By the time the Queen’s Speech was on, supermum Paula Thomas was serving up the festive feast she prepared in the morning.

Oh, and in between, she nipped to hospital to give birth to her fourth child… 75 minutes before the Christmas dinner.

ASDA check-out worker Paula’s incredible Christmas Day began at 4am when she got up to prepare the vegetables.

She first felt contractions while basting the turkey but carried on in the kitchen until husband Damian, 32, drove her to hospital at 12.35pm.

Daughter Lexi promptly arrived at 1.45pm, weighing in at 7lbs 7oz.

Once again the holiday season has brought out the best in the people who live in this quaint and beautiful region of the country. Those who had anything extra this year gave to the many who had little or nothing in the true spirit of the holidays.

There were festive dinners held all over the Seacoast for those did not have the ability to come up with one themselves. The Toys for Tots campaign and local organizations collected and distributed gifts for children who may not have gotten anything from Santa this year without those efforts, and neighbors in communities gathered all across the region for tree-lightings and caroling in the true spirit of the season.

1882: An inventive New Yorker finds a brilliant application for electric lights and becomes the first person to use them as Christmas tree decorations.

Edward H. Johnson, who toiled for Thomas Edison’s Illumination Company and later became a company vice president, used 80 small red, white and blue electric bulbs, strung together along a single power cord, to light the Christmas tree in his New York home. Some sources credit Edison himself with being the first to use electric lights as Christmas decorations, when he strung them around his laboratory in 1880.

Christmas is a holiday that brings people together, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Facebook has become a part of millions of peoples’ Christmas experiences. For the first time in its history, Facebook was the number one most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise today.

That’s worth noting. HitWise reported last year that Facebook was number two behind Google on Christmas. People say that Facebook vs. Google will be the Web’s biggest battle in coming years – but it looks like Facebook has already won the battle for Christmas.

Shoppers looking to avoid crowded malls — or shut in by a massive snowstorm on the east coast the Saturday before Christmas — took to their computers this year, boosting online sales 15.5 percent over last year. Traditional retail sales, meanwhile, jumped 3.6 percent, according to MasterCard advisors’ SpendingPulse, which tracks all forms of payment.

Electronics and e-books were major contributors to the online retail sales surge. Amazon hailed its Kindle eBook reader this year as being the most gifted item ever in Amazon’s history. This is hard to prove given that Amazon never releases the Kindle’s exact sales figures, but hey, who’s gonna doubt them?