When the enchanted animals of Hexwood discover they soon won't be magical anymore, they have to concoct an unlikely plan to save their village and themselves.
'Last Christmas in Hexwood' is a seasonal story of witches, enchanted animals and a series of unlikely plans to save Christmas.
Chapter 10
The closer Christmas Eve got -- and it was now merely days away -- the more worried Greta became about The List.
Greta was not a good girl. She knew this because she was frequently told it by adults. She did not sit still when her hair was brushed; she did not eat all her dinner; she did not have her shoes on when everyone was ready to leave, NOW.
Moreover, Greta was deeply aware that she did not want to be a good girl, not really. Good girls sat quietly and put up with tedious things like school and long lectures from their parents. Good girls didn’t climb trees. Good girls didn’t push their little sisters out of trees to cause a distraction so they could sneak into their grandmother’s kitchen to steal biscuits.
Good girls were boring and infuriating, and Greta very much wanted to be exciting and infuriating.
There was, however, the small matter of The List.
The List belonged to Father Christmas. There were, in fact, two lists: one of good children, and one of bad children. If you were on the list of good children, he would visit you on Christmas Eve and fill your stocking with toys. If you were on the list of bad children, you got coal.
To be honest, the coal didn’t seem too bad. Greta had asked what happened if you were a bad poor child, who needed coal for heating. Would you then get given toys as a punishment? But she had been told not to be silly, asking stupid questions. Silly was what she was often told she was. Not good, but definitely silly.
Moreover, she had heard somewhere that if you squeezed coal hard enough you could squeeze it into a diamond. This didn’t sound like a bad present at all. Diamonds were expensive, she knew this. If you had a diamond you could sell it for lots of money and buy more toys than Father Christmas could carry.
Unfortunately she had tried it once and was evidently too small a girl to squeeze it hard enough. All she had managed to do was to make her hands dirty. And then make her dress dirty. And then the curtains, the doorknob and the stair rail. That had also, apparently, been silly, and not good.
In other words, Greta was of the suspicion that she was not on the list that got you toys. She was very much a coal kind of girl. And despite all her rationalisations about coal, she knew that, really, if she was being honest with herself - and good girls were always honest - she wanted the toys.
And so, as Christmas Eve approached, she worried about it more and more.
Not being a good girl, her first instinct had been for deceit. Was there some way to trick Father Christmas into thinking she was good? She had been invited to write to him to tell him which toys she wanted, and she wondered whether she could use the letter to plead her case; but apparently that was silly too. But she wondered about the letter, still.
If Father Christmas could somehow magically know all about your behaviour throughout the year, how come he needed a letter to know what you wanted for Christmas? Was the list thing all a ruse to make you behave like the good girl you knew you weren’t?
She wondered if she could simply use the letter to claim good deeds that she hadn’t actually performed: whether that would convince him. But then if he really was watching her all year, he’d know it was a lie and that was definitely not good. Good girls were always honest.
But how could he know? It couldn’t be that the adults told him. They weren’t always there. And when they were there, they weren’t always watching. Although, to be fair, what they weren’t watching were the things you wanted them to watch, like a cartwheel or the interesting insect you’d found. If you did something you didn’t want them to see, like standing on the kitchen counter in muddy shoes to reach the biscuit box, that they noticed, and quickly, too.
She wondered if it was his magic. After all, he could visit every house in the world on Christmas Eve, and get into them all too, even if they didn’t have chimneys; maybe he visited every home, every day, all the year round. But that didn’t sit right with her. Christmas Eve was a magical time. If the rest of the year was magical then there wouldn’t be anything special about Christmas Eve.
Then she wondered if Father Christmas had spies. Animals made the most sense. At first she thought birds, because they could see everything when they flew. Then she wondered what happened when you were bad indoors, and thought it might be spiders; they seemed furtive, and they even had the word ‘spy’ in their name. Finally, she decided that it was probably all animals. It made sense.
There were animals everywhere; they could all confer and keep notes, passing them up to the reindeer and finally to Father Christmas, for his list.
All of which goes some way to explain why she was not taken entirely off-guard when, on her way to take her grandmother some biscuits, she was jumped on by a badger.
The biscuits and the grandmother take some explaining. Greta had been wracking her brains trying to think of something good to do to try and shift her name across the lists. It says something about how rare this was that all she could think of was something from a fairy tale. Little Red Riding Hood had taken food to her grandmother in the forest, and Greta had got the impression that that was supposed to have been a good deed.
Greta herself had been more interested in the wolf. Wolves were wild and exciting. She had hoped there were some in Hexwood; but she had been told that this was silly, and that there weren’t any in the whole country except for in zoos. The idea of badgers hadn’t even crossed her mind.
The only food she could think of to take to her grandmother was biscuits. This was because her grandmother always gave her biscuits when she visited. It did not occur to her that this meant her grandmother already had some biscuits, and probably didn’t need any more. It also didn’t occur to her that in order to get some biscuits she had to take them from the larder, which was technically stealing and therefore not good.
It was also not good to go into the forest. Even if it wasn’t really a forest; just Hexwood.
Not that her grandmother lived in the wood; she lived in a bungalow down a lane off the Small Stone road. But Greta decided to go there by cutting across the village green and through a corner of Hexwood to the Meadow, on the other side of which was the Small Stone road, on the other side of which was her grandmother.
She knew that she wasn’t supposed to go wandering around in the Hexwood. She had been told often enough that doing so was both silly and not good; but then, she knew that the adults thought it was silly and not good because it was dark and magical, and that was precisely why she liked it.
She had even once seen a rabbit wearing a hat in the wood. When she had told other people this she had been informed she was being silly again and a no-good liar.
This was not fair, because she was actually telling the truth for once; and now she went into the wood whenever she could, in the hopes of seeing the hat-wearing rabbit again and proving to herself that it was real.
She was a little satisfied, then, as well as surprised, to note that the badger that jumped on her in the wood was wearing an old tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.
She was more surprised than satisfied, though, to discover that badgers are a lot bigger and heavier than you’d expect and, more confusingly, smell of beer and pipe smoke. It knocked her to the ground and sat on her tummy and then a bevy of rabbits ran out from the brambles and grabbed her arms and legs. Finding herself immobilised was mitigated by the fact that several of the bunnies were wearing hats. Woolly ones.
Then a hedgehog in red boots climbed up onto her chest and started issuing orders to a gang of mice and voles who scampered backwards and forwards over her, pulling ropes behind them. The badger and the rabbits rolled her over and they trussed her up tight. They rolled her again and she caught a glimpse of weasels and ferrets and mink and stoats flowing together around her, lifting her up. And then she was carried off, up The Walk and into the wood.
So, this is it, she thought, watching the sky pass by through the bare branches above her. I've finally been so bad that Father Christmas has had to send his agents to intervene. Still, I am being kidnapped by talking animals in a magic wood. This is why I never wanted to be good in the first place.
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