sort of fiendish weapon that I am sure is used by terrorists to carry out a hijack! Reduce the crew to tears of hysterical laughter with the jokes, force the pilots to wear silly hats and then redirect the plane to Christmas Island.