Christmas Tun

The Christmas Tun is the usual term for the extra London fan meeting historically held on the Thursday before Christmas eve and more recently on the third Thursday of December (i. e. a week earlier in Decembers that begin on Tuesday to Thursday).

London fandom has long met on Thursdays – see history at London Circle. The tradition was founded in 1946 and there are pre-Second World War precursors as far back as 1937. Early meetings were weekly but became monthly in 1958 with the date being fixed as the first Thursday of the month. At some point – and nobody's quite sure when this was – an additional Christmas meeting was added in December, usually on the Thursday before Christmas eve although in more recent years it's shifted to the third Thursday in December. This meeting dates back to at least 1980 as it's mentioned in Ansible #14 and likely goes back further than that. When the meetings were at the One Tun pub (1974–87), this extra gathering was called, naturally, 'the Christmas Tun'.

From February 1987 the meetings relocated to a new pub called the Wellington and in subsequent years it's moved several more times. Some old hands still refer to the meeting as 'the Tun' although others favour something more meaningful such as 'the First Thursday'. The term 'Christmas Tun' for that extra December meeting is more pervasive, for all that it's an anachronistic allusion to a venue that hasn't been used for nearly 40 years.

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Fanspeak

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