Intermittent thread of THINGS TO DO to divert yourself when festivity is at a bit of a premium.

Number 1: the 1986 adaptation of Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings is on YouTube. It's got Barbara Flynn in it. And Geoffrey Palmer.
The New Adlestrop map of extant and former railways – part of whose charm is that it's been in development for about 20 years – so far covers all of Wales and England up as far as Lancaster and York. Gaze in wonder at what was and might have been:
https://www.systemed.net/atlas/ 
Ooh, and this also belongs here. (The times were *not* simpler, but, like all times, they contained their share of simple things...) https://twitter.com/JamesBSumner/status/1305788967271366657
Most of the cryptic crossword and other puzzles Stephen Sondheim compiled for New York Magazine in the 60s are online thanks to the kind efforts of Galen Fott. They are much as you'd expect them to be: http://blogfott.blogspot.com/2014/07/putting-it-together.html
Away-from-the-screen suggestions are harder, because I don't know what you've got apart from an Internet connection. But you've probably got some paper. If so, you could always learn paper engineering. Have a look at the Pop-Up Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx2M2bGHtXBszG6tuR_NIbQ
...and a quick search of http://archive.org  yields plenty of sources for reference and inspiration:
https://archive.org/details/HackSpace06/page/n39/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/usbornebookofpap00cliv/
https://archive.org/details/manualpopup/mode/1up
https://archive.org/details/paperengineering0000avel/
If you're attempting to Amuse Small Children and have reached the "I wish I had a book of those science-from-household-objects demos to hand": a useful old workhorse, the Exploratorium Science Snackbook, is borrowable on http://archive.org . https://archive.org/details/exploratoriumsci00expl
(Unlike the better-known Cookbook, the Snackbook is optimised for use of non-specialist kit that might be lying around.

...or, at least, that might have been lying around in 1991. Some readers may need to skip the pages relating to monochrome CRT TV sets and whatnot.)
Back to the screen. @TheTimTraveller's travel videos cover all those peculiar cartographic and transport anomalies you vaguely remember hearing about. The cross-border hotel, Dutch/Belgian counter-exclaves, Wuppertal's dangly railway: it's all here, folks https://www.youtube.com/c/TheTimTraveller/videos
The Tim Traveller

https://www.youtube.com/c/TheTimTraveller/videos
Another one for the staring-at-old-maps fans. @natlibscotmaps https://maps.nls.uk/  covers the whole of Great Britain including the Islands and has the fairly detailed six-inch-to-the-mile (1:10,560) series from the nineteenth century.

Look, I can see our house from here!
This https://twitter.com/garius/status/1341435554450317313 reminds me that "watch some old @Ri_Science Christmas Lectures" belongs on this thread. Everything surviving in the archive is at https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/watch

Some of the oldest stand up well today; others really don't, but they're fascinating either way.
In this one https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/watch/1974/the-engineer-through-the-looking-glass/the-jabberwock at 50m45s, Eric Laithwaite openly proclaims that Newton's Laws don't hold for non-uniform angular accelaration. This kind of behaviour meant nobody would publish his research, but he somehow still got to do the Lectures: https://www.rigb.org/blog/2013/december/eric-laithwaite
The gyroscope, an engineer and the CHRISTMAS LECTURES

Eric Laithwaite was a British electrical engineer and presenter of the 1974 CHRISTMAS LECTURES who sparked a controversial debate with his unconventional views on the behaviour of gyroscopes.

https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/watch/1974/the-engineer-through-the-looking-glass/the-jabberwock
Looking for absorbing games?

Children of the 80s may remember playing text adventures, controlled by typed commands. The genre has somehow morphed into a vigorous enthusiast and artistic subculture rejoicing in the name "interactive fiction" and including a lot of fun stuff.
To play, you first need to install the appropriate interpreter for your device: there's advice at
http://users.actrix.co.nz/stevgrif/howplay.htm
https://nickm.com/if/faq.html#How_can_I_download_and_play_IF.3F
http://www.davidkinder.co.uk/frotz.html 
https://www.tads.org/tads3.htm 

Once that's done, you can get almost any game as a teeny-tiny file, usually free.
A few recommendations. If you need something to divert you for a solid week or more, try the game that redefined the form, Graham Nelson's Curses! (1993).
Vast, rambling and virtually impossible to complete without hints IMO, but frequently breathtaking.
https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=plvzam05bmz3enh8
Shorter and more controlled, but highly atmospheric, is Gareth Rees's Oxbridge period piece Christminster (1995). Thoughtfully designed to avoid the common problem of getting stuck after solving the puzzles in an order the designer didn't think of. https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=fq26p07f48ckfror
Requiring less investment still, but superbly designed, is Andrew D Pontious's inspired Rematch (2000). The game always ends after one move; the challenge is to find, on the Groundhog Day principle, the one move that doesn't lose. https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=22oqimzgf8snv002
I can particularly recommend Rematch if you're keen to recapture the experience of acting logically and methodically being rewarded with any kind of progress, which you're unlikely to encounter anywhere else in these times.
Definitely one for this thread. ( #scicomm people tend to be pretty well prepared where finding THINGS TO DO is concerned) https://twitter.com/Sarah_Cosgriff/status/1341674791976230912
One for anyone who is in a particularly foul mood: give the insides of your fridge a good clean. Your mood won't get any fouler from doing this, and at the end of the process you'll have a clean fridge, which may be uplifting in its own right, and will certainly be hygienic.
This: https://twitter.com/gralefrit/status/1341650036422225920

is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p02f1fjh
Fancy a traditional snowbound murder mystery? Try Nicholas Blake's 1949 short story "A Study in White". It's in various anthologies:
https://archive.org/details/crimeatchristmas00jack/page/10/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/fiftyyearsofbest00elea/page/134/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/murdermostirish00edgo/page/36/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/fiftybestmysteri00elea/page/134/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/centuryofbritish00anne/page/278/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/greatirishdetect00pete/page/66/mode/2up
occasionally published as "A Problem in White" – spot the editor who didn't get the reference – or "The Snow Line".

"Nicholas Blake" himself was an AKA too, of course, spending most of his time as the poet and actor-sirer Cecil Day Lewis. ASiW is not a very poetical exercise,
but then, that's not what you want here. It's an unusually strong example of the "pure puzzle" mystery, where every piece of information needed is supplied upfront, allowing the sharp and careful reader to reach the solution, alongside the detective, by reasoning alone.
Disappointingly often these turn out to be badly constructed or have been rendered obscure by the passage of time, but ASiW is the real deal, to the extent that you could (if enjoying/tolerating the company of like-minded persons) use it as a kind of collaborative solving game.
A nice features is that the main task, to find the murderer's identity, is very strictly "fair play" (I managed it, which is not usual), but there's also a secondary challenge, to spot all the clues: these are more debatable, but if you get most of them you can feel smug about it
The "mystery for Christmas" is virtually a subgenre to itself, with quite a few anthologies borrowable on http://archive.org . The ones I've found:
https://archive.org/details/crimeatchristmas00jack/
https://archive.org/details/christmascrimes00anne/
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780892964000/
https://archive.org/details/mysteryforxmas00cynt/
https://archive.org/details/murdermostmerry30000unse/
A more active suggestion: why not do *this*? https://twitter.com/MikeHolden42/status/1342154510014193667

Or, if your household lacks either the materials or the demand for this particular endeavour (or you're renting), anything similarly grand and defiant of the natural tedious order of things.
You can follow @JamesBSumner.
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