Christmas

Christmas is one of the most important festivals in the calendar, and remains devoutly pagan despite popular complaints that it is becoming a little bit too Christianised.
It is both the winter solstice (a fizzy drink) and the anniversary of the birth of political activist, preacher and Radio 4 Garden Time regular Jesus Christ, in an inn in inner Innsbruck in 0AD.

Christmas is a time when families get together and fall asleep in chairs. People also give one another presents of socks and CDs, or sometimes a combination of the two, like a sock with a CD in it.
If your Birthday is on Christmas Day, the two cancel each other out and you get nothing. This is why Jesus didn't have many possessions.

Apes

Apes are humankind's closest relatives in the animal kingdom. However, they don't visit us very often and the most we ever get from them is the odd finger-painted Christmas card so sometimes I wonder why I bother.

There are different species of apes, but the most popular are the orang-utan, which is Malay for 'grumpy old man in the forest', and the chimp, which makes cocopops.
Other family favourites include the gorilla, the cheeky monkey and King Kong. The Monkees are not apes; they are in fact a religious order.

Many ape species are endangered and populations are reaching critically low levels, largely due to hunting and encroachment on habitat by humans, and also as a result of repeated gruelling experiments involving large numbers of chimps and typewriters.
To combat the decline, the Ape Marketing Council created the Planet of the Apes, located about halfway between Earth and Mars, but it has not proven popular with visitors so far, losing out to more exciting attractions like Lego World and Moon of Muesli.

Apes are sometimes kept captive in apiaries by bees in armour.

Ghosts

(Also known as wraiths, phantasms, spooks and spirits)
A ghost is what is left of a person after the soul has gone to the underworld, the body has turned to dust, and all the clothes have been given to a charity shop.

Ghosts have been around for several millennia. Several classical Greek plays contain references to ghosts, most famously in the comedy Heebie-Jeebies in Thebes by Aristophanes and the tragic Don't tell the Archon his Wife is See-through by Euripides.

In the medieval period it was thought that ghosts were caused by bad smells. They were generally regarded as pests, and most households would have their own scented priest to keep the ghosts away. Outside of the peak ghosting period, the priests were stored in priest-holes, which can still be seen in some ex-local authority flats today.

These days the public attitude towards ghosts is quite different, and ghosts perform many useful tasks such as slamming doors mysteriously, breaking unwanted crockery and making children talk with unearthly grown-up voices, which provides hours of family entertainment around Christmas time.