User:DrThneed/Advent Calendar 2024

I thought it would be fun to try a Wiki-themed Advent calendar on BlueSky (other socials would be fun too but who has the time?!). The post threading all the days starts here. Here's what I did, typos and everything, and the resulting edits:

Day 1 Whamageddon

Welcome to #WikiAdvent Calendar #Day1 Today's "window" is a proper NZ rabbithole. Let's go! 🧵 1st Dec marks the start of Advent, and also the beginning of #Whamageddon, which my kids take very seriously. Last year I heard Wham’s Last Christmas in the pharmacy on the 1st. Straight to Whamhalla!

The Whamageddon Wikipedia page explains the rules Whamageddon. It also lists supposed variations to the game, including the statement that “In New Zealand, 'Snoopy's Christmas' is sometimes used as the featured song.” Really? I’d never heard that. It is definitely possible...Snoopy’s Christmas gets played all over NZ. It even has a float in the Dunedin Santa Parade (truly) and yet wasn’t a hit anywhere else in the world. We love it, and apparently we also love to hate it, voting it the worst Christmas song in a Herald poll in 2007. The Spin Off interviewed Bruce Ward, the man responsible for bringing it to NZ and it’s worth a read, not least for the OTHER seasonal NZ hit I strongly dislike and can now blame him for (link). Shudder. Thanks Bruce.

But back to Snoopy. The claim in the Whamageddon Wikipedia article is marked “citation needed”. Can I track down a source? I found this 2022 US article where the author casts doubt, clearly having NO IDEA how popular Snoopy’s Christmas is in NZ. The problem is that looking through the history of the Whamageddon Wikipedia page I can see that the Snoopy claim was added by an anonymous editor (with an IP address in Wellington) on 1 Dec 2020. A citation needed tag got added a while later. So the Petaluma article cannot be our source. Nor can this 2021 Time Out article. In fact the closest I can get to a source is a Reddit post (you knew that was coming, right?) from 2019 saying ONE PERSON played this ONE TIME. Is that the source of this claim? When a piece of incorrect info on Wikipedia gets picked up and used outside Wikipedia, and then the sources get added later to “prove” the fact on Wikipedia, we call it circular reporting or “citogenesis”.

We can avoid creating another example of citogenesis here by removing that unsourced claim (I'm going to take out ALL the unsourced claims in this article). But if any Wiki sleuths able to track down a pre-1 Dec 2020 reliable link between Snoopy and Whamageddon we can always add it back!

Now I did mention rabbit holes so here’s a little quiz for you. Without looking (of course), if I tell you that 1 of the 3 writers of Snoopy’s Christmas was involved in some other hit songs, what would they be? (we can't do polls yet, right? I'll just list them)

A. Can’t help falling in love (Elvis Presley) B. The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimbaway) C. Lullaby of Birdland (Ella Fitzgerald) D. It’s a wonderful world (Louis Armstrong) E. All of the above

You all know its E, right? The mind that wrote Lullaby of Birdland wrote Snoopy's Christmas. Unbelievable! 🤯 You can read about George David Weiss here, and see his song category here (strangely not linked from his Wikipedia page). Time for me to do some quick edits, get ready for this year’s Santa Parade, and see if I can get a better shot of Snoopy! I hope they've adjusted some of the floats so the new George St lampposts don't destroy the wings on the giant albatross this year...I took a look at the Santa Parade article and....hoo boy. Lot of unsourced info, a massive North American bias, and some questionable statements. I have heard our Santa Parade called a Christmas Parade but never a Christmas Pageant! Quick touch up, sourced to Te Ara which has a whole article on NZ Santa Parades! And then I checked the Wikipedia list of Christmas and holiday season parades. Is there one where you live, dear reader? Is it in this article? I had to edit to make clear that Dunedin's parade is 1st or 2nd Sunday, not just 2nd, given we are having it today.

