I'VE JUST come back from visiting my brother and sister-in-law and their seven-week-old son on Cape Cod. The Cape is a long quirky curl of peninsula that sticks out like a handwriting flourish from the bottom of Massachusetts. My sister-in-law's family has a house - or rather a collection of converted turkey sheds - at the very tip of the peninsula, in the middle of a forest, on the shore of what is known as Horseleech Pond. (This is misleading: there are no horseleeches and the 'pond' is a bit less than a mile wide.)

In terms of broadcast classical music, Christmas is not a time of innovation and challenge. Channel 4 may have managed to offend the deserving with its Camp Christmas, but its musical offering remained solidly traditional.

I LIKED Sue, this new 'old friend' of my mother's, although I had met her only once. She was quite a lot younger than my mother and very funny. She would come out with expressions, sort of catch phrases, which we had never heard. She had an infectious, throaty laugh and drank and smoked a lot.

'And you must be Richard,' my father says to my significant other. Planted in the doorway, Dad proffers a sweaty palm and flashes the fixed smile of a chat show host. How strange to witness my father attempting to act normal. That used to be my job.

FESTIVE drop-outs anxious to avoid the turkey can spend Christmas chewing stinging nettles and worms underneath a deflated parachute in Hereford.

The Bernstein family's grip on Granada continues to loosen. The leisure group's newly published report and accounts devotes a page to a glowing tribute to Sidney Bernstein, the company founder who died earlier this year.

A satisfied buyer and some of the 350 birds on offer at the Saffron Walden turkey auction, held in the Suffolk town on the Tuesday before Christmas. Thanks to a special dispensation, the tradition continues despite EU directives banning such sales. But it is in decline as more families buy supermarket turkeys. An auctions spokesman said: 'It's dying out now, but a lot of people still like to buy their turkeys this way. It has a nice atmosphere'.

MY 10-year-old daughter, Emma, recently announced that she was becoming a vegetarian. At first I was quite pleased, having vegetarian tendencies myself; but I had not realised the potential minefield both the supermarket and sweet shop were for a veggie child, let alone the warzone about to erupt at home.

Sir: Sophie Grigson says ('A feast justifies the joint effort', 9 October) that 'Sunday Lunch with a capital L and all the trimmings has been forced to change with the times.' It certainly has.

THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

CHRISTMAS DAY remains the most lucrative day of the year for those required to work, but an increasing number of workers are being forced to take longer breaks over the holiday period.

CHRISTMAS may be enough to give anyone convulsions, but the butcher who had a fit every Christmas Eve for five consecutive years was a puzzle to doctors in Edinburgh. The 26-year-old man, they report in the British Medical Journal, did not suffer from fits the rest of the year but had seizures between 11am and noon every Christmas Eve.

TURKEYS like Christmas. Indeed they depend upon it. Were it not for Christmas and stuffing, the turkey population could go into decline.

FAMILY rows over the turkey are most likely in northern England and Scotland, according to a survey which casts doubt on the traditional view of Christmas as the season of goodwill.