Celebrating 22 years of festive fun
The Christmas messages sent to the world each year since 2004
How it began: digging out some old Punch cartoons from tattered volumes bought in a Manchester street market in the early 1960s.
Ah, the joys of Photoshop. Constable's painting of Brighton beach and the Chain Pier gets a makeover.
Taking the joys of Photoshop one step further.
Back to the Punch volumes. The Argument for Garlic Soup? Still in progress over a decade and a half later.
Snow in Westdene, Brighton with an appearance by April the cat, then about 10 years old, with another dozen years to go.
They are watching Santa Claus, made by George Albert Smith at St Ann's Well Gardens in Hove in 1898, because they cannot wait for the Made in Brighton Film Festival that was to be held as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe in May 2010.
The first appearance of the characters that returned in 2017.
The turkey's first appearance.
A set of mediæval cartoons turned up belatedly to match the jokes of almost equal antiquity.
A reference to one of my favourite cheeses sneaked in with some cultural notes. (My favourite cheese pun was in the background of a Steve Bell cartoon: Cheeses of Nazareth.)
Christmas cracker jokes. Benjamin Disraeli (Dizzy) really did say that about not explaining and complaining when he said he had climbed to the top of the greasy pole. Good advice, indeed. Pity the Tennysonian verse did not exactly follow the In Memoriam rhyme scheme.
The price of food and inequality feature. If you still don't get the joke about the couple shaking hands, say the three speeches aloud: 'Ann Mayall you're Chris Mrs Bea White' and groan.
As the troubled times deepen, the first references to Brexit and the US president, with a backward glance to the previous year at top centre. The campaign to preserve the Brighton Hippodrome for use as a theatre was then in its fourth year.
Yes, it's 2010 recycled with new references to Brexit ('breakfast means . . .', 'hard or soft', four freedoms') and the US president, who was bad enough but had yet to show just how treasonably demagogic he was capable of being.
The background image is a photograph I took in the back streets of Bolton c1970, used to celebrate the town where I grew up. Some of the old jokes intermingled with a few post-referendum Brexit references when little seemed to be happening on that front.
Executed with little rehearsal time. Image source: XII—Clever People ‘On Tour’ by Rossi Ashton, from Music Hall and Theatre Review, 8 December 1910.
Enter the pandemic. The references to Barnard's Castle, 'oven-ready', 'level playing field' and social distancing may later become ephemeral but not the one to Trump as a loser, even if he was out for the time being.
The second Covid Christmas. How long the pandemic went on!
By the time of the third Covid Christmas, the behaviour of the government and especially Boris Johnson was dominating. Hence the appearance of Punch representations of some of his illustrious (or at least illustrated) predecessors as prime minister: (from the left) Gladstone, Palmerstone, Derby, Disraeli, Chamberlain, Churchill.
A storybook Christmas.
Some explanation: Boris the Spider, written by John Entwistle, is a track on The Who's album A Quick One. Gladstone Place, Road, Terrace and Gladstone Arms in Brighton are named after the former prime minister; as many as 14 prime ministers are commemorated in Brighton place names. The James Gray Collection os the Regency Society's archive of historical photographs of Brighton & Hove.
US president Donald Trump claimed to have cleared up eight wars during the first year of his second term in office. The reference here is ironic.
Page updated 17 December 2025