Belated December Challenge

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

The 25th of December, Ruby had been told, was a day on which you celebrated a God come to earth in the form of a man. That sounded good to her. Ruby was, after all, a religious kind of person. It seemed totally appropriate to her that the news that God had become Man, and that there was a Man walking the earth who all should bow down and worship was worth celebrating. She was going to do this.

She was, however, unsure exactly how. She walked around London, staring in shop windows, and trying to watch passers by as they prepared for 25th December without looking overly threatening. The last bit was difficult. Ruby was big and bulky and tended to look loom if she stood still for too long without paying attention. As it took quite a lot of mental effort for Ruby to do anything, this tended to happen quite often. It was just very difficult for Ruby to think and look inoffensive at the same time. When she was thinking, her jaw started to jut out and her brows furrowed and before you knew it, she was looming again.

However, despite these problems, by the time December 24th came around, she had made a great deal of progress in understanding these festivities. She understood that one needed a tree, for a start. She acquired a tree in the form of a young sapling from a local park. The broken off trunk dripped sap across the carpet. Maybe that was part of the magic of christmas? Ruby understood that the next step was to add lights and colourful things to the tree. Her first set of candles only succeeded in setting fire to the tree, leaving one half of it shriveled and dark. She then moved on to electric lights, in the form of a desk lamp which she slung over one branch. It dangled there in a quite satisfying manner and its unforgiving white glare lit up the room.

Ruby was pleased with this. She hoped that the God Made Man would also be pleased.

Next, she understood, came large amounts of brightly coloured wrapping paper, arranged in different size box shapes. Getting the paper to keep its shape was difficult, so she turned it into papier maché. The paper lost its colour, but at least maintained its important box-like shape.

There should also be food, which Ruby tried to cook, and music. She didn't have any way of playing recorded music, so she simply managed to manufacture a bell from an old saucepan and three old spoons and rang it vigorously.

On 25th December, Ruby lit the light on her tree, and rang the bell vigorously for half an hour. At the end of it, she shook her papier maché boxes and then tried to think of some songs she could sing which were appropriate for her festival. She couldn't think of many.

After all, she wasn't celebrating Christmas, which commememorated the birth of a small baby in a foreign land. No, she was celebrating something much much more important.

She was celebrating Imsetymass