Hollywood has outdone itself on Christmas spirit.

Studios typically offer two or three holiday-themed flicks toward year’s end. This season brings a half-dozen movies with Christmas angles, from romance and horror to family comedy and religious drama.

Leading Santa’s sleigh is Tim Allen as St. Nick again in “The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause,” battling Jack Frost (Martin Short) who’s hijacked Christmas.

Tricking Allen’s character into magically returning to the instant he first put on the red suit and became Santa, Jack Frost makes off with the Kriss Kringle duds himself and turns Christmas into “Frostmas.”

“I love `It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and I said, if there’s any way to make this an `It’s a Wonderful Life’ moment, that would be great. Where I get the chance to see the world clearly without me as Santa,” Allen said. “Then I have to figure out a way to get Christmas back.”

Also on the holiday front:

_ A family man (Matthew Broderick) duels with his neighbor (Danny DeVito) who aims to create a gaudy Christmas display visible from space in “Deck the Halls.”
_ Five youths try to elude airport officials (Lewis Black and Wilmer Valderrama) after they’re snowed in on Christmas Eve in “Unaccompanied Minors.”
_ A college student (Michelle Trachtenberg) and her friends face a killer terrorizing their sorority house over holiday break in “Black Christmas.”
_ Two women (Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) on opposite sides of the world meet on the Internet and decide to trade houses for Christmas in “The Holiday,” which co-stars Jude Law and Jack Black.
_ The birth of Christ is told in dramatic fashion in “The Nativity Story,” starring Keisha Castle-Hughes (”Whale Rider”) as the Virgin Mary.

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Christmas at The Athenæum

The five star Athenæum in London’s Piccadilly will be offering Double Rooms from just £110 from 18 December to the 7th January 2006, ideal for Christmas party goers who wish to celebrate in style and pamper themselves from head to toe during the festive season.

Following an exquisite re-design by Martin Hulbert of Fox Linton Associates (award winning designer of sister hotel, The Grove), revellers will be able to enjoy sumptuous new interiors and prepare for their Christmas party in lavish style, joining a hot list of VIPs who have come to use the Athenæum as a regular ‘home from home’…Samuel L. Jackson, Nathalie Portman and Patrick Swayze to name a few.

Once checked in, guests can head straight to The Athenæum Spa & Salon to commence their pampering and beautifying rituals - perhaps with an invigorating Mineral Salt Scrub and Wrap followed by an eyebrow tidy and manicure, or how about a blow dry and new colour for the season?

Men too can head to the spa for some grooming and pruning, a gentleman’s haircut followed by a back neck and shoulder massage will alleviate all thoughts of the office and revive the party animal within all of us!

Then it’s a matter of simply slipping into your favourite party frock and heading down to the ground floor lobby and Garden Rooms, which will be gloriously bedecked with the sights, sounds and scents of Christmas. Returning in the later hours, the Athenæum’s sumptuous and cosy Whisky Room will be open and ready to serve your favourite tipple, be it another glass of Champagne, an Irish coffee or one of over 250 whiskies.

For further information > www.athenaeumhotel.com.

Silver Dollar City’s An Old Time Christmas opens Saturday and continues through December 30 at the theme park, 399 Indian Point Road, Branson.

This year, the production “A Dickens’ Christmas Carol” includes a new scene set inside a large snow globe. The park also is presenting a new musical retelling of the “Greatest Story Ever Told, the Living Nativity.”

The lighting of the five-story special effects Christmas tree on the square is at 5:30 each evening. During An Old Time Christmas, Silver Dollar City is open 1-9 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays; noon-10 p.m. Saturdays through December 3. The park is open from 4-10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day and on November 24. Beginning December 7, the park is open from 1-9 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays and noon-10 p.m. on Saturdays, December 9, 16 and 23; the park will be closed December 24-25 and open December 26-30.

Tickets are $44 ($47.29 including tax), $34 ($36.54 including tax) for kids 4-11; free for ages 3 and younger. Call 1-800-831-4386 or visit www.silverdollarcity.com.

WORLD’S BIGGEST SHIP DELIVERS CHRISTMAS FROM CHINA

This is the floating treasure trove bringing Christmas to Britain from China. At a quarter of a mile long and 200 feet high, the Emma Maersk is the world’s biggest ship.

It’s packed to the brim with 1,886,000 Christmas decorations, and gifts including 12,800 MP3 players, 742 boxes of handbags, 334 crates of cocktail shakers, 9000 pairs of trainers, 2120 packs of books and 87,150 sets of hair straighteners. One British importer has ordered 1740 crates full of sudoko games, nursery rhyme books, jigsaws and soft toys.

And the giant vessel is also loaded with thousands of Christmas crackers, radio-controlled cars and motorbikes, guitars, cuddly toys, pinball machines, computers, poker tables, bingo sets, drum kits, dancing gorillas, electronic dinosaurs and pre-school building blocks. There are also 40,000 rechargeable AA batteries to power up the kids’ pressies.

