My trees, real and fake! What is Christmas/Yule without a twinkling fir tree, laden with baubles? It has been a custom to decorate spaces with greenery for festivals since pre-Christian times. Medieval churches purchased holly and ivy for Christmas decorations. In the town of Rye, holly twigs were wound up with broom and candles placed among them. Private homes were decorated likewise, with holly inside and ivy on the porch, and anything else that could be found green at that time of year, like rosemary, bay laurel, yew, box, broom, and mistletoe. The Protestant reformers weren't keen on all this "paganism" and sought to ban Yuletide festivities altogether. Christmas decorations disappeared between 1645 and 1660 when Christmas was actually illegal in England. When Christmas made a comeback, the 'kissing bush' was invented. The custom of kissing under a bush of foliage, five or six feet round, spread across the whole of England by the nineteenth century. Elab...

Firstly, what does animal testing involve? skin and eye irritation tests where chemicals are rubbed onto the shaved skin or dripped into the eyes of restrained rabbits without any pain relief repeated force-feeding studies lasting weeks or months to look for signs of general illness or specific health hazards such as cancer or birth defects; and  widely condemned "lethal dose" tests, in which animals are forced to swallow large amounts of a test chemical to determine the dose that causes death. at the end of a test the animals are killed, normally by asphyxiation, neck-breaking, or decapitation. Pain relief is not provided. I have been learning more and more about animal testing and which companies to avoid this year, and I am working on replacing my makeup collection with only cruelty-free products. I have to big up LUSH as one of the best cruelty-free natural vegan choices in the UK. I have been a lover of LUSH ever since I saw their first shop in Poole, D...