Edits

Removed unsourced words from Whamageddon article to avoid citogenesis
Notable parades: citation needed tags as we definitely have Santa parades throughout NZ and Adelaide being oldest needs a source. Added some detail on NZ parades sourced to our national encyclopaedia
List of Christmas and holiday season parades →New Zealand: Dunedin parade is 1st Sunday of Dec in 2024
Uploaded nine images and one video to Commons from Santa Parade
Uploaded video of Snoopy float from Dunedin Santa Parade to ‘Snoopy’s Christmas’ page, added mention of interview with Bruce Ward and quote
Added image to Buzzy bee article from Santa parade, uploaded image of Cliff the ambulance to Dunedin Hospital page, with two sources on campaign

Day 2 Christmas cards

Welcome to #WikiAdvent Calendar #Day2 Does anyone else still send Christmas cards? My parents send out homemade cards every year (dozens of them) and the weeks from early November were filled with urgent discussions about the design for the year – could it be easily reproduced? Was it different enough to previous designs? Was it too laborious to make? Early designs featured photocopied drawings, rubber-stamped dead rats (really), watercolours, folded stars, paper cutouts, ceramic stars, and more. I adopted the tradition when I left home, although I gave it up the year I didn't get a single one back! I found it harder once I moved to NZ, as a lot of imagery around winter Christmas wasn’t appropriate any more! I did a collage stocking washing line, and a star embroidered right on the card, but I don’t have copies of all of the ones I made over the years.

So I can feel you wondering where the Wiki is...don't worry! It's coming. Here's the page for Christmas cards. Notice anything? The section on homemade cards has no sources (boo!) and the images are not obviously homemade. Looking at Wikimedia Commons (our massive open photo library), I can’t find a category for homemade Christmas cards, which surprises me. Maybe I’m missing it somehow? And there’s no category for cards from the UK or NZ either! So today's editing will be uploading my images to Wikimedia Commons. Why share my pics? Because I made these cards I own the copyright. Copyright is A Big Deal when it comes to sharing photographs of artwork – just because you own the artwork, doesn’t mean you own the copyright, the artist does. I can upload these images because I both made and photographed them. And it seems there are not many images of homemade cards yet, which is a huge gap! I'll be back later to show the editing, in the meantime I uploaded my first video to Wikipedia yesterday – check it out here! I LOVE how excited the fan in the background is!).

Alright I’m back! Let’s upload! First, I go to the front page of Wikimedia Commons, log in and hit the blue upload button. If it was my first time, I’d see a guide to what can be uploaded, like this. After that, I get to select the files I want to upload, but if I make a mistake I can still change my mind, add more files etc. On the next screen, I get to give my files a copyright licence. I made these cards, and took the photo, so I own the copyright. I am going to pick a CC BY licence so people can reuse these images however they like and just have to credit me. Almost done! Now I can rename my files (if I forgot to give them informative names beforehand - Commons like useful filenames, not 123456.jpg!), and add a caption and categories. I'm going to put mine in "Christmas cards" for now. And that's it! A nice thank you for contributing to our shared commons, and I can see my final files. If I click on the filenames in blue I can access each one individually, change or add categories, etc. Oh! BONUS! When I went to create the category "Christmas cards of New Zealand", my homemade card AND this other file were in it. Someone uploaded this image years ago, gave it a category that didn't exist, and left it! Huh! Merry Christmas from Hawera!!! (and to finish off, here's that court house as photographed by Ulrich Lange and donated to Wikimedia Commons in 2017 )

Edits

Uploaded two images of Christmas cards to Commons
Added two categories, Christmas cards of New Zealand, Homemade Christmas cards
Added image of homemade Christmas cards to Christmas card article

Day 3 The Singing Ringing Tree

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day3. I’m not sure what it is about Christmas and horror. Maybe it begins when small children see Father Christmas/Santa Claus for the first time (as evidenced in this perfect reaction, on a very short video from Sunday). My kids loved The Nightmare Before Christmas, and watched it whenever they wanted. But when I was a primary-aged kid you watched what the BBC played, and then waited a year to see if you would ever get to see it again. I loved John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, charming and creepy. But it took me a long time to track down the name of a barely remembered Christmas fairy tale involving a prince, a princess, a tree and a bear. It turns out it was voted one of the spookiest 20 movies of all time in 2004! (citation needed). It continues the theme from WikiAdvent Day1 of things that were sort of hits in their own country but massive hits somewhere else.

