BRITAIN'S own Mother Goose has urged people to celebrate Christmas as normal this year with a traditional turkey or geese dinner and to ignore the hype surrounding bird flu.

Judy Goodman, championed by Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson, and The Two Fat Ladies, is famous for Goodman's Geese, which is run from her farm, near Great Witley, overlooking the Abberley Hills.

This Christmas Judy will sell 3,500 geese, as well as the same number of bronze turkeys from the Worcestershire farm, to families across Britain.

And while orders are coming in thick and fast, she is worried that media reports on bird flu will start to put people off.

She said: "The Daily Mail's front page on Saturday was stupid, it was a disgrace to the newspaper industry. The headline was 'No Turkey at Christmas?' and the article went on about how supermarkets are expecting a cull of up to 10 million birds before December 25.

"Halfway through, it said that the official advice was consumers should not worry, but the rest was just scaremongering.

"Fortunately, the people who buy my birds don't seem to have been put off by the worry of bird flu and it is business as usual."

Goodman's Geese started off by sheer fluke when Judy's in-laws, who would eat nothing else for Christmas, had to go without in 1981. The next year, determined not to suffer a similar embarrassment, she hand-reared a dozen geese for family and friends.

Judy and her two sons now run the business, which grows in size every year.

The birds are reared on a free-range system - they're fed on natural foods such as grass, corn and straw, which don't contain additives, and Judy is hopeful they will not be affected by avian flu.

She added: "God willing, everything will be alright and we won't get bird flu in this country.

"As I said, the official advice to consumers is to carry on as normal and that is what we are urging people to do.

"Have confidence in the food you are eating and where it has come."

from and have a Merry Christmas."