Flash Fiction: Christmas Eve

Another perspective from the North Pole

Hello (again, if you’re returning!) 👋🏾 I’m Ingrid and I publish Permission. I share words about my world as a grieving woman, in middle age, as a mother of boys, as an Australian living in The Netherlands, and all the nuance (and mess) that goes along with these. To know more you are welcome to check out my About page, and to read more you are welcome to check out Permission.

This is a short Flash Fiction piece. You will find infrequent fiction pieces sprinkled amongst my usual non-fiction essays. Please note this piece contains some mild explicit language.

“Arghhhh! Goddamit!”

Her grocery bag went flying one way, her purse the other. There go the oranges, she thought as she heard the grocery bag land with a heavy thump somewhere in the entranceway of her home. She reached out, hoping to find purchase on something to slow her rapid trip through the doorway. Her fingertips latched onto the door handle of her heavy front door and she was able to pull herself upright. She took a deep breath, and then another, trying to calm her racing heart. She leaned against the door and looked down at what had caused her to trip. Her anger peaked.

“GODDAMIT! How many times have I told him to get his darned boots out of the doorway!”

She kicked the fat black boots out into the snow and slammed the door so hard it echoed through the empty house. Her mood dark, she picked up the groceries and stomped into the kitchen. She turned on the lights and took in the island bench in the centre of the kitchen, the open cabinet cupboards, the cluttered benches. Her rage intensified. There wasn’t a single clear space in this house that didn’t have something of his discarded on it. His clothes, his boots, his bags, his hats, his lists, everything everywhere all the time. In terms of his priorities, keeping any kind of order in their home was right at the bottom, if it made on there at all. She was sick to death of the mess and the chaos.

Sometimes, she thought she was sick to death of him. Thirty-seven years together and he still had absolutely no respect for what she needed. No consideration, no inclination to pause and think, what must this be like for her? This time of year was undoubtedly the worst. She became invisible to him, just another helper amongst hundreds of helpers. Just another cog in the wheel of his why, his purpose, his ruddy God-given mission. Ho ho ho indeed.

She thought back to this time last year; Christmas Eve and the tooth incident. She knew he had meant well, or at least she tried to remind herself of that. But honestly, who on earth puts coins in their pudding?

“The Brits, that’s who!” He had said through tears of laughter, while handing her wads of tissue to staunch the blood flowing from her broken tooth.

“But… we’re not British, or in Great Britain! Why wouldn’t you warn me?” The tears rolling down her face were from the pain, but the fury behind her words was unmistakable and directed solely at him. Well, unmistakeable to her. Clearly mistakeable to him as his laughter intensified.

“That’s part of the fun, love! You take a bite, and you don’t know what you’ll find! They put all sorts of things in their pudding – buttons, rings, thimbles. But the coin is the luckiest! Finding the silver coin in your pudding means wealth will find you in the coming year. Isn’t that marvellous!” His laughter had faded but the big grin remained.

She looked at him blankly. “Marvellous, oh yes, marvellous! As I stand here with blood gushing from my face and half a tooth in my spoon, I absolutely agree that it’s marvellous to have found a silver coin in my dessert.” She looked at him for another moment and watched his smile slide away. “Bloody marvellous. Enjoy your pudding.” She walked into the bathroom, closed it quietly and clicked the lock. She hadn’t emerged until she knew he had left.

This Christmas Eve, her wish list was short. Pack a bag, run away, never come back. She wouldn’t even need to book a flight; she could take one of the sleighs he wasn’t using – they had about 15 as back-up. And in one of the smaller sleighs, she would only need four reindeer from their herd of more than a thousand. In the craziness of Christmas Eve, no one would notice a missing back-up sleigh and four reindeer. She’d had a bag packed for weeks with the bare essentials, not that he would have noticed if she’d packed the whole house.

She looked at the clock: 4.31pm. The only flaw in her plan was Jólabókaflóð. One of the few traditions she’d retained from her native Iceland, Jólabókaflóð involved exchanging book gifts with loved ones on Christmas Eve, and then snuggling up with said books and reading late into the night. Her mother had usually chosen fiction books for her and her siblings which suited their current genre of choice (hers was always romance), while her father would buy them practical books about respecting nature, understanding the seasons and foraging. It was a warming, homely tradition that she carried close to her heart. It wasn’t just the gifted books; it was the time and care that went into choosing the book. Thinking about the person and what they would love to read, or thinking about the person and what might be useful for them to know. Really, for her, it was all about the thought behind the book.

Given his Christmas Eve commitments, which seemed to start earlier and earlier each year, their Jólabókaflóð exchange now took place at 4.30pm before he dashed off. When they first married, it used to take place deep in the dark evening, when they would wrap themselves in blankets before the fire, sip cinnamon hot chocolates as they opened each other’s fat stack of gifted books, as they could never stop at just one. Cuddled together, they would read till the early hours of the morning and sleep in late on Christmas Day.

Of course, that all changed when he took over deliveries from his father and needed to leave by midnight to make all the stops. Over the years, Jólabókaflóð had moved from being the lovely highpoint of their Christmas Eve to a quick pit-stop before he hurried back to the workshop. From gifting a heavy stack of books, it had petered out to a single tome. Everything about Jólabókaflóð, indeed everything about her life here, was watered down, sterile, a series of checkboxes to be ticked off. The shine and the joy had long worn off their marriage, and the coal beneath was unbearable.

She looked at the clock again: 4:36pm. She sighed and walked over to the tiny Norway Spruce sitting on their dining table with two wrapped books underneath. They had a bigger Fir set up in the living room with presents for friends and family piled beneath and around it. But their Jólabókaflóð gifts, their only presents to each other, had their own little tree. She reached for the thick book wrapped in plain gold paper. Part of the fun of Jólabókaflóð was guessing what the book might be, but as she was on her own, she tore the paper off. Then she stared blankly at the cover of the book.

It by Stephen King.

Her brain could not compute. She knew the book, because as with anyone who is easily scared and avoids horror in any medium, she was well aware of what to avoid. Stephen King, universally accepted as the King of Horror, was an author who she knew she didn’t have the mental resilience to cope with, let alone enjoy.

And, of course, he knew this. He knew she didn’t watch scary movies or read scary books. There was no form of horror that she enjoyed, and he knew this because he loved the horror genre. He enjoyed the shock and the scare and the tension. He loved the build-up and the terror lurking throughout the story. She couldn’t count the number of times he had watched The Shining or The Exorcist while she had hidden in their bedroom with a cosy small-town romance novel.

She let out a slow, careful breath. She took the still-wrapped gift from under the tree – The Winter Spirits, ironically a collection of winter-themed ghost stories that she knew he would enjoy – and placed it in her handbag. She removed the other book from her handbag – a well-worn copy of Conscious Uncoupling: The 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After – and placed it under the tiny tree, next to the Stephen King book. She paused for a moment, looking around her house for the last time. She walked to the closet, pulled out her packed bag from behind the coats and jackets, and stepped out the front door.

“Merry Christmas Nick”, she whispered as she pulled the door closed behind her.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash