Twelve Days of Christmas: 1

A Very Merry Christmas to You!

Here we are at the last of our twelve days of Christmas. Thank you for your presence on this winter  adventure in words. I hope you, yes, you, have a restful, playful, heartening holiday.

Alice x

 

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

 

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me

a memory.

Everyone’s lying on the sofas and the floor

stuffed fat with too much food

and he comes in

wearing a borrowed jumper

telling me how cold it is in the garden

and that

I should come and look

I’m playing scrabble with my siblings

but I’m losing so I say

okay

and we walk through the hallway

with its wood chip wallpaper and

peeling paint.

The kitchen’s still steamy and the big mirror’s

dripping wet.

So I draw us on it.

I make his ears look bigger and

my hair look curlier

and we both have dots for eyes.

We put on some wellies

not ours

that are by the back door and

I wrestle with the bolt at the bottom

and then we’re outside

on the patio.

It’s so cold

a cold that I sometimes miss.

It wakes us up.

The sky is

familiar grey

I like it

not too bright

not too blue

not all the time.

We look at the veggie patch and

we don’t find much that

doesn’t look like sticks and twigs.

We go to the pond.

Together

we lift up the wire protector

which keeps the hedgehogs from drowning.

We poke at the ice

but don’t break it

just to see if anything’s moving underneath.

He starts making up a song

and

I join in

we put the cover back on the pond

so the little ones don’t fall in.

The song sometimes rhymes and

sometimes it doesn’t

and it makes us laugh.

He points to a robin in the holly tree

he points as he sings:

‘And a

partridge in a pear tree.’