I Wish It Could be Christmas Every Day

A Willerby Story.

Cathy loved Christmas.

She found the weight of the winter months when it was over depressing, so she was always late taking down her decorations.

The nativity set, cards, tinsel and holly were, she felt, a defence against the early year dark and cold before the new year really began.

She waited until at least the weekend after the last of the village lights were gone before taking the boxes and crates from the loft and beginning what could not be reasonably put off for longer.

She tried to make it nicer by playing Christmas songs, drinking mulled wine and thinking ahead to how good it would feel when she took all the stuff out again, but there was never a way to escape the melancholy in the certainty she was the last one at the party.

This year was even gloomier than usual, because her Christmas had been such a good one, with the end of the festivities a reminder of the ways in which her life wasn’t quite what she wanted it to be.

Her world-scattered family had been reunited for the first time in years.

There’d been silly childhood games, good-natured bickering over exactly how long to roast the turkey and she’d even managed to squeeze in a trip to the Green Man with her two brothers and their wives while her parents babysat her nephews and nieces.

It had been wonderful.

But now it was over, and it was so long until spring – so long she didn’t dare look up when the mornings got lighter because she feared if she did, she might burst into tears.

This - despite herself - was what she always ended up thinking about as she put everything away and ate the last of the cheese and chocolate.

She left the Tree until last.

It was a Norwegian Spruce, eight feet high, the biggest she’d ever had and worth every penny of the sixty pounds she’d paid for it.

She stepped back to admire it one last time – glorious in twinkling light, mismatched baubles and decorations accumulated over many lifetimes.

“Alexa,” Cathy said, “Play Oh Christmas Tree,” and then, wine-tipsy and half-heartedly enjoying the maudlin, she stripped its branches and boughs of its decades of good memories.

And that was that.

Christmas was over; an expensive non-drop fir tree standing naked next to the TV, dripping browning needles on the carpet all that was left.

Looking at the dead tree the new year felt like nothing special and the world small, cold and mean.

She sighed.

“I wish it could be Christmas every day,” she whispered, like a prayer or a spell, and then whispered it a second time without meaning to.

From behind her, Alexa began playing the opening bars of the Wizzard song at her highest volume setting, making her jump and turn around.

“Alexa off,” she shouted.

The music stopped and she heard a dry rustling behind her.

She turned and thought she saw the branches and needles of the dead tree shiver for a moment before going quite still.

Then she looked closer and suddenly understood the tree as a corpse – a dead thing in her house at the beginning of rot and decay.

The magic was gone.

It was not Christmas anymore and now the Tree gave Cathy the creeps.

She wasted no more time.

She brought it down quickly, wrestled it through the door into the hall, through her kitchen and then out into the back garden where she shoved it up against the woodpile to cut up later.

She vacuumed up the trail of needles, watched some TV and went to bed.

Her haunting began in the small hours of the next morning.

“Oh, when the snowman brings the snow,” Alexa sang, jolting Cathy from deep sleep, “well he just might like to know..”

She jumped from the bed and stumbled blearily down the stairs to the living room, wondering if one or both of her brothers had set this up as a prank before they left.

“Alexa!” She called. “Alexa Off! Alexa Off!”

“If you jump into your bed,” Alexa carried on singing, “quickly cover up your head..”

“Alexa!”

“Don’t you lock the doors, you know that Sweet Santa Claus is on the way!”

“Alexa off!” Cathy shouted, stumbling down the last few stairs.

It was shockingly cold in the living room and a freezing breeze flapped the curtains against the windows.

“Must have left a window open,” Cathy thought, blearily, reaching for the switch.

She flicked on the light and there was her Tree, battered and crooked by the TV in the green plastic stand she’d left outside to put in the shed later.

As she’d thought she’d imagined the evening before, she thought she saw it quiver and rustle then freeze as she looked at it, as if it had been moving in the dark and been surprised by the light.

“Oh I wish it could be Christmas every day..”, sang Alexa.

Cathy went to the socket and pulled out the plug.

Alexa fell silent mid-lyric and, shivering, Cathy looked round.

There was a trail of brown needles and dark sticky mud leading from the tree to the hall. She followed it into the kitchen and to the wide-open and swinging door that led out to her garden.

Not her brothers but someone else, thought Cathy, playing a bad taste joke, someone who knew about how late she left her decorations up.

Most likely teenagers who’d heard their parents gossiping about it.

Tomorrow she might put something on the Willerby village WhatsApp group but before that she wanted the dead tree out of her house.

Not just wanted.

Needed.

She shrugged a coat over her pyjamas and her feet into wellies, then wrestled the cold weight of the dead tree out the kitchen door, wincing at its pricks and its wet, slimy feel on her cheeks.

She dumped it on the lawn and went back inside and, before she went back to bed, she locked and bolted both the back and front doors.

The idea of someone in her house while she was asleep creeped her out, but this was Willerby and the reason she lay awake until dawn was the more disturbing possibility nobody had been there at all - that the Tree had moved on its own.

She gave up on sleep and looked out of her kitchen window.

The Tree was still on the lawn, but she thought she’d dropped it further away than where it was, just a few feet from the doorstep.

But both doors were still locked and bolted, and that was reassuring.

She made breakfast and went to work where she allowed the banality of meetings and calls to lull away the weird and by the time she returned she’d almost convinced herself she’d imagined or dreamt the whole thing.