For those of us who don’t like turkey, the Emma Maersk is groaning under the weight of 150 tons of New Zealand lamb, 10 tons of mussels and crateloads of frozen chickens, pumpkins, swordfish and tuna. And if you fancy a cuppa before you doze off in front of the Queen’s speech, you’ll be glad to hear that the 170,000-tonmaritimemonster is carrying 22,280 kg of Vietnamese tea.

The Danish-built Emma Maersk is on its maiden voyage. It set sail from Yantian port in southern China last month, manned by just 13 crew, and is now sailing past Spain on its way to Felixstowe in Suffolk. It’s due to arrive on Saturday and its cargo will help fuel yet another multi-billion-pound Christmas spending frenzy.

But critics warn that the flood of imports from China will mean the sack for hundreds of thousands of workers in Europe. Green MEP Caroline Lucas said: “All these goods could have been made in Europe. Whole sectors of global trade are now being dominated by China. “This is a triumph for multinational capital, not for Chinese workers. As well as suffering from some of the worst labour exploitation on record, they are also losing jobs at a phenomenal rate.”  

Here’s an economic conundrum. While sales from online retailers are set to hit £9 billion in the UK alone this Christmas, the soaring popularity of online shopping could end up costing employers more than £7 billion in lost productivity.

With two million Britons having taken up shopping on the Internet in the past twelve months, employment law experts have warned that the problem of staff shopping while they ought to be working could be huge.

“More and more people are turning to the Internet either to buy presents, or to do a little window shopping,” said Peter Mooney, of Employment Law Advisory Services (ELAS). “But for many employers, every hour a member of staff spends looking for Christmas presents online is an hour they should have spent working. “Even using rather conservative estimates, that could cost UK businesses billions between now and December 25.”

Working on an average of half an hour a day spent shopping online, and an average hourly wage of £12.50, ELAS estimate that UK employers could stand to lose almost a billion pounds a week in lost work time. With eight working weeks to go before Christmas, that could amount to almost £7.25 billion in lost time.

“Very few employers are so Scrooge-like that they wouldn’t forgive their staff the occasional glance at Christmas presents online,” said Mr Mooney. “But with sophisticated, and at times, addictive, websites now geared to keeping shoppers online for as long as possible, even an occasional glance can turn into half an hour browsing. “That time soon adds up, and it costs UK Plc billions,” he added.

To combat the problem, employers need to act now, weeks before their staff’s shopping starts in earnest, by setting out a specific Internet policy.

“By outlining what is and what is not acceptable during work time, employers not only remind their staff not to abuse work systems, but give themselves a solid basis on which to take action whenever anyone oversteps the mark,” explains Mr Mooney. “Without that, not only do bosses face losing a lot of time to shopping, they could even come unstuck for taking excessive action.”

Children hoping to get Lego toys for Christmas may be in for a disappointment.

The Danish toy maker is having a hard time keeping up with demand for its popular plastic building blocks as toy stores stack their inventories for the Christmas season, a company official said today.

“Many of our most popular products are sold out,” Lego spokeswoman Charlotte Simonsen said. “As part of efforts to restructure the company and focus on our core business, we had to make some cuts and the company has not had time to readjust its production.”

Simonsen declined to say how many orders had been turned down, but said the restructuring changes had affected the production of Duplo bricks and boxes with Lego City, Star Wars and Lego Technik sets.

The Billund, Denmark-based group has been trimming its staff at home and abroad since starting a restructuring programme four years ago. Part of its production and distribution has been moved to countries with lower wages than Denmark, including the Czech Republic and Mexico. Boersen, Denmark’s leading financial newspaper, estimated that Lego could lose €104.6m because of lost Christmas sales.

Nancy sat at the diner table talking to her friends, when a man came barging in screaming.
“He got my son! The blue boy got my son!”

Nancy heard a few other people scream, confused she asked.

“Who’s the blue boy?”

Shocked the people turned towards her in terror, one of the women walked over to her and said.

“the blue boy is the ghost of a child left out in the snow, by unloving parents.”

Interested Nancy kept listening.

“He froze to death but no one found his body, now his comes to people’s homes and the first to see him never moves again.”

Frightened Nancy paid for her meal and went home to get away from those people.

“They’re crazy.” Nancy said to her self as she closed the front door behind her.

That night she couldn’t sleep, so Nancy got up and went to the living room to read a book. Its was warm in the living room she sat in her favorite chair and started reading.

All of a sudden there was a knocking at the door.

“Who could that be at this time of night?”

Nancy went to the door opened it and saw no one there, frightened a little she shut the door and locked it tight.

“Probably some teenagers having a little fun.”

Nancy said to her self as she sat back down in her chair. Before she could open the book the phone rang, she picked up the phone.

“hello?” she said

No one answered, scared Nancy dropped the and ran for the back door hoping she could stay with the nieghbors til morning.

Just as Nancy reach the door something started ponding on the other side, Nancy screamed.

“GO AWAY, LEAVE ME ALONE. I DIDN’T LEAVE IN THE COLD TO DIE!”

Nancy hudled to the floor in terror, shaking out of fright. Then a vioce came.

“Let me in, its cold out here.”

Horified Nancy got up and ran for the living room window hoping to jump out of it, and run to the police. Went she was a few feet away Nancy saw a blue face in the window. Her frozen body fell to the floor and she frozed to death in her own home.