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With Christmas<\/a> fast approaching, we asked our staff and readers an all-important question for the season: \u201cIf you could gift any person from the past with a present, who would you choose and what would you give them?\u201d<\/p>\n From an air-fryer for Alfred the Great<\/a> to a fitness tracker for Empress Sisi<\/a>, read their answers here\u2026<\/p>\n Everyone is buying an air fryer for Christmas this year. King Alfred the Great<\/a> could surely have done with one of them in the year 878. As culinary mishaps go, Alfred\u2019s cake-burning blunder<\/a> is up there with the most famous. If he\u2019d had an air fryer with a timer mechanism, he\u2019d have been able to knock up some lovely doughnuts<\/a> that would have cooked nicely, whether or not Alfred remembered to tend to them. A batch of fluffy and delicious doughnuts would surely have cheered him up in his lonely languish in a peasant\u2019s hut in the Somerset Levels, though obviously he might have struggled with the electricity supply, so I guess he\u2019d need a generator as well. Also, the recipe requires sugar<\/a>, which wouldn\u2019t have been in ready supply in 9th-century England, so suddenly this Christmas present is getting pretty expensive.<\/p>\n Galileo, a video of earth rise<\/p>\u2014 shorty (@AdamPik85586673) November 28, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote>Dave Musgrove, content director at BBC History:<\/em><\/h3>\n