When Queen Elizabeth bestowed an honorary knighthood on Bill Gates a couple of years ago, she admitted that she had never used a computer. Well, today the oldest reigning British monarch uses e-mail, and, upon urging by her grandaughters, she has this week launched a channel on YouTube, The Royal Channel, the Official YouTube Channel for the British Monarchy.
You can watch her first televised Christmas message, delivered fifty years ago today, in which she considered how the new technology of television might bring her closer to her subjects. And today she delivers her first Christmas message on both television and YouTube. (I can’t link directly to these videos because this ability has been disabled.) There are many videos of historical interest and if you are interested in British history you will find these fascinating.
Read more about the Queen on YouTube in this Globe and Mail December 23 story.
More interesting Christmas sites …
The Toys of Our Childhood:
Here is a wonderful site from the Archives of Ontario. From the site:
Last Christmas the Archives of Ontario remembered an Eatons Christmas and we asked members of the public to send us their memories of how Eatons, with its Toyland, catalogue and Santa Claus parade impacted on their lives. We had many delightful responses and posted a sampling of them on our memories page.
You can browse photos of toys and Christmas letters from children from the late 1800s to the 1970s. Very nostalgic!
And finally, here is Christmas at War: Experiences from the First and Second World Wars, from the Imperial War Museum (UK). From the site:
The stories told here, using material from the Museum’s collections, show the need to mark Christmas as a special day, even when the conditions of wartime do their best to prevent this. Anne Taylor-Vaisey
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