Dan McCurdy 2011 Short

“A Christmas Tale.“

Christmas Lodge is a former Hunting Lodge built in Victorian times and buried deep in the Scottish highlands. Just look for the thickest part of the forest of the thickest forest you can find on your Google maps and you’ll find it in the thickest part.

There you’ll find Ella Cinders. You’ll also find her normally every day in the kitchen. Today she’s busy painting her legs with coal dust for the effect of being poor and downtrodden and overworked. She is poor and downtrodden and overworked, so she doesn’t really need to do this.

The kitchen, as you can imagine in such a former hunting lodge, and as was necessary in the glory days when hunting was legal, stretches along most of the entire length of the basement. Hunting, in the days before recessions and such things, and before all our betters went to sunnier climes with their money, was a serious business. Serious both financially and culinary, and much money was invested in an enormous Aga cooker, at one end, and an even HUGER wooden kitchen table in the middle. Cinders is normally hard at work at one of them.

There are various dead wildlife hung at various intervals and cooking utensils swing uncontrollably on their hooks, largely because of the various unseen draughts. Upstairs, directly above the kitchen the main dining room has a HUGE dining table comparable in size to the kitchen table and round the walls, deer antlers and sometimes whole deer heads, have all been hung with tinsel and sprigs of heather. Some of them occasionally speak. The whole deer heads of course, and not the antlers. That would indeed be fanciful. These deer heads often tell tales of what they’ve seen and heard and the goings on they’ve seen and heard going on round the big dining table they watch over. The tinsel sometimes blocks their view of the table and as the most goings on go on over the festive period this annoys them and gives them cause to moan incessantly the whole year.

“Remember last Christmas, I couldn’t see a thing that was going on,“ their utterances will start and reach a climax as the next festive season approaches.

(Continues.........)