The film is 1957’s The Singing Ringing Tree, made in East Germany by Francesco Stefani, who will you know from his other films......wait, no, just that. Hmm. Although he probably did other things too, given he got the Federal Cross and the Bavarian Cross, English Wikipedia just doesn’t know about them. The BBC apparently played The Singing Ringing Tree a “massive number of times” between 1960 and 1980. Here’s the trailer, although it was shown in black and white when I watched it (more scary? less scary? more I think). And this review is how I found it, thanks Duck Duck Go. And here’s the Wikipedia page for the film. I’m going to add the link to the trailer in the External Sources section of the page, then I’m going to see if I can add anything to poor Stefani’s tiny stub of an article! One thing I have to show you is The Fast Show spoof of the film. It was made by Paul Whitehouse, working through his childhood trauma. And another bonus - in linking the voiceover artist Tony Bilbow's Wikipedia article to The Singing Ringing Tree page, I came across the amazing wind sculpture of the same name. Coincidence? Or is the artist another traumatised child of the 70s? I've improved Stefani's article a little, linked Bilbow to his work, & added a link to the full length version of the film (with English voiceover) to the 'External links' bit of the Wikipedia page. It's hard to see why I was scared at the time, but in my defence I was 4, and it IS decidedly weird!

Edits

Added ref section, 3 refs, and information to Francesco Stefani
Added source and cult status, and link to full dubbed version, to The Singing Ringing Tree
Added link from Tony Bilbow to The Singing Ringing Tree, and mention that he voiceovered the series

Day 4 Advent Calendars

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day4 This is an advent calendar, so at some point obviously we have to talk about Advent Calendars! Today I’m going to do some research, AND settle an age-old dispute once and for all. Honest. But first – who has a physical advent calendar this year? In this house, I have a tea calendar, my kids have gummies, and my husband has beer (we share). I am constantly amazed by the range of calendars capitalism affords us: 24 little bits of cheese! Socks! Bath bombs! Lego! Puzzles! New Zealand media outlet The Spin Off loves to rank things, and a couple of years ago they snarkily ranked 20 of NZ’s best advent calendars, it's worth a read. And of course there are life size calendars, calendars made of shipping containers, digital ones with music and animation, even a climate change protest calendar made for the chair of Lloyds Bank. Humans really like counting down to things, eh?

Now, to that dispute – it’s an age-old argument, do Advent calendars have windows or doors? My family says windows (13 yo), windows (husband), and “wouldn’t it depend what the printed picture is, I’ve always called them flaps anyway” (16yo). We may have to cast our net wider. Who better to consult than Wikipedia?

