Tag Archives: Christmas

Unknown's avatar

Round two of the word game – it’s getting harder

by

“But on the inside there is nothing – only the bare gingerbread walls.

It is not a real house – not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.

That’s when the stories can move in.” Vera Nazarian, the Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Here is today’s challenge – to make a sentence out of the letters in the words ‘The Gingerbread House’. The order of the words must remain the same as in the name of the item, in this case they would go:

T – H – E   G – I – N – G – E – R – B – R – E – A – D  H – O – U – S – E

These are my two attempts:

“Tea helps everything go in nice, gentle, easy rythyms by restoring energy and dopamine, helping our systems engage.”

“The house entrance goes into nine generously extended, refurbished bedrooms, rather excitingly and daringly haunted on unusually special evenings.”

Hope you might have fun with this.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Here’s a word game as the year ends

by

Wreath

Time is proving hard to catch hold of at this time of year, so here’s a plan to help see The Phraser through to the end of its 365 days of blogging.

The idea is that the post on each of the remaining days will be of something related to the season. There will be a photograph with a word beneath it, and the challenge will be to make a sentence using words starting with each of the letters in the name of the item in the image. Today, for example, the image is a wreath – W R E A T H.

Here is a sentence linked to those letters. Hope you might try too, if you have the time. There must be better ideas out there than the one below.

W – Will R – robin – E – eat – A – all – T – the – H – holly

Will robin eat all the holly?

Thanks for reading. Tomorrow the word will be a little trickier.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

“Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas …”

by

Christmas is settling in around us, mushrooming up through the pavements and jangling out from the shops. We know the traditions, and we know it’s never a good time for turkeys.

This Christmas I’ll remember the turkeys, and the British poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah who died on 7 December of this year at the age of 65. Born in Birmingham, and the eldest of nine children, he knew first hand the realities of racism, domestic abuse, borstal, and prison. He was dyslexic, and by his early teens he was out of school but already he was getting known as a poet. And the poems kept coming.

Talking Turkeys was published in 1994. It feels funny and joyful, just as he so often seemed himself, but there are messages tucked inside the poem’s feathers, ones that perhaps we’re more inclined to take notice of now, than we might have been when the poem first came out almost two decades ago.

Here it is if you’d like a listen:

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023