Ho, Ho, Ho

The family were all tucked up in bed. Sheets freshly washed. Children dutifully scrubbed and wearing new pyjamas. Everyone had long since succumbed to sleep. Wrung out. The children with anticipation, and the grown-ups with ordinary exhaustion. Mistletoe, or an approximation of it, was arranged in big bunches across the mantel. Stockings drooped against the brickwork. Fairy lights winked in the darkness. Something else was festooned around the room as generously as the tinsel and badly-glittered pinecones. Something that lay heavy in the room like snow. It probably leaked from the sleeping forms upstairs. It was a waiting sort of feeling. It was the whisper in your head that said anything could happen, and it was going to happen any minute n... skritch skratch Whatever it was that could happen was happening right now, inside the chimney. A whole lot of possibility was inching its way down towards the fireplace. Watch closely. This could be quite the spectacle. It's a boot. Quite an imposing boot. Black, of course. Large. Leathery. Buckles all the way down it. It makes a slithery, squelchy sort of *pop* as it emerges, like a dragon emerging from a particularly warm and sticky swamp. Wait and watch, like a midwife, watching the weirdest breech birth the world has ever seen. The second boot appears. The tops of them betray the lining, which is furry, and at this hour in the middle of winter, sodden and grey. Slowly, as if time is neither here nor there, the chimney-place gives birth to a towering man-shape that unfolds himself and hefts his sack over one shoulder. He is clad in damp furs. The room is overcome with the smell of them, thick and stifling. With soggy footsteps, he makes his way to the beds of the curly-headed little darlings. There are wet, sawing sounds for several minutes, but no screams. Heavy creaking tells us he's returning, and also that his sack is quite a bit heavier. He ducks as he rounds the corner of the staircase (he's really quite tall) and strides back towards the fire. The sack bulges more now, and it has several dark and sticky patches blooming on it. Then he pauses, and with a throaty, worrying chuckle, he pulls out a knife and fishes about in the sack. He's quite graceful, the way he sinks cross-legged onto the rug, to complete his craft. His long fingers oddly tender amongst those curls. Slice. Slice. Slice. Slice. Carve. Excise. Pop. Slice. He drops the trinkets into the stockings, heaves the bag again, and vanishes back up the chimney. There's the expected sounds of hooves and runners and so on. Crunching snow, too, and his otherworldly voice booming across the roof and fading away... But these are background details to the thing that is front and centre, which is the blood dripping from the stocking-toes onto the hearth. The heads he will boil down for skulls which he mounts onto his sleigh. But the noses and ears he leaves behind. A little memento. A gift for the season, merry and red.

Which list are you on?