The English Wikipedia article says “Many Advent calendars take the form of a large rectangular card with "Doors", one for each day of December leading up to and including Christmas Eve (December 24) or Christmas Day (December 25)” Isn’t that odd? We don’t normally capitalise nouns in English, and there’s no reason to put it in double quotes, really. I wonder if it got translated from German Wikipedia? That might also explain why there are no sources. What if we survey all the language Wikipedias, what will we find? Research method: translate first few paragraphs of Wikipedia article until we find the use of windows or doors. Findings: Clearly a preference for windows! And only a couple of “doors or windows”. (Please do not comment on my charting skills. Excel is not my friend.) I found a surprising number of other terms, including boxes, cut holes, flaps, drawers, pockets, openings, compartments, days, hatches, slots, and JARS! I think this is probably a Google translate fail, it’s from el Wikipedia, and the sentence is “The Christmas calendar is either a large jar that brings poinsettias or a large decorated open box with gifts". You what now? I love poinsettias but how do they function as a calendar?! They work quite well as a tree though! Happy for any el speakers to shed further light on this. A lot of these articles on Advent calendars have similar construction to the English article, so are either sourced from it or from the same place the English one was. But interestingly quite a few have replaced “Doors” with the word for windows. Oh wait. Oh no. Oh nonononono. Back in 2021 the English article used to say “windows” (in quotes, no caps) WITH A SOURCE. And then used the term doors further down the page. What happened? In 2022 there was a series of edits and reversions kicked off by an anonymous editor replacing all the uses of windows in the article with doors. After being reverted, they tried many more times, in the process removing the source that used the term window. There was shouting and bad language. The reverting editors lost track and reverted to “Doors” with no source. Maybe distracted by the insertion of fish and wheels! (not shown) in the article?! But this explains some differences between language Wikis, I think. Windows or doors depends on when you translated from English. I'm going to make some edits to the English article to get rid of that weird construction, add in sources and try to not start an edit war! Wish me luck. This started as a bit of a joke but there are clearly very strong feelings on the matter out there! 😬 And please enjoy this absolutely spot-on poem by the wonderful Brian Bilston. Edits made. Chip in here if you wish. I settled on "a large rectangular card with flaps (variously referred to as doors or windows)" and gave two sources. Will it stick? Who knows!

Edits

Altered Advent calendar article to read “Many Advent calendars take the form of a large rectangular card with flaps (variously referred to as doors or windows),” and added two sources.

Day 5 Pomanders

Welcome to my #WikiAdvent calendar, #Day5 This morning I drove down the road and noticed a fabulous fragrance that wasn’t there last week. It’s possibly the cabbage tree flowers, which have a wonderful smell. You wouldn't know it from the Wikipedia article though. Still, it got me thinking about the smell of Christmas. As I grew up in the UK, that was fragrances like cinnamon, cloves, oranges and pine. For several years in a row I had a Penhaligon's Scented Treasury book in my Christmas stocking.

Penhaligon's is a perfume house in London, which started in the 1860s in the Turkish Baths on Jermyn Street. Those Penhaligon books were treasure troves - beautifully illustrated, scented collections of poems, paintings and stories. Here's the Christmas one on eBay Anyway - back to Christmas scents. I remember Blue Peter showing us how to make a pomander one year, which was an orange studded all over with cloves. They smell amazing and, if you can get them to dry rather than rot, they last for ages. As far as editing goes, today I have already removed some vandalism from the Penhaligon's article. I'm going to look for some sources on modern pomanders, as there are none in the article. And I'm going to consider whether modern orange-and-clove pomanders might deserve their own Wikidata item as distinct from earlier pomanders, which were holders for different scents and spices. I can't say what those smell of, but I CAN say what a modern pomander smells of. @lucymoore.bsky.social began a WikiProject on smells this year so how to model smell on Wikidata is on my mind! I wonder if I can find a description of scent of a cabbage tree flower to add? Suggestions welcome!

Oh well this is fun! It looks to me like all the encyclopaedia articles on pomanders are similar to the English one, covering the pierced metal kind and the orange clove ones, EXCEPT Danish Wikipedia, which has an article only about the oranges as Christmas decorations! That article is labelled Juleappelsin, whereas as far as I can tell a pomander in Danish is a Balsambøsse (thank you Rosenborg museum for your multilingual website - I don't trust Google, which told me the orange was studded with carnations!!!). Ah yes, no I am not falling into the trap of trying to figure out how on earth this came about (screenshot of empty Nostradumus section in Pomander article). And if you think that was the end of it you don't know me very well. Of course I looked at the Wikipedia page history, and of course I looked at the edit summary - there were three paragraphs on Nostradamus's recipe for rose tablets, removed for copyright infringement. So I looked in the trusty Internet Archive to see if I could summarise the original - and found rose tablets (pills in this version) aren't actually anything to do with pomanders anyway - they were to be dissolved under the tongue! So I can delete that heading. There's quite a few references to rose in this book, and even a rose pomade (oh, pomade! originally an apple ointment for skin and hair) so maybe I missed scented stuff to go in a pomander.

