At LifeStyle, we are especially grateful for the wonderful gifts the arts scene has heaped upon Singapore these past months.

From cutting-edge plays to spellbinding art and warm, welcoming venues, these fruits of the imagination give much soul to our city.

To celebrate, we picked 10 elements which represent some highlights of 2007, and asked four members of the literary scene - ghost story master Russell Lee, playwrights Haresh Sharma and Eleanor Wong, and indie bookstore owner Karen Wai - to each weave a Christmas story which incorporates at least four of them. Here's the gift list:

1. Asian boys, after the last instalment of Alfian Sa'at's Asian Boys trilogy of plays.

2. A campaign to confer the Public Service Star, inspired by Eleanor Wong's 2006 play The Campaign To Confer The Public Service Star On JBJ, restaged in September to rave reviews.

3. Getai, taken from film-maker Royston Tan's film 881, which introduced a whole new generation to the charms of these traditional song-and-dance performances which take place during the Hungry Ghost Festival.

4. Ian McKellen's underpants refers to the British thespian keeping his underwear on when he played King Lear during the Royal Shakespeare Company's visit here in July. In the original Stratford-Upon-Avon production, he bared it all in a pivotal scene.

5. An independent bookstore celebrates how, even as major bookstore chains opened new outlets here, smaller indie booksellers like BooksActually and Select Books have been holding their own with their niche collections and personal service.

6. A museum came from the high profiles museums enjoyed this year, with celebrities as ambassadors and expansion plans galore.

7. A rap video alludes to the Media Development Authority's video clip of its senior management bopping to hip-hop and telling people to 'get creative'.

8. A shattered chandelier was not inspired by The Phantom Of The Opera musical but by artist Jason Lim's Just Dharma, a 250kg chandelier which was deliberately crashed at the dramatic opening of the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

9. A violin prodigy refers to how more and more talented young musicians are making their mark overseas. They include Gabriel Ng, who was 12 when he won the prestigious Andrea Postacchini International Violin Competition in Italy in May.

10. 251 was the title of one of the sauciest plays this year, Ng Yi-Sheng's take on local porn star Annabel Chong, who infamously had sex 251 times in 10 hours in 1995.

The stories the four writers created using these elements are sobering and hopeful, magical and sweet, reflecting, like the arts scene which inspired them, the range of human experience. We hope you enjoy them, and here's wishing everyone a very merry - and artsy - Christmas.

Stephanie Yap