This Side of the Pond

When I told my husband the other day that I was thinking of renaming the cat “Widow Twankey” because she always seems to be behind me no matter how many times I turn around, I wasn’t expecting quite the confusion I was met with. It seems, even now, there are still some holiday traditions that seem perfectly normal to my people…but might not be so understandable everywhere else.

Widow Twankey, you see, is a traditional character from a type of play put on all across the UK over the holiday season: the pantomime. She turns up when the story is based on Aladdin and is what’s known as a pantomime...