Edits

Removed vandalism from Penhaligon’s
Added two sources to pomander, removed redundant Nostradamus section
Added word and removed spaces on Pomade
Added flower scent to Cordyline article
Added ‘smells of sweetness’ and applies to part nectar to Corydyline australis in Wikidata
Added common names to Pittosporum eugenioides lemonwood or tarata Q7199141, added ‘smells of’ honey with applies to part nectar.
Created Wikidata item for orange clove pomander, and moved the Danish link there

Day 6 Christmas cats

Welcome to #Day6 of the #WikiAdvent calendar! Today I was remembering the year we got a stray kitten on Christmas eve from a litter born in a friend’s garage. She hid behind the Christmas tree for days, and barely forgave us for taking it down. It sent me down a Christmas cat rabbithole, where I read about Iceland’s Yule Cat – a massive cat who eats people who didn’t get new clothes on Christmas eve! The Yule Cat is associated with the Yule Lads, who used to kidnap children, but now just steal things instead, and the ogress Grýla and you can read about these horrifying characters on the Icelandic Christmas folklore page. In our house though the cat we associate most with Christmas is a very famous cat, worldwide - one of the top 10 of fictional cats along with the Cheshire Cat! I'm talking about Slinky Malinki, who is important enough to have his own Wikipedia page, and the star of 'Slinky Malinki's Christmas Crackers'. In this based-on-a-true-story picture book, this mischievous black cat climbs the Christmas tree, causing chaos. When the family restore the ornaments to their rightful places, they – "Oh Foozle! What a shattering shame!" - can’t find the fairy (it’s under the rug) but Slinky has taken its place on top of the tree so all is well.

As far as editing goes, I will be adding a summary of the story to Slinky's page, and mentioning that he was the subject of a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. If you have access to cats, you are welcome to post Christmas cat pictures below. I'm still recovering from reading about the Yule Cat! Okay so the funniest thing is that whoever wrote this article introduces us to Slinky Malinki and then calls him Malinki after that...as if it's his surname? And like this is a biography article? Not gonna lie I kinda like it.

Edits

Removed copyright violation from Slinky Malinki Christmas Crackers.
Added mention of Edinburgh Fringe and two sources.
Added summary of story and another source to publisher.

Day 7 Gingerbread

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day7 Today’s topic is....(drumroll please) gingerbread! When I was a kid gingerbread was one of two things, a dense moist cake that improved with keeping, or biscuits cut in shapes, iced with royal icing, and for people, currant faces & buttons. I didn’t hear about gingerbread houses for some years. The gingerbread house page tells us that gingerbread has been around for centuries, but that making it into houses was invented by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 in the story Hansel and Gretel. OR The Grimms simply popularised a pre-existing custom (seems more likely to me, seeing as royal icing and gingerbread are all that is needed, and both had been around for hundreds of years before the Grimms). The gingerbread house Wikipedia page tells us that the largest house made had nearly 36 million calories 🤢.

Anyway – how am I going to lever NZ and Wikipedia editing into these wanderings? Well. I live in Dunedin, and anyone who has visited will probably have seen the fantastic Dunedin Railway Station. It earned its architect, George Troup, the nickname Gingerbread George, for obvious reasons. It looks more properly gingerbready to me than any of the pics on the Gingerbread (architecture) page! Inevitably the station was recreated in gingerbread a few years ago by a local chef. Sadly I have no openly licensed image of that to add to the Wikipedia page, but I can add the fact and its source. Here are some pictures of my own gingerbread creations over the year, just for fun. We got bored with houses, and the kids requested a city (I could only manage a hamlet) and a castle. This year? Who knows! We were in Boston living in an AirBNB the year we made the castle. I normally cut the tiniest corner off a ziploc for icing, to get a nice fine line, but the US bags were *stretchy*, so the icing got thicker and thicker as I worked! Nightmare (before Christmas).

