Wait until next year

Today I brave the work Christmas meal and party. I have a festive sweater on and everything. For those interested, I shall be eating turkey and Christmas pudding rather than any of the other more esoteric menu offerings, as I believe you should always eat turkey and Christmas pudding at a Christmas meal, no matter how many Christmas meals you have each December.

My particular role is hosting the Christmas quiz, the annual feature of enforced fun for the workforce. I fully intend to make the spectacle awkward, boring and difficult with the grand finale of several teams arguing over the validity of the questions and/or answers.

As a special blogging bonus, here is the actual quiz, so you can pretend to be at my work Christmas party too…

Steve’s Super Christmas Quiz

Round one – what Christmas songs do these lyrics come from?

1. Where the tree tops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.
2. With a corncob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal.
3. Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.
4. And if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows.
5. Do the fairies keep him sober for a day.
6. A time for giving, a time for getting, a time for forgiving and for forgetting.
7. It was Christmas Eve babe, in the drunk tank. An old man said to me, won’t see another one.
8. You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout.
9. Me? I guess I was a shoulder to cry on.
10. Through the years we all will be together if the fates allow.

Round two – who are these people we are describing, all born on Christmas Day?

1. I am an England and Essex cricketer, who scored 766 runs against Australia during the 2010-11 Ashes series.
2. I am an internationally successful singer. My song “Thank You” was sampled by Eminem in his song “Stan”.
3. I am a famous model and photographer, born in Copenhagen.
4. I am another internally successful singer, who sung with The Tourists and Eurythmics before going solo.
5. I was a writer and raconteur, famous for the book The Naked Civil Servant.

Round three – can you tell what Christmas films, or films set during the Christmas period, are being described from these brief plot outlines from the Internet Movie Database website?

1. An 8-year-old boy who is accidentally left behind while his family flies to France for Christmas must defend his home against idiotic burglars.
2. A boy inadvertently breaks 3 important rules concerning his new pet and unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town.
3. An angel helps a compassionate but despairingly frustrated businessman by showing what life would have been like if he never existed.
4. When a nice old man who claims to be Santa Claus is institutionalized as insane, a young lawyer decides to defend him by arguing in court that he is the real thing.
5. John McClane, officer of the NYPD, tries to save wife Holly Gennaro and several others, taken hostage by German terrorist Hans Gruber during a Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles.
6. A recently widowed man’s son calls a radio talk-show in an attempt to find his father a partner.
7. After inadvertently wreaking havoc on the elf community due to his ungainly size, a man raised as an elf at the North Pole is sent to the U.S. in search of his true identity.
8. Jack Skellington, king of Halloweentown, discovers Christmas Town, but doesn’t quite understand the concept.
9. A veteran cop, Murtaugh, is partnered with a young suicidal cop, Riggs. Both having one thing in common; hating working in pairs. Now they must learn to work with one another to stop a gang of drug smugglers.
10. Follows the lives of eight very different couples in dealing with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London, England.

You are very welcome to post your answers, if you’re having a very slow day today. There will be no prize, but for the bragging rights on winning an online quiz. Which are pretty serious bragging rights, you know. But no cheating. I can tell if you’ve been cheating.

Good luck!