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.