‪Oh dear, in adding the baked station to Wikipedia, I linked to the hotel the baker was from (Scenic Southern Cross Hotel). That page is named Grand Casino Dunedin so I created a redirect from the Southern Cross Hotel. It hasn't always been a casino!

Edits

Added gingerbread station to Dunedin Railway Station page, with source
Made redirect for Southern Cross Hotel Dunedin, to Grand Casino Dunedin

Day 8 Wreaths and Big Things

Welcome to my #WikiAdvent #Day8 Today we shall be leapfrogging from Christmas wreaths to road trips, come along for the ride. This thread brought to you by this absolutely astonishing wreath which turned up all the way from a craft fair in England yesterday.

So a Christmas wreath would more traditionally be greenery - I used to do holly and ivy ones in the UK. Naturally in NZ that's not so appropriate or necessary as the flowers are blooming. Anyway, my mother wrote “have a very kitschy Christmas” on her present

Edits

Day 9 Caganer

Edits

Day 10 Carols

Welcome to #WikiAdvent calendar #Day10 My daughter had her Grade 5 singing exam today, which took the form of a concert. Great fun! But it reminded me about Christmas carols. I used to go carol singing every year with a friend who lived in a tiny village. Everyone would gather and we’d troupe around the houses, being rewarded with lollies at every house, which we’d share out at the end (like wassailing). Like that painting only in the dark and with a bit less snow and a couple more thatched cottages.

As a student I was part of an informal choir that would sing at the Christmas market for charity, stopping midway for mulled wine halfway through to warm our frozen fingers. It was there I first came across one of my fave carols, Boris Ord’s Adam lay y’bounden (video). The manuscript words of this song have survived since c1400. The words to Adam lay ybounden are from 1400, and possibly related songs sung in mystery plays. I never loved singing about being grateful for original sin, but I just love Ord's setting. Another favourite of mine is Tomorrow shall be my dancing day, not written down until the 1800s, but undoubtedly earlier (maybe even pre-Adam), and possibly also a mystery play song. Here's the Willcocks arrangement.

So what makes a carol? Pretty much any song sung at or around Christmas with a Christmas theme, so Wikipedia says. I feel like that's a bit loose - most of us would differentiate between a lot of modern Christmas songs and carols, I suspect! One Christmas carol that I have to include, to inch us closer to NZ, is The Twelve Days of Christmas. YES I WILL SAY IT it’s not the first twelve days of December, it’s not the twelve days before Christmas, it’s the twelve days AFTER Christmas eve! A million variations exist (counting songs invite that) including the well-known in New Zealand A Pukeko in a Punga Tree by Māori Language Commissioner Kīngi Īhaka (I had no idea who wrote it!), published as a picture book in 1981. I'm going to track down a source and add this information to Īhaka's page, but to finish I can recommend this very New Zulland version of The Twelve Days of Christmas by The Māori Sidesteps.

Edits

Added two paragraphs on Pūkeko on a ponga tree to Kīngi Īhaka and four sources.
Uploaded an image of the song from Dunedin Santa Parade and added to Kīngi Īhaka page.

Day 11 Christmas pudding

Welcome to #WikiAdvent #Day11 I’m starting to think about what to have for Christmas dinner. One thing that won’t be making an appearance this year is Christmas pudding. I do love it (so dense! So rich! So good with brandy butter!). It was my habit to make a batch of five or six, boil them up, wrap them in baking paper and foil and store them in the top of the larder, to be used as needed over several years. But I’m short on pudding bowls after The Big Tipping Over Disaster of 2019 and it looks like it might be warm this Christmas, which means a pav or a trifle is more in order.

