“O Christmas tree, how tasty are thy branches!”
That’s what shoppers in Manchester’s NOMA neighbourhood will be singing, thanks to its artisan pop-up department store and “edible” Christmas tree.
The 20-acre mixed-use neighbourhood in Manchester city centre is drawing in crowds with the retail offering that exclusively features UK brands offering handcrafted goods. And, if they get peckish, they can nibble on the tree, designed by creative consultancy Standard Practice and design studio Tim Denton, which grows seasonal herbs such rosemary, thyme and sage.
It takes the unofficial, barely sought-after prize for best Christmas tree in Diary’s inbox this year.
Ideal home, Christmas edition
Few things are a bigger part of Christmas than Christmas movies. Diary itself just enjoyed the latest remake of festive horror classic, Black Christmas. But the sorority house being terrorised by a slasher in said film is perhaps not the perfect location to spend the holiday season. Thankfully, a few other Christmas staples offer more appealing accommodation – and Sellhousefast.uk took it on itself to find out which is “the most ideal”.
It surveyed 1,323 people on their opinions on a number of Christmas movie houses – and the clear winner is the frankly ludicrously huge McAllister family abode from Home Alone (complete with swinging paint pots and other lethal booby traps, presumably).
However, the second to fourth-placed properties expose gaps in Diary’s knowledge – we haven’t seen the cottage in The Holiday, the house in Christmas With the Kranks or whatever is going on in The Family Stone. It apparently scored highly on idealness of set-up with 47% of respondents, despite only 18% admitting to having watched it.
Others that made the top 10 include Miracle on 34th Street, Love Actually, A Christmas Carol, Deck the Halls and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. But 23%, it seems, would happily celebrate in The Nightmare Before Christmas – and they are Diary’s kind of people.
For what it’s worth…
So those are the Christmas movie properties that are most appealing to stay in – but let’s cut to the important question: which is worth the most?
Comparison website GetAgent.co.uk had money on the mind when it compared the real-life values of “some of the more memorable properties featured on our screens at Christmas” – adding TV favourites into the mix.
In a press release that reads more like the festive Radio Times special, it puts the Highclere Castle estate from Downton Abbey (is this Christmassy?) top at an estimated £137m.
At the other end of the spectrum, with Gavin and Stacey apparently due to return to our screens this Christmas, a terraced house in Barry, South Wales, would set you back around £174,000.
In between, Harry Potter fans would have to fork out £348,000 for the Dursley residence of 4 Privet Drive, Surrey.
Susan Walker’s dream family home, as featured in Miracle on 34th Street, would cost around £2.75m, James Bond’s family home in the Scottish highlands, Skyfall Lodge, would be around £2.2m, while a New York apartment like the one in Elf would set you back £1.05m.
As for the officially very des res featured in Home Alone, a suburban detached house in Chicago would cost £1.2m. But, criminally, both Sellhousefast and GetAgent seem to have overlooked the best Christmas property from the best Christmas movie (and officially EG’s number one building in film): Nakatomi Plaza from Die Hard. What better place to spend the holidays? And, as a skyscraper in Los Angeles, we bet it’s worth a bit more than Downton Abbey too.
Dancer in the street
There can be no doubt that Diary’s MVPs of 2019 are the tireless researchers at Sellhousefast, and, since it’s Christmas, we’ll be generous and feature more of their property-adjacent nonsense.
While the rest of the country was focused on perhaps the most significant General Election of modern times, they were looking into festive street names – and likely having a much better time for it.
Their findings in brief: The UK has just under 300 festive street names, with the East of England home to the most.
St Nicholas Street is the most common festive road name. Rudolph is, shockingly, not the most popular reindeer, by this metric at least. And, they say, Christmas Pie Avenue is possibly “the most festive of all” – though Diary would politely disagree, since who ever heard of a Christmas pie?
Beyond “St Nicholas”, other words often found accompanying street/road/lane/close/avenue/etc include: Shepherd, Pine Tree, Noel and Stocking, while there were also 10 featuring Turkey, nine Mistletoe and two Gingerbread Lanes.
In news that will surprise literally nobody, greater London is the region with the least festive cheer in its street names.
And finally, since you’ve been racking your brains on the reindeer front, six out of nine are represented, with Comet and Vixen outstripping Rudolph. Dancer, Cupid and Donner all have at least one sign – meaning Prancer, Blitzen and Dasher are unloved on the streets of Great Britain. Housebuilders, you know what you have to do in 2020.
