I’ve never been a fan of the cold, and I’m anticipating the temperature is only going to keep dropping before there’s any sort of rise.
You feel the bitter cold almost instantaneously when your gloveless hand is out of your pocket or when any skin is exposed – and that’s before the wind sweeps through.
I have also never been impressed when Christmas lights are set up and turned on before 1st December. I’ve always believed 25 days is suffice to get in some sort of festive spirit and maybe a small sense of denial or fear that we simply just roll from one event to the next without a commercial break. But with the Oxford street lights glowing, and the Winter Wonderland ablaze in colour, I have come to realise that bright and sparkly lights help distract people from the cold.
And it seems to work too.
When you’re in a sense of fairyland, before you know it, you’ve forgotten that it’s approaching zero degrees and you’ve been outside for more than four hours.
The pictures below (and there are more in the gallery) are of the Winter Wonderland at Hyde Park London, taken on 23rd November 2015. The event opened three days earlier, and while I was there it was relatively quiet because it was a Monday night and schools are still in semester.
Winter Wonderland is a Christmas carnival, with rides, games, mulled wine, bars, hot chocolate and whisky, pig on a spit, German sausages, roast chickens, old guys singing karaoke and Christmas carols blaring over the loud speaker.
