The Twelve Days of Christmas

• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 1
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 2
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 3
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 4
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 5
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 6
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 7
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 8
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 9
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 10
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 11
• The Twelve Days of Christ­mas: 12

I don’t like Christ­mas. It doesn’t agree with me, for more reas­ons than I care to men­tion. It’s not just the insane demands for cheer­ful­ness and good­will to all men, not just the tink­ling bells of fest­ive music blar­ing out of every shop door­way, not just the rampant com­mer­cial­ism, not just the fact that drunken men all over the coun­try are dressed up in itchy cot­ton wool beards and thread­bare red coats, not just the morn­ing, noon and night filled with dubi­ous TV spe­cials. After all, every­body hates those, don’t they?

My loath­ing of Christ­mas is more deep-seated, hid­ing some­where behind a dec­or­ated tree inside my psyche and clutch­ing a half-unwrapped gift that it was strictly for­bid­den to open before morn­ing. For­tu­nately for you as well as me, I don’t need to say any more about that, because every so often I pay a not incon­sid­er­able por­tion of my salary to a quiet, object­ive listener in a book-lined room some­where, and he or she lets me talk to them about that and many other things. Strangely enough, I often feel the need to go and see such a per­son as the fest­ive sea­son begins to loom on the hori­zon, resem­bling noth­ing quite so much as a par­tic­u­larly men­acing sil­hou­ette of Santa’s sleigh with bells that toll rather than peal cheerily.

In the run-up to Christ­mas 2003, hav­ing already found myself in a story-telling frame of mind thanks to some animal fables, I chose to take to my bunker and hide away from the Yuletide mad­ness infest­ing the streets out­side by writ­ing a series of tales based on the The Twelve Days of Christ­mas. Just to be awk­ward and con­trary, I actu­ally wrote them in the twelve days run­ning up to the end­less bout of fest­ive over-indulgence rather than the twelve days of Christ­mas itself, as a num­ber of com­menters poin­ted out at the time.

But that wasn’t my main worry. No, I was rather more con­cerned by the increas­ingly dark dir­ec­tion in which these short stor­ies seemed to be head­ing. They star­ted with the sense­less, bru­tal murder of a part­ridge, and then things just got worse. And worse. And worse again. Oh dear.

Illus­tra­tions: The superb pic­tures accom­pa­ny­ing each of these stor­ies are edited ver­sions of ori­gin­als drawn spe­cially for this series by the immensely skilled hand of The Gold­fish.

More stor­ies: Animal Fables.