Welcome to a four day weekend (for some) and some public holiday pay (for others) and Christmas (for also some), Bilbies and Quokkas and visitors from across the seas! Stephanie is in Perth, and Liz is in Melbourne, and from 3500 kilometres apart we bring you this Christmas Public Holiday No Award Specialganza, before lunch and then the traditional nap.

Alleged pie fight sours Christmas party – from Liz’s home state, a tale of drunken work Christmas party pie assault shenanigans. No Award does not endorse assault but does endorse hilarity.

Important science: Christmas puddings put to the sobriety test; and because we (Stephanie) are scientists here at NA: the actual study at the MJA.

At The Conversation: Families we choose: an Australian gay and lesbian Christmas. (Please note that No Award does not endorse headlines that exclude other queer peoples)

Stephanie saw some of these today! The Mooja tree! Call to embrace world’s biggest mistletoe, the native Christmas tree.

A No Award pet hate: dumping things at Op Shops. Remember that if you wouldn’t give it to a friend, you shouldn’t give it to an op shop, because it costs millions of dollars for those oppies to dispose of your shit.

A case of Christmas workplace bullying, possibly by a superior: How cruel Kris Kringle ruined my public service career.

In tales of why capitalism is bad: Yiwu’s ‘red factories’: where the world’s Christmas decorations are made. This link has been doing the rounds as it’s recent and on the Shanghaiist, about factory conditions, capitalism, and the shit that’s used on cheap Christmas decorations.

A handy fact sheet from Alzheimer’s Australia, Including people with Alzheimer’s at Christmas.

Australia’s transplanted Christmas will never stop being surreal, which just keeps showing how little it belongs. Steph isn’t sure how she feels about the chat about childhood being a time of magic and how adults cram all the magic in to childhood before we lose it, which is frankly bull because Chinese adults believe in magic their whole lives, have you met her, but she likes the rest of it. (Related, Christine Anu has released an album of Christmas songs with no mention of snow, Island Christmas, which Steph desperately wants to listen to, because it seems relevant to interests of colonisation and what is australian and identity and etc)

Don’t forget for one second that the Prime Minister’s gift to us this Christmas was a shithead for Minister for Social Services and severe funding cuts to a number of organisations including those providing homeless and disability services.

And finally, a Christmas message we’ve stolen from Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin, via Mr First Dog on the Moon, because No Award maintains that Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin is modelled on Stephanie.