Christmas Tun
The Christmas Tun is the usual term for the extra London pub fan meeting 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 Wednesday or Thursday).
London fandom has long met on Thursdays – see history at London Circle. The tradition was founded in March 1946 and there are pre-Second World War precursors as far back as 1937. Meetings became weekly soon in 1946 but as attendance was flagging by 1958, it was decided to fix the date as the first Thursday of the month from 1959, so people could be sure to meet everybody. (At the same time there was an attempt to formalise such a London Circle as a sf club, but this fizzled – and schismed – within the year.)[1] At some point – nobody's quite sure when this was yet – 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 fixed third Thursday in December (i. e. exactly fortnight after the usual time, even if there may be a free Thursday later in the Christmas week). This meeting dates back to at least 1980 when it was mentioned in Ansible #14 (with a definite article) 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 since 1997 they moved several more times (though stable at The Bishop's Finger since 2016). 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 almost 40 years.
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