Reading the history of puddings on Wikipedia, I absolutely love this bit of Wikipedia editing: “There is a popular and wholly unsubstantiated myth[citation needed] that in 1714, George I of Great Britain (sometimes known as the Pudding King) requested that plum pudding be served as part of his royal feast in his first Christmas in England”. Can I find a citation for the fact the myth is unsubstantiated? Who knows, but I need to try! 😆 (bit tautologous thou', right? If it was substantiated, it wouldn't be a myth)

The 1st printed Christmas Pud recipe was Eliza Acton’s (1845). By the time goldminers were colonising NZ, Christmas and plum pudding were strongly associated, so much that it didn’t feel like Christmas without a pud. Luckily the ingredients were widely available. In 1881 the Christchurch Globe published a pudding recipe in song form, requiring a 1lb of most things, and promised a cheaper recipe to follow but AFAICT didn't print it! The 1874 Weekly News had your back, tho, with several recipes including one that eked out the good stuff with grated carrots and spuds (but thankfully didn’t return to the medieval style of including meat).

My mum showed up one year in NZ with a pudding, having had to explain to the xray staff at Auckland airport what the bomb-shaped thing in her suitcase was. But she was just following tradition, even in the 1860s people were sending puddings round the world – sending slices back to relatives in England, or receiving a whole pudding from London. Enough meandering! I could explore for hours the weird traditions associated with puds – like making them on Stir-Up Sunday (the last Sunday before Advent), or it being lucky for the whole family to stir it 3 times and make a wish, or hiding a silver coin in them, or pouring hot brandy on them and lighting them on fire. Instead I’m going to leave you with one of my all-time favourite Christmas puddings. It’s Albert, the cut-and-come-again pudding from The Magic Pudding (1918) and which my dad read to us as kids. Albert was “a Christmas, steak, and apple-dumpling Puddin’” all at once, and he never ran out, even if he did run away, and his manners were atrocious.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, you can read the whole thing here (with pictures), or just enjoy the summary on Wikipedia. I'm off to find an edit to make!

Edits

Added sources to Stir-Up Sunday and Christmas Pudding, removing a citation needed tag.
Added images/SDC to brandy butter/hard sauce images on Commons

Day 12 Pavlova

Having done Christmas pudding yesterday I feel like it’s essential to cover what would be a more popular NZ Christmas dessert today – pavlova. My mum used to serve it covered with cream and halved grapes soaked in sherry, or fruit salad in the summer in the 70s. So when I moved to NZ it felt like a blast from the past to see the same thing everywhere at Christmas! The shop-bought pavlova here is a big slab of foam confection, which I really can’t recommend, but homemade ones vary between masses of marshmallowy middle or chewy insides. Yum! The inside is the key difference from a meringue, which is meant to be solid. I can't find a Commons picture of the inside of a meringue, sorry.

I have to mention, of course, the dispute about who invented it, NZ or Australia? Both like to claim it. Researcher Michael Symons diplomatically pointed out that there probably isn’t one invention. Other food historians have traced it to very similar textured cakes from Europe, much earlier. What I did discover reading Wikipedia was the delightful range of things called pavlova that are different to the NZ/Aus pav. There was a 1911 Strawberries pavlova from the UK that was a sorbet (there’s an image here). There’s this NZ layered jelly from 1927, and this dry-ice confection from Greece (just because). But I want you to imagine a record-breaking 85 m2 pavlova. How many egg whites is that? How big a beater did they need? HOW DID THEY COOK IT?

To editing! In reading about pavlovas I discovered that one of the food historians had a Wikidata item recording him as having died in 1999, although he was alive and well in 2007 when he researched pavs in NZ, and as far as I can tell, he’s still alive! 🫢 So editing today is to correct that. Rather than delete the incorrect date, though, I will deprecate the statement, and say it's wrong. That reduces the chance that another editor will incorrectly re-add the death date. The info for that year is coming from the German National Library. I hope GND will check and update their records at some point and he can live again! I’ve added some information to show he is still living. To finish, here's Anna Pavlova during her 1926 tour of NZ, which started all the Pavlova fuss here.

Edits

On Wikidata item for food researcher Michael Symons, added a description saying he was still alive, and deprecated death date, which was sourced to GND. Added a reason for deprecation qualifier and reference URL to his website. Added his spouse (and a link from her to him), and another identifier.
On Pavlova, tried to more accurately summarise Symons's views on David Burton.