How to see ghosts or surely bring them to you

Back in the UK, for a while at least. And damn, it's cold.

The last two years have been rather peripatetic, consisting of a year of summer with brief pauses for two weeks of winter and four of monsoon, followed by six months of what passes for spring in Australia, the UK and New Zealand.

This (of course) got me thinking about my most recent ficathon signup: the masseffect secret santa exchange.Many of the prompts are winter or Christmas themed,and yet the more travelling I do the more obvious it is that the 'traditional' snowy, decorated Christmas is something of a rarity. Growing up in the UK meant that Christmas day for us was chilly, grey and wet, and as we grew older, increasingly family-orientated rather than secular. I celebrated last Christmas in Cambodia with a few expats and large quantities of alcohol, and the windup to Xmas in Australia this year featured surfing Santas in thirty-degree heat and Christmas undies. Usually it's just an excuse to play holiday-themed music, which I adore. This season's playlist features Vienna Teng's Atheist Christmas Carol, Twisted Sister's version of O Come All Ye Faithful and Thea Gilmore's cover of the St `Stephen's Day Murders.

So winter or, for that matter, Christmas on a spaceship two thousand years in the future probably wouldn't be quite as we know it. And that's without mentioning Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Solstice et al. I'm not sure where I'm going to go with the theme, I just know that it'll probably feature jokes about frogs freezing solid and people crawling into tauntauns to keep warm. 

So what does winter mean to you? Card games with grumpy relatives wearing badly-knitted sweaters, snowball fights, surfing or just the shortest day of the year? And,most importantly, what songs are on your Christmas playlist this year?