Nonetheless after dinner and a bath she double-checked both her outside doors were locked, and Alexa was unplugged before she went to bed.

…

“Oh, when the snowman brings the snow,” sang something from downstairs in the small hours, “well he just might like to know..”

This time Cathy did not leap out of bed.

Instead, dreading what she’d find, she walked slowly down the stairs and carefully to the hall where she turned on the light to reveal another trail of brown needles and mud that went from the kitchen into the lounge.

In the glare the needles looked like worms and imagining how they might twist and wriggle turned her stomach.

She stepped carefully over them and opened the living room door to the tree back in its place by the TV, which had turned itself on and was playing the song through YouTube.

The air was filled with the cloying, oversweet scent of rotting pine and, somehow, she knew without having to look that the dead tree was filled with small living things that crept, crawled, wriggled and slimed.

Before she had time to think she pulled on her coat and wellies and dragged the awful thing through the hall and out of the wide-open kitchen door.

This time, steeling herself to the horrible wet slipperiness in her hands, she pulled it all the way to the woodpile and dumped it there by her axe and saw.

Then, wiping her hands on her pyjamas, she went back in, locked and bolted the door, scrubbed herself raw in a piping hot shower and then again lay restlessly in bed until it was time coffee and work.

But before leaving the house there was the tree to deal with.

She went at it furiously stripping its limbs roughly from its spinal trunk with the sharp toothed steel edges of her axe and saw.

It was tough going and by the time she’d dismembered it she was sweating in her dressing gown in the freezing cold morning, which meant another shower before dressing, making her late for work.

She spent the day tetchy and grumpy and snapped so unpleasantly at her intern she thought she might have made him cry. The mistake he’d made had been inconsequential, he didn’t deserve it, and she felt guilty about it until mid-afternoon when her mind turned to her Tree

At three she went home, using a headache she didn’t have as an excuse.

She grew progressively more anxious on the half-an-hour drive home and was breathing hard and sweating as she pulled her car up to the kerb opposite her house.

She dumped her bag on the couch and went straight out to the garden.

The bones and flesh of the broken tree were still where she’d left them that morning and, in the light of day, surrounded by the dull greenery of winter they looked like just what they were; the broken-up pieces of an evergreen filled with sap that burned well – perfect natural firelighters and nothing more.

Cathy gave out a relieved sigh, slumped herself in her armchair and numbed her mind with mindless reality TV, a Deliveroo curry and the best part of a bottle of wine.

Then she checked Alexa was still unplugged, ripped the TV’s plug from its socket and went to bed, hoping and praying that was the end of it all.

But it wasn’t.

“Oh, when the snowman brings the snow,” went her phone, lighting up in its charging cradle, “well he just might like to know.”

Breathing fast, her heart thumping in her chest, Cathy rolled over and reached for it.

Her shaking and clumsy hands knocked it from the bedside table to somewhere beneath her bed.

“If you jump into your bed, quickly cover up your head.”

In the dark and on her knees, Cathy scrabbled but couldn’t find it.

“Don’t you lock the doors, you know that Sweet Santa Claus is on the way!”

She reached further, her fingers closing around it just as it reached the chorus.

“I wish it could be Christmas every day!”

She pulled it out and held down the power button to turn it off and, with a sick feeling in her stomach, went downstairs where, in the living room by the TV, the stripped trunk of the Tree stood was back.

Fanned around it were drifts branches, more of them trailing into the hall, then to the kitchen and through the unlocked door to the garden, seeming to wave at her from the floor like fingers beckoning her to open graves.

Hardly thinking, in a frenzy, she flung open the door of her wood-burner and began stuffing in armfuls of the Tree.

She crammed as much as would fit, soaked it all in lighter fluid and threw in a match. The tree burned like hellfire, roaring, spitting and fizzing in the grate as the oily sap caught on the flames, the heavy stink of pine, like a rotting air-freshener everywhere.

Cathy worked for more than an hour, barely aware of her own hysterical laughter and tears, shoving a new load of tree through the burner’s hatch as soon as the fire had consumed what was there. Tongues of flame danced eldritch shadows on the walls and despite it being cold outside and the kitchen door being wide open the living room was soon unbearably hot.

Once the branches were all gone from the living room, hall and kitchen she wrenched the trunk from the stand and took it outside where she propped it against a low wall and kicked it into pieces.

She burned these too, then stripped to her underwear and threw her stained pyjamas into the stove for good measure – she knew she’d never be able to wear them again.

Finally, she got out the hoover and sucked up every small needle she could see and emptied the bag into the fire too.

Once she was sure every scrap was gone, she curled up in a ball on the cold kitchen floor and collapsed into manic laughter.

…

Cathy did not go to work the next day or the day after that and then it was the weekend.

She spent it weak and listless between her bed and the sofa like a convalescent after a fever.

She kept her devices unplugged and her phone on silent.

By Sunday night a sense of normality had returned, and she welcomed the tricks she could feel her mind was doing to make the events of the last week unreal. She was sure, within a week or so, she’d be certain she really had been struck by a bad fever and that any weird memories were just leftover rags of fading dreams.

She would not fight that.

On Monday morning Cathy felt fine.

Normal.

She ate a healthy breakfast of Weetabix and fruit. Showered. Got dressed. Drank coffee.

Refreshed, she stepped out into a cold, clear morning, scraped the frost from her windscreen and settled into her car.

Then – on instinct and before she had a chance to stop herself – she turned on the car radio.