This year’s most-wanted ornaments include weight-loss syringes and favourite foodstuffs. When and why did Christmas trees become so commercialised?

it was the second Tuesday in November but Christmas was already in crisis. Sarah Gibbons had just received a shipment of baubles at her Glasgow homeware shop, Modern Love Store, and some crucial ornaments were missing. She hopped on a long-distance phone call to her suppliers in the US – she needed to sort this out. After all, her customers were clamouring for them. “People aren’t just buying one,” the 39-year-old shopkeeper told me after discovering the missing decorations, “they’re buying three or four at a time.” Three what? Turtle doves? Nutcrackers? Or perhaps some classic candy canes? Of course not. This year’s must-have bauble is in the shape of a lightly glittered syringe of Ozempic.

Growing up, my favourite Christmas ornament was a little pink plastic baby Jesus resting in a manger. He was bought by my great-aunt in Oberammergau, Germany, in 1990 – and although his battery hasn’t been changed since, you can still press his belly to hear Silent Night play. Today, decorations are a little different. Ozempic isn’t the only needle hanging from our needles: Britons can also purchase Christmas tree ornaments shaped like syringes of Botox and filler. Meanwhile, Selfridges is selling a dirty martini bauble, M&S is peddling a hanging prawn cocktail and Aldi is offering an ornament shaped like an air fryer. Move over, baby Jesus; glass has now been blown into the likeness of Harry Styles, Taylor Swift and The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White.

Powerful Christian figures are emerging in Britain but there are important differences from the US, where evangelism has fuelled Trump

At recent Reform UK press conferences, two very distinctive heads can often be spotted in the front row: the near-white locks of Danny Kruger, the party’s head of policy, and the swept-back blond mane of James Orr, now a senior adviser to Nigel Farage.

As well as guiding the policy programme for what could be the UK’s next government, the pair have something else in common. Both are highly devout Christians who came to religion in adulthood and have trenchant views on social issues such as abortion and the family.

The Duchess of Sussex is back and suddenly her show makes sense. It is cringingly ultra-extra, of course, but isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

No matter the time of year, ’tis always open season on the Duchess of Sussex’s televisual offering, With Love, Meghan. Critics, professional and armchair, have rarely been so united as when gleefully ripping series one and two of the lifestyle show to shreds. The consensus was that there has never been a greater royal outrage than when she took some pretzels out of a labelled bag, put them in a different bag, then labelled it. And she didn’t even attempt to explain herself to Emily Maitlis afterwards.

Now, like a merry renegade master, she is back once again with a “Holiday Celebration” (aka a Christmas special). But this time, it’s different. There are still the usual elements we’ve come to expect – psychobabble word salads, extreme hosting – but in the context of a yuletide episode, suddenly it all makes sense. The pieces have fallen into place; it’s a perfect snow storm.

Kildunne is known for her startling speed and audacious tries, but there’s more to the talented full-back than rugby, from a passion for photography to a sideline in DIY tattooing

Ellie Kildunne says it’s not quite sunk in yet. A couple of months on from winning the Rugby Union World Cup with her England teammates, she’s still on a high. I ask if she slept with her winner’s medal by her bed the night they won. “That night?” She gives me a look. “It’s still by my bed. Every day. I wake up and the medal’s next to my bed. And it’s, like, as if!”

But Kildunne is not resting on her laurels. She says the medal is also a reminder of what’s left to achieve – for her, and for women’s rugby in general. “Your heart’s telling you that you’ve done it, but I need to refocus. So it’s about how can we win the prem, how can we win another Six Nations, more World Cups? How can we keep fans coming to games? We’ve sold out Twickenham, so how do we do it again?”

If Monopoly is your festive fallback for family fun then go directly to Jail and do not pass Go. A new wave of party pleasers, trick takers and strategy games can transport you to Stalingrad, the spirit realm, or even Georgian sex venues

There was a time when playing a Christmas board game meant dusting off an old favourite selected from a narrow range of options. Maybe Trivial Pursuit, if you wanted to show off your pub quiz chops. Or Scrabble, if you felt like flexing your wordsmith muscles. Or Monopoly, if you hoped to roll around in wads of fake cash. But these days the choice is far, far wider. Almost overwhelmingly so.

During the past decade, the modern board game scene has exploded like a cartoon kitten. As screens have come to dominate our eyelines and erode our mental health, more of us are seeking recreational solace in the more social, less toxic worlds of cardboard, cubes and wooden pawns – or “meeples”, to use the hobby parlance. Each tabletop experience has been finely crafted to yield maximum enjoyment in an often gorgeously presented way. Taking their cue from such indefatigable “Eurogame” classics as Catan and Codenames, these modern games have so grown in popularity they’ve encouraged the spread of high-street board game cafes, fuelled a boom in tabletop-related influencer activity, filled convention halls at ever-growing expos worldwide and raised millions on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter.

As peace hopes falter, infantry soldiers face more long deployments risking their lives against Russian attacks

For almost all of their 62-day deployment on the frontline east of Pokrovske, Bohdan and Ivan hid – first in a village shop, then, after a deadly firefight with Russian soldiers, in a tiny basement where the infantrymen from Ukraine’s 31st Brigade had to survive seven more weeks.

Food, water, cigarettes and other supplies were airlifted in by a friendly drone, their toilet was their 3 sq metre room, their nearest comrades 200 metres or so away. Their only hope was to remain underground, because they knew if they were detected a Russian drone could kill them all.

Police think incident at airport car park involved ‘people known to each other’ as argument escalated

A man has been arrested on suspicion of assault after people were allegedly attacked with a “form of pepper spray” at a multistorey car park at Heathrow airport Terminal 3, police have said.

The Metropolitan police said armed officers were called to the terminal’s car park at about 8.11am to a report of people being assaulted.

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Church leaders respond to far-right appropriation of Christian symbols with ‘Outsiders welcome’ message

The Church of England is to launch a poster campaign aimed at challenging the anti-migrant message of Tommy Robinson, whose “Unite the Kingdom” movement has urged its supporters to join a carols event next weekend to “put the Christ back into Christmas”.

The posters, which will go on display at bus stops, say “Christ has always been in Christmas” and “Outsiders welcome”. They will also be available for local churches to download and display over the festive period.

Kishwer Falkner says Reform leader should apologise to people who say he targeted them at school, even if he rejects being deliberately racist

Nigel Farage should offer an unreserved apology to people who allege he targeted them with racist or antisemitic behaviour while at school, the outgoing head of the government’s equalities watchdog has said.

Kishwer Falkner, a crossbench peer who has just completed five years as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said that even if the Reform UK leader rejected the allegation that he had been deliberately racist, he could nonetheless apologise to people who said they had been deeply hurt by his actions.