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Black Xmas

Jaspistos

IN COMPETITION No. 2014 you were invited to supply a horrible or horrid story with a Christmas setting.

Only the other day a shop Santa Claus was accused of striking a small child in the face. It was, he claimed, an inadvertent blow. Having done duty as a commercial Santa myself, I am inclined to suspect the worst. I am a straight eat-drink-and-be- merry man over the season, but others fall into suicidal gloom. It was the composer Peter Warlock (real name Philip Heseltine) who killed himself, leaving a note to say that he'd done it because he couldn't face another English Christmas. Basil Ransome-Davies warned me: `Remember the grisly dad-dying-in-the- chimney Xmas tale in Gremlins? Watch out — someone may try to rip it off for this comp.' Nobody did. A happy New Year to you all.

The prizewinners, printed below, get £30 each, and the bonus bottle of Isle of Jura Single Malt Scotch whisky goes to Godfrey Bullard.

Good King Wenceslas looked out, at the insistency of his page, Esur. He saw the peasant, listened to Esur's pleadings, reluctantly set forth into the blizzard, his page in front. Esur took them in a wide circle, not difficult in those conditions. Finally the King's strength gave out. `Fails my heart!' he gasped, then collapsed in the snow and stayed there. Esur survived, struggling home to tell the story — his story. Everyone believed him. They found the body.

A week later lawyers, clever men, arrived to inform Esur, who waspretty clever himself, that Wenceslas had left him the winter palace, with a considerable fortune. Esur shed real tears, a useful accomplishment. When the lawyers had gone, he heaped pine logs upon the fire before settling himself in the King's chair. It was rather big, but he'd grow into it.

Suddenly he sat up, listening. Was that a

carol-singer, one feeble voice across the snow?

(Godfrey Bullard) Gary's coffin seemed out of place in the small church at Drayton St Peter. All around were sprigs of holly, intertwined with ivy; the Christmas crib was decorated in expectation of the great feast to come. The rector disliked funerals on Christmas Eve, but Gary's moth- er, Maureen, had insisted. `Better do it before Christmas,' she instructed the rector. Gary's last temporary employment was as an elf in Santa's Grotto in a department store. Nobody will ever know what happened inside the Grotto. On the Saturday before Christmas parents and children were queue- ing to see Santa after lunch, but nobody could get in. When the police broke into the Grotto they found four bodies lying next to each other in Rudolph's sleigh. Why had Santa and his three elves, Gary, Caroline and Rosie, killed themselves? Were they driven to it by the thought of living in a Winter Wonderland? (Edmund Eggleston) Arthur Munds decided he'd had enough enough department store trees and depart- ment store Santas, mince pies and puddings, Cinderella, Snow White, 'Away in the Manger' on the radio, on TV, even infiltrating the muzak in the lift. He'd had enough of turkey recipes, chocolate logs and charity cards, humorous books and Teletubbies high on the charts but nowhere on the shelves, of artificial snow in the shop windows, plastic reindeer with glowing noses, laser beams in Oxford Street, tinsel and holly wrap at 50p a roll.

And so where, in happier times, he had once hung his stocking, Arthur now hanged himself. Can one blame him? It was, after all, only the first week in November. (Anthony Goodman) `A turkey is not just for Christmas,' remarked Tarquin sententiously, as the self-basting, ready-frozen, giblet-free bird was being crammed by his mother into the outsize micro-wave.

`You shut it, Tarquin,' she answered. The boy held up a banner which read SPROUTS OUT. He waved it, smirking. Three-quarters of an hour later, the meal was over, and the family pets were let loose on the half-frosted carcass. The cat ate the budgie, furtively, in one bite. But Tarquin saw it.

`Mum,' he called, `you can get one budgie in one swallow!'

`Leave the cracker, and open your present,' she shouted from the bathroom. Tarquin ripped at the paper. It was soft, slippery. It was a turkey chick, and at least a week dead.

`It's a virtual reality pet,' said his mother. `A turkey is not just for Christmas, see?'

`How d'you mean?'

`It's Boxing Day,' replied his mother. 'You overslept.'

(Bill Greenwell)