The first day of Christmas

I meant to post this before midnight, it's now officially the second day of December but since I haven't gone to bed yet I'm still classing it as the first!

Anyway, it's December, in case you hadn't noticed, which means it's Christmas! I know some people might disagree with me and say Christmas doesn't start till Christmas Eve and that December is just the build-up to Christmas, but, hey, the build-up starts here at Cherryade Towers some time In July and we have two little Christmas trees up all year round!

So, I've got the big tree (artificial of course, you can't get pink real trees, and besides, the needles drop everywhere and plastic is always superior to real trees and flowers, much cleaner and tidier and shinier!) and a Hello Kitty angel for the top plus I have just bought some brand new decorations, a set of Disney Princess baubles, a gingerbread man stood on a Christmas cake, a bucket containing candy cane and sweeties (not real!), a plastic sparkly cupcake, some pink tinsel, some battery operated pink fairy lights and chocolate decorations from Aldi, it'll be the prettiest tree ever! Hoping to put it up on Thursday before we go to ATP.

I was kindly asked to write two articles on why Christmas music is so special recently. One is in the latest edition of the Pull Yourself Together fanzine, which is brilliant and can be picked up from most good record shops all over the UK. Thanks to Dan and Hannah for asking me to contribute and for putting such a lovely advert for A Very Cherry Christmas vol. 5 in there!

The lovely Natalie Bradbury of fabulous local band The Shrieking Violets has also very kindly asked me some questions about the Very Cherry Christmas compilations, why I love Christmas music and Cherryade in general. You can read the great article she wrote about it, plus a fab review of A Very Cherry Christmas 5 here:
www.theshriekingviolet.blogspot.com
where you can read more of Natalie's really beautiful writings about life in this wonderful city amongst other fascinating topics!

You can still buy A Very Cherry Christmas vol. 5 here:
www.cherryademusic.co.uk/buyavcc5.html
as well as from all good record shops (distributed by Cargo) and on Itunes but the Cherryade Website is the only place where you can grab an amazing bargain by buying all 5 volumes of our utterly amazing Christmas compilation series for only £18 + £2 p and p, in fact it's the only place to buy volumes 1-4!

The December Dandelion schedule is now streaming here:
www.dandelionradio.com
where you can hear our very special Christmas show as well as all the other amazing shows!

Tomorrow I will post a list of some of my other favourite Christmas albums and songs as well as a guide to what's coming up in this magical month!

There was a chocolate bell in my Hello Kitty advent calendar today!

Lots of Cherry Christmas love,
Rach Cherryade xxx
www.cherryademusic.co.uk
www.dandelionradio.com

Trapped in my flat: A dream come true...

This is the first in a series of (totally self-indulgent and of no interest to anyone but me) posts which will profile some of the lovely things which I have squirrelled away in the kingdom of kitsch that is Cherryade Towers! Just to explain, our flat (Cherryade Towers) is the first 'grown-up' home I've ever lived in, the first place that wasn't my parents' house, or a hall of residence or a house I shared with friends. It belongs to Adam Cherryade and I and we are very proud of it. Despite the felling of maturity that owning your own home is supposed to bring, Cherryade Towers is essentially decorated in the way the seven-year-old me would probably have wanted it to look. It's very colourful (mostly pink!) and gloriously loud and mismatched. The lounge, in particular, is the focal point of the flat, I treat it as a kind of living museum, it's full of lovely things and I do find myself wandering around it sometimes just looking at all the stuff, the wonder still hasn't worn off! But, like a museum, the lounge is not really meant to be used. When we have guests round we take them in the lounge but it's not a room we use every day and I get very annoyed if Adam tries to eat biscuits in there while watching tv! Our lounge is certainly not minimalist, there are ornaments and knick-knacks everywhere you look, little miniature collections of My Little Ponies, plastic cakes, pictures of cakes, fairies, Hello Kitties, porcelain shoes, Strawberry Shortcake dolls, Baby Cham glasses and plastic deer, snow globes and loads more. Then there are individual items such as the beautiful cocktail cabinet with lamp attached, the man painting a glass of wine on an easel and encased in a bottle of mysterious booze, a lamp in the shape of a cocktail glass, a pineapple ice bucket, a 1950s chrome electric fire in the shape of a yacht, a pink keyboard I'll never be able to play, a Tiffany-style glass lamp with strawberries on and so much more (which I'll discuss in future blogs). Essentially Cherryade Towers is full of the kind of things nobody else would probably want but which make it feel like my home, like somewhere I belong, and, even if it's not to everyone's taste, visitors certainly seem to enjoy looking at all the stuff too! My only worry is that my inability to get rid of anything, plus the fact thatboxes of records are steadily taking over what bits of the flat aren't already full of brightly coloured bits of plastic, might mean that I may one day be buried under an avalanche of treasures, ah well, it'd be worth it!

So, the first item in this virtual tour will be the latest additions to our collection. My dad found them in his shop and wanted to get them out the way and figured they'd be perfect in our flat (this is the way we acquire a lot of our junk, er, heirlooms!). They are two of those machines you used to put 10p in as a kid and get a plastic ball out of which would have a plastic ring or a wonky model of a horse or soldier in garish colours in them, remember those? Well, I do, and then imagine if you'd been given an entire one of these as a kid and could undo them and take out as many of the balls as you wanted, my childhood dream come true! I must admit, I'm perhaps not as enthusiastic about the contents as I would have been as a kid but they still look fabulous in our lounge, they're a bright red with a yellow flap where the toys come out, and with all the different colour balls inside they do look very in-keeping with the rest of the room! So, welcome to Cherryade Towers brightly coloured plastic ball machines that I don't know the proper name for, you'll never leave!

www.cherryademusic.co.uk
www.dandelionradio.com