‘We swish you a merry Christmas’, our three-year-old sang loudly as we dropped her into a red ski-suit and pushed on some waterproof mittens, great for scooping up snow. There wasn’t actually any snow, just a bitter wind that felt as if it had been hurled directly from Siberia. The car park was already packed, and vehicles disgorged hyper-excited children dressed for an excursion to the shops, little legs blue with cold. Cars were already leaving, wheel spinning and sending up arcs of muddy spray, pebble-dashing the gathering queue for Santaland.
A desultory sleet stung our faces, but our daughter thought it was about to snow and her smile widened. At the gate, elves, more used to dealing with fairground security, stamped our hands. Across a ploughed field a sign pointed, ‘To the Nativity Scene’ which appeared to be a painted board which looming garishly across the mud. The colours of the cut-out figures were bright, but the paint had run.
A colonnade of fir trees led us towards Santa Central, clumps of fake snow clung to the branches. Our child was in a Narnia style forest, but we could see over the trees to a man in high vis battling to keep a cigarette in his mouth while working a fake snow sprayer.
At Santa Central our daughter threw her arms in the air with delight at the winter wonderland: a circle of log cabins surrounded a snowy space, perfect for snow angels and gentle snowball fights. The log cabins were a job lot of cheap garden sheds, tinsel and paper chains drooped from wooden slats. Feet had criss-crossed the patches of grubby snow so there was barely any left. We took a photo where the snow lay deepest avoiding the mud.
The cabins sold fake leather handbags and cones of marshmallows, redolent of a fairground. There were real huskies, but they looked more like Alsatians running manically around an enclosure and apparently there was a real reindeer, but the real Sami Reindeer Handler had gone to lunch taking the real reindeer with him. We steered our child away, glad that she couldn’t yet read, and towards a shed where you could make Christmas cookies with Mother Christmas.
Mother Christmas was not present. The cabin looked as if it had been ransacked; biscuits, sweets and glitter festooned the floor. Our daughter, however, took the biscuits and daubed them liberally with sticky icing, jelly sweets and glitter balls, hard enough to chip your teeth. She was delighted with her decorating, and we piled the monstrous creations into a paper bag to dispose of when she wasn’t looking. She moved onto the colouring. Badly photocopied line drawings of gingerbread men and robins. She coloured with all her might, not worrying about staying within any lines, signed the pictures with a squiggle and presented them to us.
Lines of disgruntled people snaked around the site waiting to visit Santa. We persuaded our daughter that she didn’t want to visit a pretend Father Christmas and congratulated ourselves on avoiding what was now a very fractious queue. Mums in long cardigans were regretting their choice, as the sleet soaked into the wool, sagging the sleeves and dragging the hems into the mud. Children who were now really cold, and even more bored, wailed. A joyless figure dressed as a deer loped past. ‘Rudolf’, our daughter squeaked. As he took a swig from a hip flask; it wasn’t just the cold that was making his nose turn red.
It was all kicking off in the queue. Dads who had worked hard all year for a foreign holiday and a trip to Santaland were taking a swing at each other, when my husband noticed that the nearest shed had a flurry of activity. Hastily tacked up wrapping paper and tinsel, and n office chair was rolled in along with some cuddly toys and half wrapped presents.
A second Santa! The shed door opened, and a Santa suited security guard straightened his beard, the typist chair he was sitting on sliding on the wooden floor. Our daughter was enthralled, we took a photo avoiding the helper who was still stapling up decorations. Santa gave our daughter not a gift but a raffle ticket which she held aloft between her forefinger and thumb as if it were Willy Wonka’s golden ticket itself.
The Gift Emporium was a larger shed with a miserable skinny snowman on the door. His stuffing had all slipped to his toes, he looked as if he were melting, and he kept eying the elf working on the counter. The elf was doing his best to keep smiling despite a burgeoning black eye. To our child, that elf had the kindest of eyes. She didn’t notice that one of them was blue and bloodshot and rapidly closing.
We handed over the raffle ticket as two dads started arguing over a plastic pony. There was a choice of a tractor, a doll or an expanding ball. Our child went for the ball, and we prayed it would keep going at least until we got home. Outside, the elf and the snowman were sizing up to each other and we ushered our little family back to Santa Central.
It was now unbearably cold, and the sleet was refusing to turn to snow. Someone dressed as a Christmas pudding but without the padding, had got the snow machine working and from the sky there fell, what looked like, actual flakes of snow. Our child rushed to the middle of the mud; her arms outstretched to the heavens. The light was dimming, and a floodlight had been set up to light the Nativity Scene. From this distance we couldn’t see the ploughed field or the dripping paint, the bruised elf, fighting dads or wailing children, just the Holy Family gazing at the Saviour of the world, their new-born child. Our daughter twirled; a tiny red blur, face upturned to the swirling snow, a small figure of blazing Christmas joy.
Author: Tracey Fuller is a Dartmoor fiction writer. She is published in Women Speak Volumes, Science Fictions, Oh! and Litro. Her novella took a lifeboat crew, a vintage car and a diving show through the Great War. She was in the WordSpace 2024 cohort and likes riding her tandem around Devon.